Roger Deakin in the field past Coachford

Reading Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm in the field past Coachford, two afternoons de suite during a heatwave. P saw a kingfisher, twice. Rowers came by on the Wednesday, Thursday there was music from down the reservoir, nearer Coachford; a well-bred dog tested us out for ten minutes, two lads came down for a dip and shouted about in the water then left. I like sliding down into the water into an amphitheatre created by the curve of trees on the far side. Water levels are high so grassy banks are submerged. An oak tree for shade behind us, young oaks cut by the mower but growing again. Clouds of midges keep away. The picnic table across the water, untenanted. The second day we could hear a pump going on the far side, which gives rise to thoughts about this river, this reservoir, best water usage throughout the world, and worst, cooling our wretched data, as a reed in front of us rises and submerges in a southeast breeze.

Roger Deakin's notes in and around his Suffolk village chime with a reader in the field past Coachford. He records birds, trees, activities of all kinds on the land in the village, on the common. The long view. The wide and permanent view. The red of the red. Green of the green. Roger Deakin follows the ant on his pages, the life of a neighbour spider, the diet of his local hedgehog. He regrets there's no one to be there to fold sheets in the dance of backing and advancing and putting away. He digs up docks in the field, keeps their blackened stalks, defends the integrity of Cowpasture Lane, bewails modern villas around the common, swims in the moat, sleeps in the railway wagon, wakes with the birds. 

I share one moment of his Suffolk past: the Rougham Tree Fair, where I met my sister once in the seventies, and could have met Roger Deakin. She was well into a drive-past of pony and trap; I don't what this satisfied for her or for how long. I slept in the porch of her tent. I remember nothing about trees. Or music. I remember face-painting.

Embers, Sándor Márai, Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

A book you know takes your temperature.

I re-read Embers by Sándor Márai and discover that I am not in the way of preferring solitude in the middle of a deep forest. Not at all. It's like looking down a long corridor, and there are two old men meeting after forty-one years. Cherchez la femme. When I first read it I relished the isolation, the bottomless quiet of it.  This time I'm restless with the rules, the codes, the duty and the proprieties.

I dip back into Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm with relief.  Here he is watching his cat Millie.

You're a passionate little person — you sit on my table, and when I speak kind words to you, you purr. When I stroke you with kind words, you purr even louder than when I stroke you with my fingertips. And when a train goes by at the end of the fields, or a magpie calls, your ears swivel and focus all on their own, each ear moving independently. So one ear listens to a wood pigeon and another to the slight whirring of the fridge. 

That's better.

Roger Deakin and One Straw Revolution

During days of gales and rain and storms I skirt the outdoors. Lay on the floor upstairs and read random bits of One Straw Revolution; more like grazing on a book. How you construct a world view is a subtle affair, a grasshopper on a stalk, for example. Or maybe you were asleep some of the time?

Next day, tail end of the storm, heavy showers, Roger Deakin's diary. He appreciates the principle of writing as flitting, as with diaries, journals. You can note the smallest, most important things:

Every now and again you find yourself slipping into a little pocket, a little envelope, of country that is unknown to anyone else, which feels as though it is your own secret land.

Idle thoughts are at the centre of his activity as a human.

If you want to know what it's like to be a tree, sleep with a cat on your bed and feel it manoeuvring and exploring your curves and hollows for the most comfortable nest.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is about his activity as a human, his reflection as a human. The travels and encounters of Wildwood, focused in chapters, are human too, but there is nothing to compare with notes taken on the hoof, swimming in the moat, sleeping in the shepherd's hut.

I slept in the shepherd's hut last night after an eight-length evening swim in the moat, now beginning to weed up — a beautiful, nearly full moonlit night. Very bright, hardly proper darkness at all. At ten to four I was woken up by a warbler (not sure which) hopping along the tin roof of the hut, then striking up the most beautiful song, at first utterly solo in the half-light, soon joined by other birds.