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The first thing that struck me about Pewsey was that it now had a by-pass. This does not augur well, I thought as I climbed the steps up from the towpath of the Kennet and Avon Canal. I wasn’t expecting the village to be totally preserved in aspic these last 30 years just for my benefit. But I hoped the place would be recognisable at least.

The cottage where I lived for two years was still there, set at right angles to the Wilcot Road. Our local was still open just a few paces from the front door.

The Crown was the site of one of the weirdest experiences of my life.

Going back to my arrival back in 1990, I had signed the lease for the house and picked up the keys at the estate agents. I was a one man advance party for the family that evening. The cupboards were bare so I walked across to the Crown to see if I could get something to eat there.

My entrance was of the ‘metropolitan-type-walks-into-rural pub-and-locals-fall-silent’ variety. We’ve seen it The Wicker Man and An American Werewolf in London and countless other horror films.

It was a stroke of luck that there was football on the TV there that night. Not just any old football match but the England v Germany semi-final from the 1990 World Cup. I asked a question that showed a modicum of bloke-ish knowledge and I got a grunt of recognition. I interpreted that as a positive sign. I need not turn on my heels and go straight back out hungry. I took a seat.

With 10 minutes of normal time left, Gary Lineker equalised for England and the Crown was a-whooping and a-hollering. That was that as far as the pub was concerned. Collectively we were going to hire a mini-bus the next day to drive to Italy for the final five days later. And I had offered myself up as the designated driver.

Alas, history didn’t serve up a happy ending.

The game went to extra time and a penalty shootout that was inevitably won by Germany. But not before the infamous ‘Gazza’s tears’ moment where Paul Gascoigne got booked. So he would miss the final even if England got there.

Alas, it turned out that we would not be going to Italy. But I had earned a modicum of acceptance from the villagers.

That Friday afternoon in 2025 when I made my return to Pewsey, not only was the Crown busy but all the others I remembered were too; the Royal Oak, the Coopers Arms, the Alfred’s and the Moonrakers. Not bad for a village of less than 4,000 souls.

By far the most notorious of those when I lived there was that last pub in the list.

‘Moonrakers’ is a local name for Wiltshire folk. It comes from a story about smugglers pretending to be catching the moon’s reflections in a pond, using a rake when the customs and excise men came looking for their contraband.

When I lived there as a young family we avoided that particular pub as it had a general air of disorder. Back then we heard stories of a character who had got repeatedly banned from the Moonrakers. And indeed from every pub in the village.

Unbeknownst to me at the same time as us there was another outsider living in Pewsey, a writer by the name of Jez Butterworth. He met that outcast and ten years later who wrote a play called ‘Jerusalem’. It had multiple award-winning runs in the West End and on Broadway. To this day it is the finest experience I have ever had in a theatre any time, any place.

The play’s hero was called Johnny “Rooster” Byron. He was played by Mark Rylance and he was based in large part on that outcast from Pewsey.

The Wiltshire village of Pewsey becomes the fictional ‘Flintock’, its famous real-life carnival transposed from September to St Georges Day for the play’s setting.

When I saw the play in the West End, I was brought up short when the road I lived was name-checked in Act One, possibly even my home too. Rooster reports that a local “says I been burgling flats up the Wilcot Road”.

For Rooster, living as a hard-living, modern-day gypsy in a decrepit Airstream caravan in the woods behind Pewsey/Flintlock, England’s past is all around him. Just as I bumped into ghosts of England’s ancient past during that hike in 2025, Rooster talks about meeting the giant that built Stonehenge “just off the A14 outside Upavon. About half a mile from the Little Chef”.

The old myths still linger in the prehistoric barrows that circle the village as Rooster declaims to his merry band of followers: “Come, you drunken spirits. Come, you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants!”.

The Moonrakers was bedecked in a Cross of St George that day when I returned, perhaps in honour of the play and the former patron they had tried to ban all those years ago2.

Back in the early 90s when I lived in the village, the main way for me to unwind from corporate life was to snatch a run on the Wiltshire Downs with the local running club. As I headed back to the station to catch the train back to London 30 years later, I wondered whether any of the people I ran with were still about.

I decided to sneak a short cut marked on my map, down an unmarked alley. I thought I would save myself time but I was pulled up short by a man of a similar age to me. He told me there was no right of way. My hackles raised, I replied that there were no signs to say it was a no through way3 . That was when things took a turn for the uncanny. As had the whole day.

This chap I was in mid discussion with, had bought this thin strip of land for the community. He had re-seeded it with grass and so didn’t want it to get trampled on.

There was a van parked behind him marked ‘Woodland Services’. To defuse matters, I changed the subject and asked him: ‘Do you know Mark Anderson?’. Mark was one of the stalwarts of the running club. He was a tree surgeon so I thought that might just have been his van parked there.

Yes, came back the reply. In fact he and Mark had founded Pewsey Vale Running Club in the late 80s just before I arrived in the village. What’s more, when I told him my name, he remembered me and I remembered him. His name was Mark and my name was Mark. And there was a missing Mark Anderson. Thrice Mark. And Johnny Rooster is played by Mark Rylance and his six year old son in the play is called Mark too. That’s five Marks.

We caught up on our respective news but I had to cut things short as I could see my train back to London was pulling into the station imminently.

On the journey back I reflected further on my day.

In the intervening three decades I had moved about all over the place, one of Theresa May’s subsequently named, “Citizens of Nowhere”. Haughtily, I used to describe myself as a citizen of London first, Europe second and England last.

No-one I met that day had left the village. I imagine they felt like the character Davey Dean in ‘Jerusalem’:

“I’ve never seen the point of other countries. I leave Wiltshire, my ears pop. Seriously.

I’m on my bike, pedalling along, see a sign says ‘Welcome to Berkshire’, I turn straight round.

I don’t like to go east of Wootton Bassett. Suddenly it’s Reading, then London, then before you know where you are you’re in France, and then there’s countries popping up all over. What’s that about?”

Everyone assumed I was back in Pewsey because I was coming back. Why wouldn’t they?

But how would life have turned out if my two years in the English countryside had turned out to be the rest of my life?

When I lived there in my late 20s, I didn’t feel English in the way Johnny Rooster did. Nor no doubt as the Marks did.

I was a tourist from London who stayed a couple of years then moved on. I flew to the four corners of the globe for work then at the weekends it was like we were running a B&B for weekend breaks for friends and family.

It’s only now, post Brexit, half a lifetime later, that I truly feel my roots in the land I call home.

It turned out that the early 90s were a significant if not magical time to have lived in a small village in Wiltshire. But it took me three decades and a good long walk to worth that all out.

I would turn left from our cottage in the village Pewsey in the direction of Devizes. After four miles I would hang a hard right at Alton Barnes. The road rose up steeply to the long barrow at Adams Grave that we’ve encountered already1.

On reaching the summit in the summer months of those early years of the 1990s, there was often as not a film crew stationed there. They were camped out to catch sight of whoever or what ever it was that was carving the crop circles in the farmer’s field below.

The fame of those Alton Barnes crop circles spread far and wide. They even ended up gracing the album cover of my most cherished Led Zeppelin compilation.

I used to play squash with Tim, the Alton Barnes farmer whose wheat fields were being visited by these ‘aliens’. He had no clue what was going on. It wasn’t like he was benefitting from them financially. The most commercial step he took was to plant an honesty box by the road. And that got vandalised.

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From there my car would crest the Wansdyke, a defensive ditch dating back to the 5th century. The ancient Britons had thrown it up in a hurry once they realised that the Roman army had abandoned them and they were defenceless against marauding Saxons streaming over from the North Sea.

The road then made a swooping descent past the long barrows at East Kennett and West Kennett. The latter was constructed in the 4th millennium BC. At over 100 metres it is one of the longest in Britain.

I once witnessed a summer solstice there. Most uncharacteristically ‘new-age’ of me at that time. Mine was the only company car parked up in the lay-by on the A40 I think. I was definitely the only one there without finger cymbals.

Back on my drive to work, a glance to my left would reveal the top of Silbury Hill.

An artificial chalk mound constructed a thousand years after the nearby long barrow, Silbury Hill is one of the tallest prehistoric man-made mounds in Europe, similar in volume to contemporary Egyptian pyramids. And it is still a complete mystery what it is doing there.

A double shuffle at the next junction carried me due north up through the avenue at Avebury. Rather incredibly the road bisects the henge and stone circles. It was as if you could drive through the middle of Stonehenge. Except better. After all, Avebury is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world.

After Avebury if I was lucky I would be treated to the sight of the racehorses out on their morning gallop on the Downs. They were stabled nearby at Winterbourne Bassett. I would often see the stable boys take their thoroughbreds through their paces past the Long Tan standing stone and the chalk horse at Hackpen, a reminder of how integral horses are to this landscape.

From there it was a straight run up to junction 16 of the M4 motorway and into the business park I worked. The banality of my work-place compared with the preceding 30 minutes of my morning could not be more ridiculous.

“How lucky was I?” was my thought half a lifetime later in 2025 when my hike out over the Wiltshire Downs bisected that magical drive to work.

As I scrambled down from Adam’s Grave, I realised how little had changed. But why should it have? This is a landscape visibly shaped by man over 6,000 years. Why would the last 30 years have made much of a difference?

It wasn’t crop circle time of year. The wind had gone out of the sails of all that since it was revealed that most of them were made by a couple of blokes with a plank and a ball of string2.

But they had left a trace in the form of a ‘Crop Circle Centre’ on the road out of Alton Barnes. The information boards outside confessed to an acceptance of the ‘All Man Made’ theory, so much of the mystery had gone. But there’s no reason why the local economy should not continue to benefit from something that had put Wiltshire in general and the Pewsey Vale in particular, on the map.

The weak early spring sunshine was breaking through as I took the Kennet and Avon canal for the final five miles of my odyssey. It was a stretch of towpath I used to run rather than walk along but it felt like the same me that was striding its dead straight course.

But how would I find the village I had lived in for two years of my life, the only time I had lived in the countryside?

I had spent the first two years of parenthood in Pewsey and I was a grandparent now. But this was an uncanny part of the world. Anything could happen. And it did.

To be continued

Six hours a day, most of it either up hill or down dale, this was not going to be a walk in the park in my mid 60s. What’s more we would be carrying our food and clothing on our backs. The aim was to complete a week a year to finish up 630 miles later in 2030.

Not only was there the physical prep. I was suspected there would be a strong spiritual dimension to the journey. My childhood obsession with Tolkien pictured us as hobbits tramping towards Mordor with many an ordeal on the way.

Such epic challenges are inscribed in mythology worldwide.

In the 8th century Japanese concept of misogi, the Shinto god Izanagi descends into the caverns of hell, swimming across freezing rivers, facing down demons to attain a state of sumikiri, pure clarity of mind and body.

