Touched

I was very touched by your comments yesterday. Thank you.

These Covid Times are so strange. The disjunctures between the normal and the almost utterly unbelievable, the agonisingly sad and the normalisation of loss bleeding into the almost mundane and taken for granted.

As I chopped away in the coppice our neighbour G came to see me with his beautiful setter hunting dog - for woodcock. Just in passing he told me his brother has been in hospital for six months without a visit. His wife’s father (?) died after twenty days in hospital with no contact.

Then we talked about hunting woodcock - beccaccia in Italian. He said it is the love of watching the setters work that is his joy. If he could catch the woodcock in his hands he’d happily throw them into the air to escape.

Maybe some cultures for deep historical reasons favour the path to being a hunter or a naturalist. Generally I suspect the true hunter and naturalist are closer than we think.

And then we took a drive up into the mountains on our favourite road and came across this new fence. I’ve not seen the like before but this is a mountain sheep farm surrounded by semi-wilderness and this, I suspect with good reason, is an anti-wolf fence.

We saw the six anti-Wolf dogs in the adjacent field - Belle and Sebastians. But maybe a fence like this affords more protection . It was funded with EU rural development money.

It would be interesting to know the reasons for this radical change from rickety metre high fences to this stockade level security- perhaps for the lambing season? Maybe the guard dogs are too stretched? Maybe I’ll email the farmer and ask.

The mountains were impressively austere, the last of the snow blending into the low cloud and late afternoon light, dissolving boundaries between solid ground and solid air, presaging hope from the blackbird days of an Apennine winter.

We stopped to look at a redwing or field fare way up near the ridge top and as we peered a goshawk flashed by imperious into the woodland after a jay or squirrel.

Life is scant up here but strangely reassuring in its intensity.

One day at a time.