weather

Notes on a dawn flight

From where I’m sitting I can see the wing of the plane flexing. I watch as the panels move up and down, the final stretches in preparation for what will be a juddering sprint down the runway and into the air.

My six-year-old daughter is sitting next to me in the window seat. She points to the metallic strips running from the tip of the wing towards the curved body of the plane.

“It looks like parcel tape. Is the wing held on with parcel tape?”

She smiles at the thought as I lean past her and follow her gaze, cupping the back of her plaited head in the palm of my hand.

“No, just Cello tape” I say, “This is a budget flight.”

The plane takes off from Dublin at about six, dawn still unbroken. The air outside stiff with cold.  I hardly ever look out of the window when I’m flying, least of all when we’re taking off. Although I understand the rough science of aeronautics – I know it works and why – there’s a part of me that simply doesn’t believe it. It’s easier to suspend my disbelief when my eyes are closed.

Eliza though is braver than me in so many ways. She pulls me back to the window and points at the orange glow of cars, homes, businesses and streets lights. Whole neighbourhoods and road systems mapped out with electricity. A circuit board of life.  We continue to climb, moving away from the city centre, and the surrounding towns and suburbs becoming little more than cobwebs of orange, like silky fibres gleaming on a dewy morning.

The sea finally brings the dark, broken only by the plane’s strobing wing and overhead lamps. We are a phosphorescent tube of bad air, bad coffee and cramped legs. The man to the right of me has finally surrendered the arm rest and is now sleeping noisily. He gives off a curious smell. A mix of stale breath and new leather.

I turn back to Eliza and the window. She’s busy looking for stars but there’s none to be had. They’re either wrapped up in cloud or not visible because of the curve of the porthole. In the distance another plane is winking at us. A cheery, twinkling morse code, passed between two early birds.

“Look! I’m flying.”

“I’m flying too”.

The UK coast line arrives in a string of orange light, like lazy Christmas decorations or the luminous side of some terrible deep-water fish. Further inland the patches of light grow denser. No longer isolated webs but a bed of glowing embers, as if the earth has cracked open and is now sparkling with volcanic heat rather than humming with the shimmering ghosts of burning ancient forests and long-dead sea creatures.

It is Eliza who sees the dawn first. A shy blue light seeping into the aubergine black. Shaming the man-made orange glow with its purity, its subtlety. Its shifting sublime beauty.

Violet to aqua; milk to elephant grey; hard peach to dusty charcoal. This is the slow death of night and the birth of day. No it’s more. I hold Eliza’s hand. It is the birth of this day, never to be repeated.

Oak hearts

Near the entrance to Old Broom is the first of the old oaks. Its heartwood exposed and ridged like a giant mammoth’s tooth. The children jostle each other with their elbows as they huddle into the door-shaped space, running their fingers around the raised lip of the bark and the exposed surface that marks more summers and winters than any of us will ever see. Then they’re off, their shrieks and footfalls muffled by a deep carpet of leaves and the butter-soft wood of fallen branches.

It is only the second time I have walked in this wood. The first in spring through fists of buds and now as autumn gives summer the cold shoulder; the season changing with a quiet sigh and a confetti of leaves shaped like dripping hearts. But for me, the shift and the colour of the seasons is only part of the soft beauty of these places.  Like a river source that forever wells from the past and into the future, woods possess a sense of timelessness, with roots that snake over more history than humans can comfortably imagine – the long years captured in pulsing syrupy sap and long laid down rings. John Fowles described the feeling of walking in woods as a haunting kind of “waitingness”, something that cannot be captured by writers anchored and hamstrung by tenses.

We pad round the trail, my friend James bolting after the kids who are trying to shin up the smaller trees, while Jen, Anna and I walk slowly behind, inspecting the elephant skin of the oak pollards that stand like sentinels here – guarding this fragment of wood pasture. It is centuries since these trees were last cut, a management technique that provided wood for fuel and building and kept the oaks in a state of almost perpetual youth. Left alone they have rocketed into grand old age, arching boughs shooting like thick fingers from the arthritic knuckles that mark the path of the woodsman’s saw. The official term for these whirled swellings is bollings, a lovely rounded word that dove tails beautifully with the other names of pollarding, lopping or cobbing. In fact I can’t think of many words associated with woods that don’t have a quiet earthy magic to them. Even saying the names of the trees themselves; ash, birch, oak, hornbeam, beech, hazel, lime, is enough to give me a feeling of deep humus-y pleasure.

The path leads us past other trees, unpollarded, but contorted into curious shapes. One, named the stairway to heaven by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust wardens that manage this wood, has a trunk bent into perfect steps, while another twists like a corkscrew into the ground.

Nearby is a birch that that has seeded into the crumbling heart of an oak, its silvery flanks shooting twenty feet or more into the canopy.  This is one of Old Broom’s nursery trees, nature’s very own matryoshka doll, a giant wooden joey inside the sawdust-filled pouch of old mother oak. It is though a relationship that can’t last. One day this birch will grow too big, either toppling from the weight of its own crown or forcing the trunk that nurtured and sheltered it to slowly explode.

The strain is already beginning to show. A yawning crack stretches from the top of the oak’s trunk to near its base, exposing the umbilical red tap root of the birch. It is the line between life and death.