Michael Easter gives this an “exercise bro” spin in his book ‘The Comfort Crisis’. According to him, we should all set a personal misogi that would not only be the defining event of our year, but it would also be something to look back on at the end of our life.

His was a 33 day hunting expedition to remote Alaskan back-country. He and his companions had to take four separate flights just to get the sniff of a caribou in their sights.

After that experience the author decided there were only two rules to make a challenge like that worthwhile.

• Rule 1: Make it really hard

• Rule 2: Don’t die

My equivalent would involve us taking a train to Taunton, then a bus to Minehead. We all have to start somewhere.

A month out from the big walk, I consulted my go-to guides for the last twenty years.

100% of the walks start and end with a train journey out of London. I had covered a good half of the 80+ originals but the community had now migrated online now and racked up nearly 400 well documented walks. You can of course download GPS versions onto your phone but I try to stick with the meticulous written directions pioneered by the books, each one a mini masterpiece in prose2.

I picked one that I had not come across before. It was called ‘The Pewsey Circular’. At nearly 17 miles and 1,300 feet in climbs, it was the closest I could get to a day out on the South West Coast path.

The walk was certainly the ‘exhilarating excursion’ the site promised it would be. But what I did not realise at the time was how much it would be a journey into both my own past and into the history of these Isles.

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Pewsey is an isolated village just north of the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. I had lived there literally half a lifetime ago. In fact it’s the only time I have ever lived in the countryside.

Those two years were memorable both for the beauty of the landscape and for the fact that’s where family life started for me. We chose the place as it was only 30 minutes drive to my new job in Swindon.

I strode out of the station that March morning heading north towards the village of Oare. From there I climbed up a steep gradient onto the tops of the Wiltshire Downs and directly into a blustery north-easterly.

Coming from further north and heading for the same stile as me, was a vigorous looking woman, an octagenarian at the very least. She looked like her dogs were leading her as much as she was leading them.

She looked spookily like Mrs Potts, one of many memorable characters in I Know Where I’m Going, the 1945 Powell and Pressburger film, a favourite of both Martin Scorsese and my brother.

An encounter was unavoidable once we converged at the next stile. I had to think of something to say.

I felt weirdly compelled to tell her that I had once lived in Pewsey. I blurted out a 30 second summary of my two year stay there.

Wind-swept and down-to-earth like her counterpart in the film, she addressed me directly: “So you are moving back here then?”

In her mind it was the most obvious next step in my life. How could you live anywhere else, was the implication.

I mumbled a reply and then took a footpath heading south to avoid answering the question.

An hour further on, looming out of the lowering skies was Adam’s Grave, an Iron Age hill fort. Two great battles had taken place here in Saxon times, when it held the pagan name of Woden’s Barrow.

The spot was further memorialised by Edward Thomas in his poem Lob. He wrote it in 1915 whilst on the Western Front, recalling a walk he had made through Wiltshire before the Great War.

Like me he was starting out from Lambeth, his home and mine. And we were both in search of an earlier version of ourselves:

‘Many years passed, and I went back again

Among those villages, and looked for men

Who might have known my ancient. He himself

Had long been dead or laid upon the shelf I thought.

A girl proposed Walker of Walker’s Hill,

‘Old Adam Walker. Adam’s Point you’ll see

Marked on the maps’’

‘Lob’ is defined in the dictionary as ‘a country bumpkin’ and by Thomas himself as ‘an unlettered pagan English peasant’. This was not to be the last time a pagan English man would crop up on my walk that day.

The other worldly nature of this exact same spot came back into the public imagination in the early 90s just at the time I lived nearby. It could even be said that the eyes of the world were upon just that view from the summit of Adam’s Grave.

Apparently alien life-forms had landed at the foot of the hill and carved elaborate patterns into the wheat fields below.

Where had they come from? What were they doing there? Why do it there?

To be continued…

His name was Carwyn Graves and he described himself as a writer and naturalist. I had come across many of those before; indeed I have been described as such myself, somewhat erroneously it must be said on both counts.

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When Carwyn started talking about Wales as a cultural landscape, I pricked up my ears. This was my kind of language. Well, not exactly my language as his talk was conducted 50:50 in English and Welsh. But as someone who had been deeply involved in the world of community ownership for the last 20 years, hearing a speaker passionate and knowledgeable about putting people and culture out front and centre stage got my attention.

And as a linguist by trade, I was drawn in by hearing a language I didn’t know that had literally inscribed itself into the land. Carwyn explained that Welsh gives names to landscapes that are literally untranslatable into English; words like Perllan (“a planted fruit-bearing woodland”)1 or Mynydd (“a mountain or moor in drier, rough grazing land”). In every way this sounded like poetry to my ears.

Enthralled, I stayed to the end of the call. I then tracked down a copy of his book and signed up for a tour of the site in question.

One brisk March day I set out from London at the crack of dawn for the train to Cardiff.

I had to sign a piece of paper in advance to promise that I would not disclose our destination as the transaction was finely poised at that point. I half expected Gwenni and David to blindfold and bundle me into the back of a blacked-out Humvee at the station. Indeed, a part of me was a bit disappointed that didn’t happen but the two hour drive was almost as exciting. The whole ride I bombarded them with questions which they sportingly batted back with interest.

As we drove along they pointed out the names of each landscape in Welsh. Here was some Coed, “native woodland used for food, shelter and rough grazing”, above Pontypridd. It bore the name of Coedpenmaen and it really should not still be about in this former mining valley after a couple of centuries by despoliation by slag, smoke and coke. Then with built-up towns far behind us, Gwenni pointed out the Cloddiau, “the hedgerows on earthen banks used as animal enclosures and a source of foraged food”.

By now the road had narrowed down to a single track as we closed in on our destination. We were in the midst of Rhos, which Carwyn Graves had defined as “heath, moor and bog, wetter rough grazing land”. It once made up 40 per cent of Wales’s land mass and “probably represented the single largest haven for Welsh wildlife for millennia”.

But that was far from being the case today.

The first thing that struck me when we got out of the car was the silence. But not in a good way.

At this minute I am sitting at my desk writing this from atop one of the busiest junctions in London, bisected by the road to Brighton whose foundations had been laid down originally by the Romans. Above the incessant traffic noise I can nevertheless hear the machine-gun rat-tat-tat of a wren defending its territory. A deafening squadron of parakeets are fanning out from their roost in Brockwell Park to all points of the south London compass. I can even catch the sound of a woodpecker coming from one of the larger gardens bordering the Brixton one-way system.

But that March day in one of the remotest spots in the British Isles, I could hear nothing of nature over the sounds of the light drizzle and a nearby stream.

It seemed to me we were the embodiment of what Carwyn described as “sheep-wrecked country”.

What spread out before us on the top of the moor was little more than a monoculture of molinia moor-grass. Well-nigh indestructible and tough as old boots.

Outside of the late spring sheep actively avoid eating these tough tussocks and so the grass ends up stifling all other growth. Wild flowers that might attract pollinators or the sphagnum moss that could re-wet the dried-out peat had been crowded out.

And it wasn’t the fault of the sheep farmers that it had turned out this way, David corrected me. These uplands had not been grazed with the intensity of the valleys. The Industrial Revolution and its aftermath has sent up quantities of soot and nitrogen that were still visible in soil samples today a hundred years later and that is what had killed off competitor grasses.

But all was not lost. Across the valley on neighbouring land there were signs of life. The levels of sheep stocking had been much reduced there over the last decade compared to the land we stood on. This had protected pioneering shrub and small trees trying to make a bid for life along a narrow stream (see the centre of the photo).

Tir Natur’s plan was to introduce (or strictly speaking, re-introduce) other livestock like cattle, ponies and pigs. They would trample and break up the thick tussocks of molinia that sheep skirt around and so plant life would break through. This was far from being a revolutionary step. In centuries past, people living on that land had just such a mixture of animals in their in-by land, the fields around their cottages.

Our enthralling whistle-stop tour of the land was only brought to a close by the fading light. I had the feeling that if we had enough head-torches between us, my guides would have served up stories and plans all night long.

Fittingly, David chose to bring proceedings to a close from the ruined walls of one of the former cottages that had formerly stood on the land.

We had not come across another soul all day but we had stumbled across plenty of evidence that people used to make this place their home. What appeared to be a bleak remote landscape that late winter’s day in 2025 had clearly been much more densely populated in centuries past.

The Acts of Enclosure that had changed the English landscape from the 18th century onwards had barely touched Wales. Efforts to drive the equivalent of the crofters off the Highlands and Islands had been actively resisted here on the Rhos with its “valuable peat, grazing, rabbits and berries”. In Wales it was the so-called little people who had won out.

Only now did I understand why the term ‘rewilding’ was such a toxic one in this country:

“…the idea of turning over vast tracts of hill country to nature by removing farming and farmers from the picture, as rewilding has often been presented by the media, is the very antithesis of all that rural Welsh culture has stood for. For speakers of a language where the talk is always of defending and upholding a threatened culture, to talk of ‘rewilding’ sounds very much like ‘killing a culture’”.

Tir Natur would not be making the same mistake as the land magnates of England and Scotland, clearing it of people, cattle and hearths. Animals would be going back onto the land as soon as humanly possible.

Although roads are sparse and public transport even sparser in that part of Wales, they already had ideas aplenty on how to develop accommodation for the popular Cambrian Way that runs along the western perimeter of the land. As well as attracting more walkers to linger here and see nature restoration in action, the army of volunteers to keep an eye on the livestock, conduct ecological surveys and help restore the lost peatland would need to have a roof over their heads. All in all, if this remote depopulated landscape were to be acquired by the charity, the variety of life to be seen on the land in the years to come, whether two or four legged would be greater than at any time in the last two hundred years.

Now that seemed to me something worth taking a punt on.

And after that trip, I indeed did. I became a Community Founding Member of Tir Natur. If my writing has inspired you then you can do the same by following this link.

The location of the land has also been revealed this week so there is no need for the cloak and dagger stuff any more.

Indeed, it could be said that Scotland has a better claim to me, given my family name. I mean there is even a Gordon tartan. But it turns out that connection was spurious too.

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My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was not a Gordon. His name was Wilhelm Stein. He pitched up in the East End of London as an economic migrant in the 1860s, fleeing rural poverty in what was then the Grand Duchy of Hesse, now part of Germany.

Two generations later, Wilhelm’s grandson, my grandfather Terry dropped his last name and replaced it with his middle name. That’s why my father Maurice was born a ‘Stein’ but became a ‘Gordon’ when he was six years old.

It was 1937 and the storm clouds of war were in view. It wasn’t a great time to have a recognisably German name. The father of that more famous ‘Stein’, Rick the chef, recalled that his father used to have bricks thrown through his window to shouts of ‘filthy Bosh’. But they held onto their name.

My own grandfather didn’t though. He went in the opposite direction. Indeed some might say that Terry overdid it on the assimilation front.

Not only did he drop the last trace of his German roots. His parents had given him that ‘Scottish’ middle name at a time when the local MP was Major Sir William Eden Evans Gordon. Was that mere coincidence?

Gordon was elected on an anti-immigrant ticket to one of the poorest and most diverse constituencies in the country, where my forebears the Steins lived. As a ‘restrictionist’ he wrote a book called ‘The Alien Immigrant’ where Whitechapel, my grandfather’s birth place, is portrayed as a ‘foreign town’ dominated by Eastern European Jews escaping pogroms in Russia and Poland.

It is pure speculation on my part as to whether my grandfather’s middle name had anything to do with the name of the local MP. But dropping ‘Stein’ to replace it with ‘Gordon’ would be like a Bangladeshi today in the same district of London deciding they were no longer a ‘Hossain’ but a ‘Farage’1.

In fact, the denial of his roots went even one level deeper.

When we were children we were led to believe we were part Jewish through the Stein branch of the family. We knew we weren’t properly Jewish as this came through our father’s line only. But the powers of auto-suggestion were such that we felt Jewish enough. That was a good thing and it made us feel a tiny bit more exotic and interesting growing up. It was only when I researched that line of the family that I found out that this too was made up.

20 years ago I made a visit to the National Archives in Kew where I found Wilhelm Stein’s naturalisation papers which revealed that he came from Hähnlein, a village near Frankfurt. I took a trip out there to see what traces of him remained. I had been kindly helped by an official at the town hall, a distant relative who had mapped out the Stein family tree back two further centuries to the Thirty Years War.

I asked him at what point the Steins converted to Judaism.

“You don’t have Jewish ancestors”, he asked. “If we Steins were Jewish then that hardware store over there bearing our name would not have been there all this time”, came back his allusive reply as he pointed to the other side of the road.

It turned out that my father had grown up with the story that they were Jewish in the 1930s as Terry thought it was better to be thought Jewish than German in London at that time. His over-assimilated father eventually got the chance to fight the Germans in 1940 but that’s a story for another day.

Nearly a year ago, the charity Rewilding Britain invited me onto a call about a project based in mid Wales that they thought would be right up my street. They were aware that I wanted to invest in land that could be restored for nature. I had not had that much to do with Wales over the years but my few associations with the country had all been memorable ones.

My first contact was through my father’s stepfather Bert, who migrated from Barry Island (of Gavin and Stacey fame) to the north west suburbs of London, looking for work as a gas fitter. I remember him as a genial man with a warm accent and a roll-up to hand who always had a comic and sweets ready for us when we went round to see him.

Then there were the three Welsh farms I had recruited to Feather Down, the glamping pioneer I brought over from the Netherlands 20 years ago.

They were Pant yr Hwych near the Ceredigion coast at Aberaeron, Pant y March perched above Lake Bala and Glanmor Isaf opposite the Isle of Anglesey in the shadow of Snowdon. The farmers there taught me a lot about Welsh culture, language and hill farming and they all pulled in consistent five star ratings from the urban families they hosted. Take a bow Martin, Llinos and Owen!

But I have to say, my most intense experience of what it means to be Welsh was in 1984 when I attended the annual clash between the Welsh and English rugby teams at Cardiff Arms Park. At the home crowd’s pre-match rendition of ‘Cwm Rhondda’ or ‘Bread of Heaven’ as it is better known in England, I realised I had tears streaming down my face. This was the opposition’s national anthem! Luckily England’s 21-16 victory helped me get over my conflicted feelings.

I learnt on that call in early 2025 that the people behind Tir Natur (‘Nature’s Land’ in English) had set up a charity to buy over 1,000 acres of knackered-out upland in some of the most remote countryside in Britain. Wales is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, according to Iolo Williams, the Springwatch presenter and ambassador for the charity who opened proceedings, 16 places from the foot of a league table of 240 countries. Just 4,000 hectares of its land has been left to be restored to nature, compared with over 100,000 in England and 160,000 hectares in Scotland.

The longer the Zoom call went on, the more my imagination was fired up. The passion of the Tir Natur team was tugging on my heart strings just like the home crowd at the rugby match in Cardiff forty years earlier.

But they were looking for an awful lot of money to buy the land. I took a deep breath in. I realised I needed to find out more before my head could catch up with my heart.

To be continued…

One of my volunteer gigs is as a ‘guide in the hide’ at the London Wetland Centre. I am there most Mondays from 10am to 2pm.

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At the end of the last century the site was just four concrete bowls next to the river Thames, reservoirs serving south west London.

They were made redundant when the London Ring Main was opened thus improving the efficiency of the capital’s water supply. Plans to build a shopping centre and housing developments in place of the reservoirs met with a wave of local opposition. Questions were asked in Parliament and the site ended up being preserved for nature.

The place was handed over to the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust and Sir Peter Scott’s dream of a London site was fulfilled, albeit posthumously.

There are half a dozen ‘hides’ at the Centre that camouflage birders and photographers from the wildlife. At the Wetland Centre they look like they belong there.

However, sometimes when I come across a hide ‘in the wild’, they strike me as bizarre additions to the landscape, especially when viewed from the outside, from a ‘bird’s eye view’ so to speak.

When I see them on my coastal walks, they are often in proximity to the pill-boxes built in 1940 in preparation for the anticipated Nazi invasion at the start of World War Two.

It’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

Such a sight sets me off humming ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler’, the theme tune of the 1960s British sitcom ‘Dad’s Army’.

Especially as I know that the hide is likely to contain a majority of ‘men of a certain age’ like myself who would have been called into the Home Guard on the advent of World War Two to face down the enemy.

Newby visitors to the London Wetland Centre are encouraged to drop in to the Headley Hide where there is usually someone like me around to point out what is going on through the glass. But I get to welcome every type of visitor to ‘my manor’.

In term time I’ll host groups of school children. On more than one occasion they will swear they’ve ‘seen an eagle, sir’ through the binoculars I’ve handed round. Far be it from me to discourage them, that that’s unlikely in inner London. But their eyesight is an order of magnitude better than mine so who’s to say.

In the holidays it’s more likely to be nannies, of both the metaphorical and literal kind, relieving stressed working parents and helping to keep the childcare bills down.

Experienced birders will also drop in, especially when the school groups have left, with a greeting of ‘anything interesting about?’. Usually they are referring to the rare and elusive bitterns that are resident through the winter months, quite something considering how close we are to the centre of London.

I’ve even had nature royalty visit. Corinne tells me I sound like a London taxi driver when I get home and blurt out in my excitement the equivalent of ‘you’ll never guess who I had in the back of my cab today’ - this Springwatch presenter or that wildlife influencer or even the odd celebrity that I had no idea was into birdwatching. As you can probably tell, I am quite possessive about ‘my hide’.

I have only guided there for just under a year but I have more than a few colleagues who have been volunteering there for many years, some even since the Centre opened in 2000. That is longer than nearly every one of the staff on the payroll. You could say in many senses that the volunteers hold at least as much of the ‘corporate memory’ of the place as their salaried counterparts. These long-standing volunteers have seen staff and working practices come and go, but most just carry on with what they have been doing with a quiet passion for years and decades.

There is another nature-based organisation I am involved where time passes in a curious fashion.

I support the Essex Wildlife Trust with a provision in my will to purchase nature depleted land near the coastline, part of the East Atlantic Flyway which passes down the eastern side of England. The whole route is before UNESCO for consideration to gain World Heritage Status.

I would like to do my bit and help purchase a few acres after I am gone that could fill in the gaps.

I liaise with the donor team at Essex Wildlife Trust and they are brilliant. But if I continue to live what I hope is a long and healthy life, it is highly unlikely to be Becky and Lizzy that deal with my will when the time comes. It probably won’t even be their successors either or their successors’ successors. Of course by definition I won’t be around either.

Today I very much feel part of the team when I go and visit the guys, but when it’s time to sort things out everyone involved will be complete strangers to each other. My children working with a completely different team at the Essex Wildlife Trust.

Just like with the long-standing volunteers at the London Wetland Centre, I think it’s an interesting example of the way that time passes and people come and go.

In both cases but and in very different ways, that handful of future acres on the Essex coast and that restored patch of nature in front of my hide in London are landscapes I can call my own.

But within the infinity of time, these are landscapes that we but flit in and out of.

My journey into rewilding had been kicked off by reading about what it was and where it was taking off, here and around the world. Books like Isabella’s and Cal’s had been incredibly inspiring but I had come to the realisation that I wanted to get involved in a deeper way.

I enjoyed watching nature takes its own course on my day trips into the wilderness I could find near London but the enjoyment was purely a passive one. What could I, Mark Gordon, do to move the dial further on nature restoration?

Now in my 60s, I knew time was not on my side. If I were to get involved I probably wouldn’t be around to see major changes. But if I could kick something off now perhaps there would be something for my children or grandchildren after I was no longer here.

The call for me to get a move on felt like it was coming from all sides, not just internally.

I felt like Ben Goldsmith, the financier and conservationist was addressing me personally in one of his recent podcasts:

“If you have savings, why not invest them in something great? You could choose a big cruise or a fast car or the usual kind of things you might do in retirement. Alternatively think about buying a few acres, perhaps more if you can afford it, somewhere not far from where you live and create magic. I urge you to give some thought to doing rewilding yourself, whatever scale you can. Deadwood, scrub and a bit of water are all you need to create some magic. You will sit in it. Who needs meditation or church when you can sit in a little patch of your own wild nature?”.

Stirring stuff but the phrase “somewhere not far from where you live” was a problem. Being based in inner London was going to limit my options. I am fortunate enough to be able to set some money for rewilding but I am not a man of the sort of means that can buy even an acre near me or anywhere within a couple of hours of home.

Dabbling in the balcony garden or tending to the orchard below my flat were yielding a good harvest, literally in terms of fresh herbs, and metaphorically in providing a resting place for locals, both wildlife and human.

But could that really be called ‘rewilding’, hand on heart?

I got to thinking to myself, could I get involved in rewilding at scale, outside the crowded corner of England I lived in?

Could I find a landscape that future generations could enjoy that hadn’t been there before, or at least since decades or centuries?

If I was a landowner, like Ben himself, it would be so much easier. When a paper like the Financial Times runs front page on rewilding then you know things are on the move.

It was clear I couldn’t do this on my own. I had to be part of a collective for the sort of scale I wanted.

I could chip in with a donation to a nature-based charity but I felt strongly that didn’t give me enough skin in the game. Perhaps it was egotistical of me but I wanted my descendants to be able to visit a recovering piece of land and say: “Dad/Grandad helped to make that happen”.

Perhaps I got the idea from my mother who bought herself a bench in Kew Gardens to celebrate herself when she turned 70.

Equally it could have been one of my favourite poets, Edward Thomas:

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,

Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,

The lovely visible earth and sky and sea,

Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills…

He completed this poem on the 14th of July 1915, the day he was passed fit for the British army. Two years later he was killed on the Western Front.