A note on a Hebridean boat trip

The boat is swinging like a skidding car as it makes it way down a channel lined by dark grey cliffs. I can hear the engine is gunning but progress is painfully slow. This is where currents meet, two powerful columns of water crashing and somersaulting together in a washing machine of briny muscle.

The surface of the water is taut, occasionally breaking into an angry swirl or rising into sharp spikes like the hundred black dorsal fins of fish stranded by the tide. The engine revs again and we are free, surging towards the turquoise stillness of the lagoon with its bright, white-shell sand and rocks holding waving seals.

Intrigued they slip their sausage bodies into the water, their heads bobbing to the surface closer to the boat, whiskers webbed with water and dark eyes you could almost drown in. They are mermaids with the faces of labradors.

Later we hit the swell of the sea proper. Greasy lumps of water shrug the boat into wallowing troughs, the spray hissing and leaping over 90ft cliffs.  We manoeuvre into a sea cave, the walls petrol-washed with star bursts of metallic ore that burst through a powdered mist of cormorant shit.

We shout to try and hear the echoes but the sea, always louder, shouts back.

Note on cloud and rain

I’m driving away from Middleton where I’ve spent most of the day surveying for otters. The weather has been clear and bright, with the sun bouncing off the river in glittering bursts. Joyous.

Now heading west towards Yoxford I can see the sky is darkening. When people talk about the heavens opening I have always pictured some kind of celestial trapdoor dumping lakes of water in a matter of seconds. But over the ploughed fields and industrial farms of Suffolk it looks like the cloud itself is reaching down, tendrils of teased iron wool, a smoky cumulus finger. Ratty-haired strands of rain.

It’s two miles before I’m in range. At first the rain leaves delicate paw-print patterns on the windscreen but the rhythm quickly grows until each drop explodes like a water balloon lobbed from on high.

I slow the car. The roads are already soaked, it has clearly been raining for some time. I wind my window down hoping for that spring smell of hard rain on warm land. The water tracks down the inside of the door and splashes pin pricks of cold on to my hands.

Dingle Marshes to Doggerland

This was a country diary piece written for Suffolk Magazine.

It is a day of bluster and blow, of boiling sea and blistering spray. A time when the coast is truly alive; its shingle pulse roaring and racing with the tide.

I’m walking into the wind and on to the shingle ridge that forms the seaward edge of Dingle Marshes.

To the left of me, is the heaving North Sea, to the right, a wild mosaic of marsh, reedbeds and heath. Beyond I can see the dark brow of woodland that I left behind me almost an hour ago.

The shingle is deep and noisy. Walking here demands exaggerated footsteps and I tack up and down the bank towards the exposed and solid sand of the beach to try to rest my ankles. Globs of foam scud past as I pick up round nuggets of brick and glass – tumble-polished and buffed smooth by the waves.

Holding them in my palm I think about Dunwich, just a mile or two down the coast. It must have been on wintery days like this that it slid inch by broken inch into the sea, a transition from rotten borough to capital of Doggerland – the now sunken landscape that once connected Britain’s east coast to the Netherlands, west Germany and Jutland.

Just two years ago the sea came calling again, this time for Dingle Marshes. The storm surge of 2013 saw torrents of salt water breach the ridge on which I am walking, overwhelming saline lagoons and at its peak lapping into Dunwich Forest at the back of the marshes.

This time the waves also healed, pushing shingle back into the holes and leaving Dingle as a largely freshwater reserve once more. But then, maybe I shouldn’t think of it in terms of healing. After all in a place of nature and natural processes like this, a storm surge isn’t damage it’s dynamism. The land of the bittern becoming a habitat for avocet, redshank and brine-loving starlet anemone.

Pocketing my finds I clamber back up to the highest point to gauge how far I have come. In front of me a female kestrel is hanging above the marsh, her pointed wings fanning the air in butterfly strokes while her chestnut head remains dipped low and freeze-frame still.

The same wind that rushes off the sea and now pushes at my back is giving her lift, the splayed tail harnessing each stinging gust. I watch as the black and tan wings flicker and pause.

But instead of kiting on the wind, the kestrel falls into a shoulder-hunching dive towards the edge of a saline lagoon below – eyes locked on something I cannot see.

I crane forward hoping to see her; imagining the ultra-violet world of reflected traces and tracks that allows her to missile to the ground with such deadly accuracy.

But already she is back up, almost springing off the ground and back into position, this time slightly further away.

Whatever it was she saw, it has got away. I shoulder my backpack and start walking again.
A narrow squeak, I think.

Morning fog

A morning of fog. The temperature feels colder, but still not bitter. The air is sweet with sugar beet, its turnipy fug clinging to my car as I creep towards the A14.

The road is busy and slow.  Headlamps, brake lights and shifting layers of ground-scraping grey.

By the time I reach work the sun is beginning to burn through, its patch of pure white growing bigger in the sky with each passing minute.

Watching I can’t help but think of the hold this kind of weather has on our imagination, inspiring folk tales and horror films. A mysterious world of will-’o-the-wisps and “Boys, keep off the moors”.

But there is also beauty here. It’s a time when the world in which we move is made smaller, when we can walk among the clouds.