I had to get a move on. I didn’t know how I was going to go about it but it was clear that time was of the essence.

To be continued.

Some would say that any journey that starts with the South Circular Road can only go up.

By the time I hit Putney though I can drop down onto the Thames towpath and start to breathe easier.

On a clear day that particular meander of the river past Fulham football ground, is framed ten miles off in the distance by the arch at Wembley stadium, in a symmetry that I am sure was unintended by its architects.

But this late September morning I realised I was cycling into a view of the river that might have been painted by Monet or Whistler.

A cormorant raced ahead of me in its eagerness to trace the river’s curve then just disappeared into a bank of fog.

The turn that the seasons had taken in the two weeks I had been away was even more marked when I arrived at the London Wetland Centre for my shift as a volunteer ‘guide in the hide’.

By then the mist from the river had been burnt off by the early morning sunshine. I noticed straightaway that the vegetation had started to die back. Some of summer’s lushness had been lost but the bonus was that more of nature’s comings and goings had been exposed.

When I got to the Headley Hide to make it ready for that day’s visitors it was all action stations.

Through the glass I could see a jay burying acorns for its winter pantry, another sign of autumn.

Kingfishers were whizzing up and down the channels, their flashes of blue more visible now the rushes had thinned out.

Coupled-up stonechats were passing through from the moors of the north to head for the milder weather on the south coast.

There was even a grey wagtail bobbing up and down along the perimeter of the scrape directly in front of me. Six years earlier pre-pandemic, this was one of the birds that had started to impinge itself on my hitherto nature-free consciousness. That setting was an unlikely one. The grey wagtail is a bird of clear, fast-flowing streams but this one kept on turning up on the flat rooftop adjoining our offices in central London. Apparently in winter, any puddle will do.

That Monday it wasn’t just about the birds.

Some of my favourite humans dropped by too.

I compared notes on our respective commutes with Kathy, a fellow ‘guide in the hide’, who works on the grounds on a Monday. We both live on Brixton Hill. I was feeling quietly smug about cycling to work all the way from there until she told me that she walks to Barnes and back - two hours on foot each way.

Sevim another colleague dropped into the hide. She works an early shift cleaning the visitor centre. When she finishes up there, she changes into civilian mufti and grabs her long lens to capture wildlife shots for her social media accounts.

Then came ‘Bermondsey Dave’, my moniker for the former taxi driver and a Monday regular in my hide. His weekday timetable is an enviable one. Two days a week birding and two days of fishing, with a rest day in between.

Whilst catching up with Dave’s news, a woman dropped in who was quite literally a ‘vagrant’ as birds that have wandered off course on their migration are described.

Originally a native Londoner she had spent the last decade in New Zealand, raising a family there. The previous day they had all flown into Heathrow en route to a break on the Amalfi Coast, only for her to be turned away at the gate. Whilst her British passport was good enough to get her back into the UK, it didn’t pass muster with the EU. Waving her husband and child off on the flight to Italy, she had headed directly to the London Wetland Centre whilst an emergency passport was made ready for her.

She explained that although New Zealand birdlife may appear exotic at first - most species are unique to that cut-off archipelago - there was a sameness to it that palled after a few years. Stuck out in the middle of the Pacific there was very little in the way of bird migration there. Back in London on a brilliant autumn day where it was all change she was drinking in the birdlife that she knew here as a child and loving every minute of it.

As I locked up, I reflected that it had been quite a shift.

The seasons had literally unfolded before my eyes.

I had had as good a set of bird sightings as I could remember as a ‘guide in the hide’.

But just as important as the biodiversity was the human diversity that had made that Monday a truly magical one.

“I need a decision from you now”.

One of a seemingly endless carousel of doctors at the West Middlesex hospital was on the phone. He sounded really stressed out.

“But my sister will be there in less than an hour”, I pleaded.

“We can’t wait. We need your power of attorney right now to give us permission to feed your mother through a tube”.

It clearly couldn’t wait.

I said ‘yes’.

What else could I do?

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Despite only just arriving, I turned the car around and headed back to face the next crisis in my mother’s decline with Alzheimer’s.

I had picked out Elmley for my day off. It looked wild and not too far to drive. Taking up the southern edge of the Isle of Sheppey on the Kent side of the Thames Estuary, the place had an interesting looking history.

Owned by Oxford University, forty years ago they passed Elmley over to the family that had farmed the 3,000 acres of grazing marsh for generations. After a brief period under the stewardship of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), the Merricks took its conservation back in hand. Nature was going to be front and centre stage.

Elmley is now the largest National Nature Reserve in England that is owned and run by farmers. What’s more, it is a proper business. You can book out shepherds huts and log cabins for stays. They can even stage your corporate event or wedding.

A year after that traumatic phone call, I decided to return to Elmley, this time without a car.

One December morning I took the train to Swale, the last station on the mainland and headed towards the coastal path round the southern edge of Sheppey. Facing me was a similar view to Canvey Island on the Essex side of the estuary - gas holders, scrap metal yards and cement works.

Despite the similarities between those post-apocalyptic landscapes, Kent and Essex could not be more different in the popular imagination. The latter is the home of materialistic ‘Essex man’, whilst the former is ‘the Garden of England’. The last tangle of steel structures opposite me at Sittingbourne is rapidly succeeded by the orchards of Teynham with its cherry, apple and pear trees.

But wildlife knows nothing of human stereotypes and prejudices. Both sides of the Thames Estuary sit on the East Atlantic Flyway and so both see their fair share of the 90 million migrating birds heading from north to south and back along the east coast each year.

Nor does the world of cinema, apparently.

The opening of Great Expectations from that great man of Kent, Charles Dickens, is set in the marshes around Cooling, on the Hoo Peninsula. On the map above it looks like it is trying to separate the squabbling islands of Canvey and Sheppey.

The churchyard of St James’ there still holds what has become known as ‘Pip’s Graves’, the forlorn gravestones of 13 babies that Dickens describes as “little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their [parents’] graves”.

However, when it comes to bringing Dickens to life, Kent and Essex are interchangeable.

A recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations was filmed in Tollesbury Wick on the Essex coast. Ray Winstone plays the escaped convict Magwitch. In an early primeval scene, he looms out of the mists of the marshes after escaping from a prison hulk moored off-shore.

Where he emerges is a spot I know and love from my frequent walks and stays on the Essex marshes.

Back in Kent, I continued my walk in the brisk winter sunshine along the coastal path, past flocks of redshank, godwit and dunlin till I came to a path that cut back up to Elmley nature reserve. The car park there was the setting for a display of short eared owls, seeing off a marsh harrier that had strayed onto their territory as dusk fell. I was already hooked by the place.

But it was time to head back to the station. To continue on my circular route I set off down the driveway where I had had to turn around the car a year previously after that frantic call.

Just as I got into my stride, in my peripheral vision I could see a warden gesticulating in my direction.

“You can’t walk down there”, she said.

“Yes I can”, I replied indignantly. “This is a public footpath and a right of way” I said, jabbing my finger at the OS map on my phone. “And besides there are cars going up and down the road.”

“Yes, you are perfectly within your rights to walk down that road but we would prefer it if you didn’t, for the love of the wildlife”, came the intriguing reply.

She explained to me that the lapwing and curlew on the marshes were totally habituated to cars. For them they were like slow-moving metal cows in the landscape. However a human on two legs was deemed a threat and the birds could be spooked enough to abandon their habitats.

Fiona was a retired nurse, now volunteer warden who lived in Shepherds Bush in west London. We got talking, me bombarding her with dozens of questions about this fascinating place. She kindly offered to drive me (slowly of course) back down the road through flocks of wading birds in numbers that I had rarely seen in England. We parted at the gates the best of friends and I walked back to the platform at Swale where I was treated to a starling murmuration and a kestrel harrying a marsh harrier as night fell.

The following day would be the first anniversary of my father’s death. Nine months previously to that, my mother had died, just days after that frantic call from the hospital.

Inserting the feeding tube was a postponing of her inevitable end, a sign that her body wanted to call it a day. More food was pointless but it didn’t stop our way of death prolonging her agony. In fact, the tube I gave permission for them to insert had inflamed her lungs and brought on ‘aspiration pneumonia’, the first item on her certificate as a cause of death.

I made the vow there and then as I left the Isle of Sheppey that I would draw up an expression of wishes that made it clear that forced feeding was not for me, should it come to that.

And that when I finally succumb that my remains will be scattered on one of these rewilded spots along the Thames estuary that I return to time and time again.

I never felt like I was a carer calling by. I was just a son paying his father his due. It felt like we were both catching up on lost time. Even if there were long periods of silence between us it didn’t mean we were bored. In fact sometimes we would both drop off in front of re-runs of ‘The Repair Shop’. But that felt to me just a mark of how relaxed we were finally becoming in each other’s company.

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At first I would arrive via the spanking new Elizabeth line station 10 minutes walk away from the house. It had always been a standing if somewhat macabre joke with my parents as to whether they would make it to the opening of the line.

It was announced 20 years ago but delay upon delay meant it was going to be a close-run thing between my parents’ longevity and the cutting of the ribbon. In the event they were both alive when the Elizabeth line opened but only my father got to travel on it. I made sure of that.

Their house was an Edwardian semi at the crown of the road, commanding the heights of Hanwell. It was full of stained glass, Tiffany-style lamps that my father made as a hobby. There was barely an inch of wall without a print on it.

After a month I decided upon a more circuitous route to get to their house. Winter had turned to spring and I could get off at a tube station a couple of miles more distant and get in a good walk into the bargain.

After a short stretch of main road, I was soon at the playing fields behind the secondary school my children had attended. Going down a slope to the Grand Union Canal, I saw at least a dozen rabbits quietly feeding. I had always known they were there but I had never noticed their habitat around their warren. The whole area was quite overgrown, really untidy by the standards of Ealing, the London borough known as ‘the Queen of Suburbs’. Then I noticed a nearby information board that revealed why it was quite so unkempt.

In the 1970s a local history teacher, Luke Fitzherbert led a campaign to protect a string of separate green spaces in west London that followed the course of the River Brent from the canal up to the A40 near the Hoover Factory.

This year marked 50 years since that group that he formed - the Brent River & Canal Society - got its plan approved by Ealing council and the Brent River Park was formally inaugurated. That is when the stretch of canal and river side that I was on gained protection from development and the landscape was left largely to its own devices.

Over time, the general biodiversity of the Brent River Park improved markedly. I remember riding my bike down the towpath nearly 30 years ago and being astonished at the sight of a grey heron perched on a weir amidst all manner of human detritus. Now they are commonplace. There is one who has a particular patch at a pond by Brunel’s Wharncliffe railway viaduct.

In the background of the walk there is always the hum of the traffic on the M4 elevated section, the rumbling of the Piccadilly line into central London or the planes going into Heathrow overhead. But the wildlife of the Brent River Park add their own accompaniment in the form of the machine gun burst of the Cettis warbler, the melodious decibels of a song thrush or even the harsh ‘kreear’ of a tern in the summer.

From the school playing fields the walk to my parents breaks down into four distinct sections.

First there is Warren Farm, the former playing fields, now re-wilded home of skylarks and more. I have written about it previously and how it reminds me of Berlin1.

The next stretch runs alongside Ealing hospital where I often took my parents for their check-ups and thence to Brunel’s railway viaduct crossing the river Brent. It provides a plucking post for the hospital’s resident peregrine falcons who don’t even flinch when a high-speed train passes within feet of them.

The third stretch of the walk to get to my father’s is Brent Lodge Park, known by our family and locals as ‘the Bunny Park’ after the children’s zoo there.

In summer the wildflower meadows there are a highlight. They nestle in the picturesque shadow of St Marys, a Gilbert Scott church, parts of which date back to the 12th century and possibly earlier. It also has the advantage of having no passing traffic which allows filming uninterrupted by traffic noise. For that reason St Marys has often featured in TV weddings and funerals.

St Marys was also where my mother attended an Alpha Course, in her personal search for meaning late in her life. We don’t know if she became a Christian before she died. We are not a family that finds it easy to talk about faith or feelings. But we’ve hedged our bets by getting her and my father a tree to remember them both that’s overlooked by both the Bunny Park and the church.

The fourth and final leg of my personal odyssey to my father’s house brings me to the Brent Valley golf course that my parents’ house overlooked. I don’t think of golf courses as hot-spots of biodiversity but perhaps it is the over-spill of nature from the Brent River Park that brings in green woodpeckers and all manner of wildfowl when the meadow floods behind the 14th green in the winter. The golf course was our go-to spot for meet-ups with my parents during socially distanced times.

Perhaps you can appreciate now why this walk has been important to me since they died in quick succession in 2023. Often the arc of my visits and their frequency told me more about my journey into grief than the feelings I could detect within me. Once my father was on his own, there was a metronomic regularity about them. I was doing this walk for him, in as predictable manner as possible.

When he died that frequency dialled up. I was burying myself in the probate process and walking kept me going through it. I felt sad each time when I left their house and there was no-one waving me off down the road but that was important too.

Once the house went up for sale, I did that walk less. Perhaps I was in denial that the last vestiges of my parents’ presence on earth would soon be gone.

After the sale, I have still kept up the walk but I cut it short before the golf course. I didn’t want to catch a glimpse of their house. It was never the house I grew up in but it was the home my parents chose once they’d got rid of their kids. It was made in their image not ours. And now it is someone else’s.

More often than not, I’ll get the crap spooked out of me when I head out east from London on a coastal walk.

That was literally the case on my last visit to Orford Ness, off the Suffolk coast. It used to be the British equivalent of Area 51, the air base in Nevada that never appeared on a map.

Okay, so you’ve de-commissioned a scary weapons establishment that’s been sort of top secret for nearly a century. The Ministry of Defence remove incriminating evidence from buildings with dodgy names like ‘The Black Beacon’ and ‘The Ionospheric Research Station’ and you leave a toilet cistern hiding in plain sight?

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Had I stumbled upon a set from Jurassic Park? Like the scene where the T-Rex plucks the roof off the bathroom where the cowardly lawyer had hidden after abandoning the children?

A couple of months later I took the train out of Liverpool Street to walk from Manningtree to Harwich.

It’s one of my favourites, taking in a variety of estuarine landscapes. Woods with nightingales and turtle doves, banks on the Stour hollowed out by nesting sand martins and swallows darting into the barns where they are nesting.

However on this occasion I was brought up short by this sign blocking the footpath.

It looked kind of sturdy and permanent but why were my name and initials on it? It was only the second time I had done that walk but I must have done something really bad first time round to be called out like that.

Later that autumn I was quietly minding my own business, walking up the Grays Inn Road to pick up my new steed from Condor Cycles when I found this laser printed laminate cable-tied to a lamp post.

It turned out that the QR code took you to something called the Pub Club Finder. I am not sure whether they were just trying to recruit people called Mark in this eye-catching promo. The link apologised for appearing to persecute me and my namesakes. Well, that’s ok then.

My sense of paranoia growing I decided to take myself off to the remotest place I could think of. Or at least the remotest within a one hour train ride from London.

I plumped for Canvey Island, a real life island tethered to the Essex mainland by a road bridge 30 metres long. Wikipedia will tell you that it is a place shaped by its low-lying landscape and the petrochemical industry. In my memory, it was all about Doctor Feelgood, the ultimate pub rock band and some would say a precursor of what of what became punk in the 70s.

If ever a band’s music was shaped by the landscape it was Doctor Feelgood. The band members were all brought up within a few streets of each other on Canvey.

In the 20th century the petrochemical industry piled into the western side of the island attracted by the proximity to London and the Thames and the lack of people in case it all blew up in their faces, literally. Companies like Texaco, Occidental and British Gas built storage facilities for gas and oil which at their peak totalled over a half a million tonnes.

That was until a failed IRA bomb attack in 1979 led to the realisation that there was a real danger that the whole island could go up in flames along with Southend on the mainland. At that point permissions were pulled and plans scaled back.

Julian Temple’s 2009 documentary on the band was called Oil City Confidential for that reason. The Feelgoods’ legendary guitarist, Wilko Johnson, described by Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian film critic as “a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman” at least until his death in 2022, thought the island stood comparison with the Mississippi Delta. Lines like “see you in the morning down by the jetty” where the “big ships go gliding by” pay homage to the band’s very own ‘Thames Delta’. It’s where Wilko imagined legendary blues man Muddy Waters cutting his teeth in the early decades of the 20th century if he had been born on the other side of the Atlantic.

One particular abandoned site owned by Occidental had a half-built oil refinery, storage tanks and an unused mile-long jetty that ate up over £10 million in 1970s pounds sterling. And you know the story by now when it comes to rewilding. The disused and undisturbed site quickly attracted a plethora of wildlife and after a bit of a clean-up, it was reopened as Canvey Wick nature reserve.

Actually, ‘plethora’ is a bit of an understatement.

The reserve is said to have “more biodiversity per square foot than any other site in the UK” according to Natural England. Over 1,300 species of invertebrates have been recorded here, including many endangered insects with fantastical names like the pantaloon bee, the five-banded weevil hunting wasp along with hundreds of orchids found nowhere else in the UK. And that’s because of, not despite the thin dredged-up soil on the reserve.

The fact that this place was called a ‘Wick’ also intrigued me. When we were young, my father often said to us when we were being annoying: “You’re getting on my wick”. I didn’t understand at that age how part of a candle could stand in as a metaphor for irritation.

It was only later I learned that he was turning to Cockney rhyming slang. This was an abbreviation for ‘Hampton Wick’ a suburb of London on the side of the Thames, a polite rhyming stand-in for the word ‘prick’.

The island had been a haven for a substantial East End diaspora since the end of World War Two but that was not the reason the reserve was christened Canvey Wick. On our eastern seaboard the word ‘Wick’ has Viking origins in the Old Norse language and means a ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’. Coincidentally a ‘Wick” had already cropped up in our newly rewilded lives. Over successive lockdowns we had come to know and love Fingringhoe Wick further up the coast, another de-industrialised site bursting with life now.

This year c2c, the franchise-holder for this stretch of coastline unveiled a carriage that goes by the splendid name of the ‘Wilko Express’ after the co-founder of Doctor Feelgood.

So as you can imagine I turned up at Fenchurch Street station next to the Tower of London full of expectation that I too would ride with the ghost of one of my guitar heroes. Alas, I was transported to Benfleet, the last mainland station across from Canvey, in smart but very much regular rolling stock.

The mundanity continued unabated with a short bus ride to the car park of an enormous branch of the supermarket Morrisons. But then a 10 minute walk across bare wasteland from there was enough to set my weirdness radar off.

I had by now visited enough rewilded paradises in the shadow of nuclear bunkers, secret weapons institutes and train depots for one behind the car park of an out-of-town superstore not to surprise me. In keeping with the brownfield vibe, this kingfisher sculpture repurposed from scrap metal marked the start of the reserve.

But note the scarecrow photobombing the dragonfly here. Was this another sign of impending weirdness?

Five minutes further, on what was planned to be the one of the few dockside unloading points to be built by Occidental, a procession of container ships and cruise liners was lumbering up the Thames just a few hundred yards away towering over the refineries.

Everything was already a bit out of kilter by the time I started to stride out along the sea wall heading back north towards the mainland when that Essex weirdness struck again.

What was going on? Was this evidence of satanic rites on Canvey Island?

The Essex coastline with its mists and desolation had been becoming a byword for sorcery and the supernatural in books like Sarah Perry’s Essex Serpent and The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore. But it was something else that flashed into my mind at that moment. The Wicker Man.

Although the cult classic film was set not in Essex but the Western Isles of Scotland, had I been lured here unwittingly for nefarious ends by the promise of boundless biodiversity, like the film’s Sergeant Howie played with magnificent uptightness by Edward Woodward?

Would Christopher Lee loom out of the Thames like Lord Summerisle and encase me in a wicker effigy?

There is a whole level of weirdness that definitely has me hooked on the Thames Estuary and its environs. And in many ways the wildlife is the cherry on the top of that cake. So whilst the Wicks, both Canvey and Fingringhoe, are nailed-on guarantees for me to visit for nightingales in May and June, it is the post-industrial tracery and uncanniness of both that fill me with joy.

Richard Jeffries’ late 19th century After London is the first novel to ask the ‘what if’ questions of our capital in the event of the apocalypse. With society’s collapse how do we imagine a London reconquered by nature? Written in Surbiton, now a genteel London suburb, then a Victorian liminal space between town and countryside, Jeffries paints a picture of the low-lying areas reverting to marsh-land:

‘Sometimes, after great rains, the flood cracked and split the bridges of solid stone which the ancients had built. These and the iron bridges likewise were overthrown, and presently quite disappeared, for the very foundations were covered with the sand and gravel silted up’

The Dutch settlers invited to Canvey Island during the 17th century did what the Dutch did best here and across East Anglia; they built dykes and ditches to keep the water out. That worked out OK until the night of 1st February 1953 when a storm surge coming down from the North Sea killed 53 islanders.

Jeffries could be describing from the high ground of the late Victorian era what will happen to Canvey Island and its rigs and holding tanks with rising sea levels. It may be one of the first places that gets abandoned and handed back to the sea when the walls are breached by the next big storm surge, the next 1953.

But when I beat its western bounds, the uncanniness of the island make me feel like it’s already gone. Once I’m two minutes from the car park and the dog walkers, I’ve never seen another soul there. But the cacophony of bird life, the reed warblers and cuckoos calling in spring, the plaintiff cries of the curlew and the redshank in winter, will still be heard and probably redoubled once humankind is out of the way.

I hope it’s not too morbid to say this anticipation fills me with a quiet joy.

But that wasn’t why my heart was racing. After all, ‘the Scrubs’ had been a part of the landscape of my west London childhood. Rather, it was the message my sister had left on my phone: “I can’t handle this again. You need to come right away”.

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That afternoon my father had collapsed in the street near his home. His heart had stopped for 20 minutes but the ambulance crew had managed to get it started again. It was only a matter of months since my mother had collapsed close by outside Westfield shopping centre. Her rapid descent through an incredibly brutal form of Alzheimer's ended in her death three months later.

My father was taken to Hammersmith Hospital, which isn’t actually in Hammersmith. Just as Charing Cross Hospital, where my mother was taken is not in Charing Cross. It’s in Hammersmith. Despite all the confusion I worked out where to go.

The heart unit there has views of both Wormwood Scrubs prison and what was now known as The Linford Christie Stadium. Back in the 70s, it was the plain old West London Stadium. Our running club would train there on Wednesday nights. We would share the warm-up track with a young Linford, then just one ‘Jack the Lad’, a bit of a tearaway in the sprint group. We couldn’t know then what heights he was destined for, let alone that the track would eventually bear his name.

It was clear that Thursday night that my father’s coma would be final. You don’t come back when your heart has stopped for 20 minutes. None of us were under any illusions about that.

Things were strung out for a couple of days. They proved to be some of the most memorable in our family’s history.

A shifting cast of three generations gathered around and sometimes on my father’s bed. His breathing was metronomic thanks to the ventilator. He looked like he had just dropped off to sleep in the middle of the party. In the last hours, beers were cracked open and each of us told stories from the life of Maurice or Mo, as he was known for short. He was to all intents and purposes dead but I hoped that he could hear us and our often joyous chatter. I would love to go like that, eavesdropping on my nearest and dearest at my own wake.

48 hours after my father’s collapse, the consultant said we could let him go now. The drugs and gadgetry keeping him alive could be gradually withdrawn. I was clear in my own mind that I didn’t want to witness the life support being powered down so I left my brother and sister there. I wandered out of the hospital for some fresh air.

Just two minutes walk away was that track I had known so well in my youth. With just a small rundown stand on one side, I thought it was stretching it to call it a stadium. The place was looking a lot tattier and distinctly more unloved than I remember it.

In my memories it was a place of endless summer, blood sweat and tears and laughter. I could hear the bell to mark the last lap of my distance, the 800 metres and walked back to the ward for my father’s last lap.

When I re-joined my siblings, life had left my father. His cheeks were pale and sunken and a single tear ran down his cheek, a lacrima mortis. I had thought that only ever happened in the movies.

It was a while before I could return to the Scrubs. When I did it was not the memories that brought me back.

I had since read David Lindo’s The Urban Birder. Until that point I had thought that there were just football pitches stretching north from the hospital where my father had died. But for David this was his “inner city Fair Isle”.

He was brought up in nearby Wembley and his love of birds brought him there on a regular basis during his childhood. In a chapter entitled Wormwood Scrubs - In For Life David lists some of the 140 birds he has seen in this designated Local Nature Reserve.

My first impression as I got off the train at East Acton once more was how hemmed in the space was by the arteries of London.

The hum of the Westway, the elevated section of the A40 made famous by the Clash, my childhood route ‘Up West’ marked the southern boundary. Over the years the north side of the Scrubs had been chipped away at successively by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, the depot for the Eurostar rolling stock, the Elizabeth Line and now the Old Oak Common complex accommodating HS2’s entry into London. And despite all that salami slicing, nature was holding on.

After the football pitches and the prison the first thing you notice is scrub, the actual scrub that gives its name to the place. Hawthorn, blackthorn and elder interspersed with thin stands of trees, the remnants of the Great Middlesex Forest that stretched from the city walls out to the north-west suburbs where I grew up. It ain’t pretty in a Chelsea Flower Show sort of way but this habitat is an immensely valuable habitat for wildlife.

In the spring and autumn birds on migration use the Scrubs as a refuelling point, hopping from one clump to the next along an interconnected corridor full of food and shelter.

On my spring visit the warblers were deafening, despite the man-made construction and cacophony around them. Scratchy whitethroats and melodious blackcaps, our ‘northern nightingales’ dominated the airwaves. I was surprised to pick up reed warblers too, despite the lack of water or even reeds, proof that these birds would be en route again once they had got their strength back.

It was not surprising that all this life had attracted predators. I spotted half a dozen kestrels on patrol and well-fed foxes foraging for the eggs and fledglings of ground-nesting birds like skylarks.

Amidst all that life, I had temporarily forgotten that the Scrubs were a deadly landscape. As I walked back to the tube station, I literally stumbled across this.

Not a hundred yards from full-blooded nature, this kerbside memorial commemorated the spot of one of the most notorious murders of the 1960s. In the ‘Massacre of Braybrook Street’, as it became known, three members of the police in plain clothes were shot dead by Harry Roberts and two accomplices, who feared the stash of weaponry in back of their van was about to be discovered.

One of the stalwarts of our running group at West London Stadium was called Harry Roberts. That wasn’t the name he was born with. That would be Malcom. Our coach nicknamed him Harry Roberts; that’s how notorious he was even ten years later. Not because Malcom was a ‘dodgy geezer’. Far from it. He was a gentle guy who became a train driver on the Metropolitan Line shortly after that, his chosen career for the next 43 years. As the tribute page from his running club makes clear, that name stuck with him till the day he died.

Despite so much death about, it may surprise you to learn that I intend to return to Wormwood Scrubs on a regular basis. It is one of the most biodiverse places within Zone 2 of the tube map, both scrappy and a scrapper when it comes to nature hanging on by its fingernails. I think the place is my memento mori, the skull I don’t keep on my desk, a reminder of good times and bad and of the impermanence of life.

The couple had lost their home after a speculative business deal with a friend went sour. Not only that, Moth had been diagnosed with a debilitating Parkinsons-like neurodegenerative disease. The doctor gave him only seven years to live.

They really had nothing left to lose.

So they walked.

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A film adaptation of the book came out last weekend.

In recent years I too had become fixated on the South West Coastal Path. I had walked sections of it over the years but I had got it into my head that I was going to do the whole thing and in the right order.

This was purely a theoretical exercise played out between me and the 350 pages of the go-to guide on the path. The book and its author Paddy Dillon get a lot of air-time in the film.

“What would Paddy do?” and “Paddy wouldn’t like that” are phrases that Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs would throw at each other in moments of stress. As you will see, they weren’t the only ones to appeal to ‘Saint Paddy’ as they called him.

The South West Coastal Path was just a fantasy until I persuaded my friend Peter to do it with me. We decided we weren’t going to do it all in one go, just a week per year, starting in Minehead in Somerset in 2025 and finishing in Poole in 2030.

We polished off the first tranche just a few weeks ago. So it was fresh in our minds when the three of us - Corinne, Peter and myself - went to see the film together.

This isn’t a film review. We all loved it.

Neither is it a travelogue of our week on the road. That would be boring.

However I thought it would be interesting to pick out the elements and episodes from The Salt Path that chimed with our experience.

Like Raynor and Moth, we carried everything with us. And like them, it felt really liberating about having only the bare necessities on our back.

We felt especially smug when we came across other walkers who were having their suitcases transported from one overnight stop to the next by taxi.

Except we had a roof over our head every night rather than a tent. And we had funds to pay for food along the way. Unlike Raynor and Moth, who were relying on government universal credit to fuel themselves and a tent to shelter in at the end of each day.

Neither did we experience the stigma of homelessness that Raynor and Moth met along the way. Gruff men in Barbours harumphing and bashing on their tent at dawn with their walking sticks. Holidaymakers in chocolate box pretty seaside towns shrinking at the sight of them.

Homelessness is still homelessness even amidst some of the most spectacular scenery that England has to offer.

We mostly stayed in B&Bs but our last stop was at a hotel in Croyde Bay owned by one of the biggest trade unions in the UK.

I think it was run for the benefit of their members so we weren’t quite clear why they let us in. I think they needed the revenue as we were the only guests that night. The vibe was very much the Overlook hotel in The Shining.

The experience of a long-distance walk is as much about those you criss-cross with on the way, your companions on the route, as it is the miles travelled.

In the film, Gillian and Jason encounter a cast of Londoners who invite them back to their Grand Designs style second home nearby. They have mistaken Moth for Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate who happens to be on the Path at the same time to publicise his latest book.

Further on Raynor encourages a trafficked girl to leave the county-lines gang she is caught up with. They also befriend another young woman in a cafe who inspired by their example, hands in her notice, bestowing the couple with a much needed bag of pasties on the way out.

Peter and I didn’t quite change as many lives during our week. But many of our adventures did happen in cafés.

For example, we were checking out potential lunch spots in Ilfracombe when we came across a particularly eye-catching review.

The service was so poor, the reviewer said, that they had to wait “five minuets” for their coffee.

Expecting a full-on Jane Austen costume drama on arrival, we got a chilled surfer vibe instead.

We met Germans, Finns, Canadians and a lone American woman sporting a prominent ‘I didn’t vote for Trump’ badge, no doubt the accessory of the summer for European.

The only Brits we befriended were one chap doing two stages for every one we did and a volunteer for the RNLI who had completed all 630 miles in March in 30 days. We also heard tell of a 78 year old Canadian who had done the whole thing in one go and then returned the next year to do it in the opposite direction.

Made us feel like proper slouches.

But we are going to do it all every inch in our own good time.

There will be estuaries en route with ferries to tempt us to cut corners. But in the words of Saint Paddy, we are determined not to “leave our trail in tatters” by cheating.

In the film we see Jason Isaacs, in the role of Moth, declaiming Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf at a quayside surrounded by holidaymakers. Gillian passes the hat round and collects enough for a fish and chips supper.

Peter and I are men of letters but we were more private it. But definitely more pretentious.

Each morning before we set off, we would have a pep talk from TS Eliot.

To be more specific, Spotify would play us a section of the ‘Waste Land’ in the great man’s declamatory tones.

Thanks to that inspiration, scree descents would be accompanied by cries of “Marie, Marie, hold on tight”.

And we would pause on cliff-tops to remember:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swells

And the profit and loss.

Thank goodness, there was no-one around to overhear all this.

But we will definitely put Beowulf down on the list for next year’s daily motivational speeches, perhaps even in the original Old English.

Hwæt-ever, as that good king would say.

One early landmark the film lingered on, as did we, was Culbone Church.

It is dedicated to Saint Beuno, an early Welsh saint that had sailed across the Bristol Channel to spread the word to the heathen in England. The day before we had come across Saint Dubricious who had also taken a coracle across the water and ended up with a church in Porlock named after him.

Culbone’s setting is idyllic. In Simon Jenkins’s words in England’s Thousand Best Churches, there is a “magical stream dancing past with woods threatening to engulf the graveyard”.

It may be the “smallest, most isolated and picturesque in England” but that remoteness also meant that Culbone must have been one of the most miserable places in Somerset for much of its history.

In the 14th century it was where French prisoners were housed. Two centuries later it was a leper colony. Then a prison again in the 18th century. Now it’s an Instagram hot-spot.

It was clear from the very start that this trip was also going to be a nostalgia trip for me.

Children were still playing cricket on the beach at Minehead like we did in the 70s during our caravan holiday at nearby Blue Anchor Bay.

The steam train line from Minehead to the outskirts of Taunton continued to run.

And rock pooling in Lynton was something families did now as then.

When I was a bit older the parents of my oldest friend Louis would bring us to Braunton, the final stop on this year’s route, where they had a cottage.

I have vivid memories of fishing the river Caen there for trout to take home for tea. Don’t tell anyone but we used a worm as bait, illegal then as it is now.

50 years later I walked into the newsagents in the middle of the village and introduced myself to the proprietor with the words: “Uncle Louis sends his best regards”. To his credit nephew Kieran took the sight of a tired stranger in full walking gear totally in his stride.

I have no memories from back then of just how unspeakably beautiful Exmoor and the north Devon coast was. The coastline was just a playground where we swopped the swings and roundabouts of our urban childhood for sea, sand, fishing nets and wellies.

The whole week the sea was always in sight on the right as it will be every year we do the Path. It truly gave me the sense that I live on an island, a sceptred isle.

Walking the South West Coastal Path, I was thankful for the fine weather, for my good health, my fine companion Peter and the means to bite off this first chunk in relative comfort.

I can’t wait to get the train to Barnstaple the same time next year and do it all again.

In the blue corner was John Lewis-Stempel. He wrote amongst others the exquisite Meadowland, a diary of the passing seasons in an ancient meadow on his Herefordshire farm.

In the red corner, Ben Goldsmith, environmental financier, producer and host of my go-to podcast on nature restoration.

The subject was ‘Rewilding’.

The debate ran along civilised lines until it came to what is now rapidly becoming the reductio ad Hitlerum or the ‘playing of the Nazi card’ in debates about rewilding - wolves and their re-introduction.

Many a forum would have the rule that once a Hitler comparison is made, the debate is over. And so it goes for the topic of rewilding too as once the wolf card is played by one side, everyone gets so angry that rational argument goes out the window.

All very unfortunate. And not untypical.

In 2018 Rory Stewart, ex Tory minister, former Lake District MP and now famed as a podcast co-host, went head to head with George Monbiot, Guardian journalist and author of ‘Feral’, the book that brought the rewilding movement to a wider audience ten years ago.

I found both these spectacles painful to watch. In fact I switched them off before the end.

So what’s going on here?

Why does it appear that those in the rewilding movement can’t get along with farmers?

If you believed what you saw here in these two debates then you would think there is an all-or-nothing zero-sum game being played out here.

On the one hand, farmers are trashing the environment, say some rewilders. Indeed they are the number one driver of climate change and river pollution with their methane-producing animals and chemically sterilised fields.

For many in the farming community, those in the rewilding movement are metropolitan idealists who don’t know how the countryside works and are prepared to endanger our food security for the sake of a few birds.

You may assume that I conform to the latter caricature. But it may surprise you to learn that I have a foot in both camps.

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You see, I know a thing or two about farming.

No, I wasn’t brought up on a farm. I have lived nearly all my life in cities.

Nor did we go on farm holidays when I was young.

In fact, I only got into farming in my middle years.

Not in a ‘Good Life’ sort of way (a reference that only fans of 1970s British sitcoms will understand), not by growing all my own food in the allotment in an annoyingly smug way.

Let me explain. It does start with wildlife. It starts with a mouse. The Mouse, in fact.

When I worked at Disneyland Paris as UK boss, I had a Dutch counterpart by the name of Luite Moraal. We were on nodding acquaintance but we weren’t particularly close.

Five years after we had both left Disney, he rang me up out of the blue. He had invented this tent whose interior was modelled on a Dutch farm-house from the 19th century.

There was even a ‘cupboard bed’ that mimicked the way a family would sleep above their cows to keep warm from their body heat.

He had launched the concept in the Netherlands as ‘Het Betere Boerenbed’ (the Better Farmer’s Bed) and it was going really well. Urban families were flocking to these canvas farmhouses sited on actual Dutch farms for long weekends of getting ‘back to nature’.

Would I like to team up with him and launch the concept in the UK?

I had never seen anything like it. It looked kind of weird but cute at the same time. The tents had something of the ‘shabby chic’ vibe that was just taking off in the ‘noughties’.

So I said: ‘Why not?’

I found a team and some farms to site the tents on. I souped up the name to ‘Feather Down Farm Days’ and so it was that ‘glamping’ (glamorous camping) went mainstream in this country.

I got to know many farmers and landowners during the decade I worked on Feather Down.

I explored all the pockets of beautiful landscape on our crowded island and the different ways of farming them. From upland sheep farms to lowland mixed ones, country estates with deer and even beer brewed on them and dairy farms. Lots of dairy farms. Which was just as well as an astonishing number of city children, even well-off ones, didn’t seem to know where milk came from before it got to the supermarket shelf. So twice daily milking would become a spectator sport, to the bemusement of the farmers.

I got close enough to the people who worked the land to understand the economics of farming. And it was precarious to say the least. That’s why they wanted to talk to me to help them diversify their income.

As well as conventional farming, I worked with organic farmers as well as practitioners of what has now become known as ‘regenerative farming’.

At Richard’s farm in Gloucestershire, by the banks of the river Severn, the health of the soil comes first. Disturbance is kept to a minimum (the ‘no till’ principle) and fields are allowed to recover by remaining fallow for longer than modern day farming would have the patience for. The land is then more productive in terms of the crop yields, there are less outgoings on artificial fertilisers and insecticides and the wildlife is more grateful, from the earthworms and insects to the farmland birds like the yellowhammer which are in rapid decline.

After ‘Feather Down’ got sold to new owners, that wasn’t the end of my interest in farming. I became chair of London’s biggest community farm and got into milling flour at Brixton Windmill just round the corner from where I live.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that my interest and knowledge of farming goes back further than my involvement in rewilding.

And my reading pile is equally divided between the two.

So when I see my favourite rewilder and my favourite farmer tearing into each other for public entertainment, it truly pains me.

I am a pragmatist by nature. We all have to live somewhere and we all have to get fed.

I am with Caitlin Moran, the Times columnist, who when she sees another housing development go up in her patch of London, thinks:

“I might sigh as Chris Packham lists the plummeting population of tern flocks, but the flock of young people in London is also plummeting”.

The government is leading a pukka consultation exercise around our first ever land use framework. Organisations like Rewilding Britain are making data-driven submissions to back up their vision of our green and pleasant land. In particular, how to reach the magic 30% enshrined in law that must be given over to nature:

I think in maps. And I have one in my head of this island that is more geographically based. It’s based on my visits to farms for Feather Down, so is possibly a mite naive. But hell, here goes.

The eastern side, the breadbasket of our island, is dominated by conventionally, even intensively farmed arable and vegetable crops to generate the bulk of the food we eat.

There would be pockets of regenerative farming led by the likes of Sarah Langford in Suffolk (see reading pile), ploughing shallow and looking after the earth worms. Teamed up with Dominic Buscall at Wild Ken Hill on the north Norfolk coast which hosted the BBC’s ‘Springwatch’ for three years and has a mixture of everything.

The lush western side of England is where we sent most of the ‘Feather Down’ urban families for their breaks. This would be dominated by dairy and mixed farming, the more acres for organic the better.

And the middle, particularly our uplands, would allow its unproductive margins to be handed over to nature.

It might be painful for the likes of Rory Stewart but perhaps the record number of sheep in the Lake District, that graze largely thanks to public subsidy, should be cut back to allow the land to ‘scrub up’ (literally and metaphorically).

If you read the inspirational ‘English Pastoral’ by James Rebank (again, see my reading pile), it is clear that the conversion process is a painful one. But if you can sleep better at night knowing that nature is recovering on your land, that can’t be a bad thing.

Just as importantly for a family farm, you know you will be handing something on to your children that they will want to cherish rather than trash.

Sitting in the city, I can’t do much about that process but I can do something, apart from letting nature into the nooks and crannies of the neighbourhood that I have a say in.

If people like me are happy to pay more for organic food, then more farmers will line up outside the Soil Association’s doors to begin the conversion process.

If I can get hold of ‘rewilded’ meat from Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell at Knepp, then I will gladly pay a premium.

I can also get my veg box grown to organic principles on Sutton Community Farm’s land.

Not just because it’s all delicious and better for my health. But also because I will have done my little bit to nudge the market to produce a little bit more of the right stuff.

Beating the bounds of my patch, nature was doing all it could be heard, though not necessarily seen.

The reed beds were the site of a warbler stand-off.

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The Cetti’s Warblers had been loyal and stayed put there all year. They were most put-out to have to share their home with the upstarts back from Africa.

Their explosive machine-gun song seemed to be aimed explicitly at the Reed Warbler’s rhythm and blues riffs and the Sedge Warbler’s jazz extemporisations.

The returning blackcaps and chiffchaffs just added to the kerfuffle.

But what a joyous kerfuffle!

Both seen and heard were the sand martins rattling overhead. Their on-site Airbnb, the nest bank lovingly crafted for them, looked very much booked out for the season. The martins were bringing nesting material into the holes at a dizzying speed.

Of the wading birds on-site there were only a pair each of lapwing and oystercatchers left over from the winter. But they were making their presence felt in a big way with ear-splitting ‘pee-wits’ from the one and piping ‘kleeps’ from the other.

And if that wasn’t enough, gigantic marsh frogs were laughing at each other in chorus at an incredible decibel level across the wetland.

And everywhere was green, so green that it hurt the eyes.

As Jane Austen said of spring in Mansfield Park, it is the “season which cannot, in spite of its capriciousness, be unlovely”.

Not every one was so impressed however.

I bumped into some of the regular birders. They greeted me with a “it’s a bit quiet today” or “there’s not much about”.

What they were referring to was the lack of rare or vagrant birds to add to their lifetime lists. Nothing that had been blown off course that day and found itself in Barnes rather than the Baltic or the Bay of Biscay.

We smiled and exchanged niceties.

But what I really wanted to do was to shake them by the shoulders.

“Where is your inner child? Where is your wonder at all this magnificence?”

I should have dragged them over to the school group nearby, soaking up every word from an educator colleague about why wetlands are such a magnet to all the birds and insects that appeared to be literally bursting at the seams all around.

What struck me about the London Wetland Centre when I first volunteered there were the similarities it bore to somewhere else I used to work - Disneyland Paris.

When I first took up a leadership role there, some of my right-on friends were horrified. I had joined a quasi-cult, in their eyes, a manufactured and artificial dystopia. But I loved it and still take great pride in the creativity and professionalism that were behind ‘the Disney Experience’.

And I feel the same way about the London Wetland Centre.

Of course, I enjoy being in the wild margins of our islands, where nature is left to its own devices. The tidy walkways, bright clear signage and the attractive information boards of the place I work in, would be a real turn-off on my tramps through the post-apocalyptic landscapes of the Thames Estuary, for example.

But here, just five miles from Trafalgar Square, it’s just right.

Both Disney and WWT (the organisation behind the London Wetland Centre) have visitor attractions to run and they both do it brilliantly.

And in the middle of London, it’s not about landscape-level nature restoration. Rather it’s about creating an oasis, that both birds and human beings can access and appreciate.

And on glorious spring days like this one, to luxuriate and glory in.

At that moment my reveries were interrupted by a scream.

It was not the type of scream that would normally have put me on high alert in the centre of Brixton.

Rather it came from high up in the sky

It came from last summer, not this spring.

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“It can’t be”, I thought. “It’s still April”.

I looked up and sure enough, there they were.

A dozen ‘black bows’ as the poet Edward Thomas called them.

The swifts were back.

‘Are they too early?’, asked Ted Hughes in his eponymous poem1.

It was written in the 70s and is date-stamped 15th May, more than two weeks hence.

But I didn’t care about the date.

My favourite birds were back from their winter break in southern Africa.

I call it a winter break but that’s where they have been for the past nine months of my life. Yes, I realise my view is both anthropomorphic and London-centric.

After spending the majority of the year feeding and sleeping on the wing, they are now back in the northern hemisphere, their breeding grounds. I say breeding grounds but they will also mate on the wing here. The swifts I saw, if they are one of the mature birds, will touch down on earth briefly, here on the British Isles. That’s good enough for me to call this their home.

I often wonder why they bother to grace us with their presence for a handful of weeks of the year. Surely they have everything they need ‘down south’. After all they can race recklessly round a continent or two in fine sunny weather, just for the hell of it.

Why run the risks of a 6,000 journey to find their favourite urban nesting site blocked up by home improvers, amongst the other obstacles we put in their way?

And why despite everything we throw at them do they always seem so joyful here?

As Richard Mabey says in his book Nature Cure, “you would need to have a very sophisticated view of pleasure to believe they weren’t ‘enjoying’ themselves”.

As I walked through Brixton that day, I wanted to button-hole passers-by and shake them from their digitally-induced torpor to look up from their phones.

I felt like intoning the words of Ted Hughes to them:

“They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come”.

But I knew where I would find a more receptive audience. Ironically, it was in the virtual world.

When I got back home I logged onto a swift lovers group on social media.

I knew the birds I had seen would not be sticking around in London.

Our city’s temporary residents would be in the rearguard that would be here in a couple of weeks.

These guys were heading north. And so it proved.

I had a picture in my mind of the control room in ‘the Battle of Britain’, one of my beloved childhood films, with bulbs coming on in succession across a 3D map. Only this time it was not Luftwaffe bombers but squadrons of swifts fanning out across the country.

Incidentally it’s only recently that I have realised that French filmmakers overdub urban scenes with the screams of swifts as an unconscious signal to the viewer to say, ‘this is taking place in summer, in case you hadn’t guessed’.

The swift stands head and shoulders (an inapposite metaphor if ever there was one) above all other birds for me. That’s why they are in my logo.

After all, the swift was my gateway drug into nature.

That bitter but golden spring of the first lockdown in 2020 segued into the return of the swifts where I was.

I find it hard to believe now that they had passed unnoticed in my life till then but they literally burst onto the scene in Corinne’s cul-de-sac in Harlow.

As a new town of the 50s and 60s, its largely social housing stock had been neither ‘improved’ not hermetically sealed-up. The eaves and rafters of our little street provided just the nooks and crannies swifts need to nest in. And nest they did along those terraces.

And those that didn’t, the first years, the ‘screamers and knockers’ checking out nesting sites for future years, careened up and down, as if we were hosting “their evening dirt track meetings”.

When Corinne sold up in 2023 to return to London, I realised the swifts would one of the things I would miss most about Harlow. I see them in ‘screaming parties’ from the flat in Brixton in the height of the summer, but never at such close quarters, nor in such numbers as I saw in the Essex skies.

As Aldo Leopard wrote of swift migration in America:

‘An annual barter of food for light in which the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from murky skies2’.

This is the first in an occasional series on rewilded spots along the Essex coast and Thames Estuary and what they mean to me.

“What do you want for your birthday?” asked Corinne late last summer.

I replied: “A wet and windy winter’s weekend on the Essex Marshes”.

There was, as they say, method in my madness.

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That coastline was where we’d spent an awful lot of time walking between lockdowns (see earlier post: ‘The only (fly)way is Essex’).

I had also been captivated by Sarah Perry’s ‘Essex Serpent’ during the pandemic, set there in late Victorian times.

The heroine Cora Seabourne, played by Clare Danes in a more than creditable Apple TV adaptation, had left London to make it her mission to rid the locals of their superstitions around sea monsters and demons lurking in the marshes.

And in every episode the weather was awful and inhospitable and for me, inspirational. That hint of menace is one of the many aspects of the Essex Marshes that draws me back time after time.

By contrast, an easy destination for our weekly walks out of London is the South Downs National Park, easy peasy to get to by train. Bucolic and safe.

Essex is not a county that you could say ‘plays it safe’.

Robert McFarlane in his book ‘The Old Ways’ has a chapter describing ‘the deadliest path in Britain’. It was no surprise to me to learn that it is in Essex.

The Broomway is a public footpath that heads straight out to sea just north of Southend, curling back to shore three miles to the north on the ominously named ‘Foulness Island’

It is thought to have killed more than a hundred people over the years. Fog had disoriented them, tides had rushed in on them or the night had fooled them. More than once, in the stories I ready about the Broomway, the twinkling lights of the Kent coast opposite would get mistaken for home and the doomed local would walk straight out to sea.

So why not give it a go, I thought.

It took some time but I eventually persuaded Corinne that we could walk the Broomway with a local guide who had knowledge of the tides.

We lived to tell the tale but it all added to the frisson I associate with the Essex coastline.

For my birthday weekend we chose the self same area that the Essex Serpent had been shot in, around Tollesbury, the self-described ‘village of the plough and sail’.

Old Hall Marshes had often called to us during my Essex lockdown years. Its nearly 2,000 acres were formerly divided up into plots for tenant farmers who grazed sheep and cattle. The RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) bought it up in 1984 to return it to its salt marsh wilderness.

By the car park entrance there were a handful of holiday cottages that had always caught our eye.

“We must stay there one day”, we said to each other every time we passed.

When Corinne contacted the owner with my birthday criteria, a weekend in January was recommended to us. It was certainly an unusual request to seek out the worst weather possible but the owner would see what she could do.

When we arrived there that Friday evening it was already dark. The signs were promising. The wind was getting up and squalls of rain were hammering at the windows.

To further get ourselves into the mood we tuned in to that day’s ‘Shipping Forecast’.

BBC Radio 4 had recently held a day-long celebration of its 100th birthday on New Year’s Eve so it was top of mind for me.

For those of you not from these islands, this is a programme lasting nine minutes, broadcast three times a day. It warns those about to take to the sea of the weather conditions they can expect employing a series of names and terms that are engraved onto the national consciousness.

The Shipping Forecast has gone far beyond its original aim of keeping people safe at sea. Indeed it has been largely supplanted by digital technology as you might expect by now. But the Shipping Forecast lives on as a cultural phenomenon for us Brits, a soporific sleep aid and even a source of poetry and song.

Listening to its birthday celebration I realised it is one of the things that helps define us as an island race, verbally and spatially. In just a few minutes it makes a whistle-stop tour of the coastline of the British Isles surrounded by water, and not always hospitable water at that.

That Friday night in January, the Shipping Forecast was sounding very promising indeed. Storm Eowyn was battering the coast of Ireland and Scotland and the advice was that we should gird our loins in Essex as we were going to get caught up in its back-wash.

We went to bed that night with the anticipation that we would get the wild wet weekend that I had come looking for.

Pulling back the curtains that Saturday morning however, there was a glorious sunrise.

Out on the marsh we saw as many birds in terms of sheer volume as I’d seen in one place in my life. Sure I had been on trips with experienced birdwatchers when a long list of species had been ticked off. But the sheer number over-wintering on the marshes that day was astounding.

Those who had come south from colder climes like Iceland for relative warmth (it was just above freezing that day) included Brent and Greylag Geese, Teal, Wigeon, Shelduck, Redshank and Dunlin. Others had come down to the coast from the uplands for the winter like curlew and lapwing.

It was indeed a birthday treat despite the stunning weather.

The second day we walked round Essex Wildlife Trust’s ‘Tollesbury Wick’. I must confess that morning was closer to what the doctor had ordered.

A biting easterly was whistling across from Scandinavia and the Low Countries.

The sky was the colour of slate.

The views out to the de-commissioned nuclear power plant at Bradwell were stunning.

They had ‘the look of empty tombs where giants have been buried’ according to Sarah Perry, that self-same author and chronicler of Essex.

You could even see the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall beyond, established in 653 by Cedd a missionary sent from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne and built on the ruins of an old Roman fort.

It is one of the oldest churches in England and certainly one of the most remote.

On the way home, I realised that by setting the weather up to be awful we had won both ways round for my birthday treat.

There may be no sea monsters and demons lurking there, as far as I could tell. But the Essex coastline still had me in its spell.

It was more recently that I realised that most of these places had rewilded themselves.

And that was what had lured me there in the first place.

I just hadn’t known it at the time.

One of those landscapes was Orford Ness, a spit of land sticking out of the Suffolk coast into the North Sea.

A ‘ness’ is literally a ‘nose’ in Old Norse, a language spoken over a thousand years ago across the sea and over the horizon from Orford.

I first learned about the promontory and its sinister past in W. G. Sebald’s ‘Rings of Saturn’, a book I had studied as part of my Master’s dissertation.

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Sebald was a German writer and academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich just up the road from Orford. His books have haunted me the last 20 years.

My first contact with Sebald’s work was ‘The Emigrants’ which I picked up by chance in a local bookshop.

It appears to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. The first story starts with the author coming across an old man in the garden of a house he was seeking to rent a room in.

As this man Henry Selwyn narrates his story, it is clear that the Holocaust floats unspoken in the background starting with his family’s exodus from the cheder in a village near Grodno in Lithuania.

But there was something else I found deeply unsettling about it all on an all too personal level.

The Selwyn family’s entry point was Whitechapel, where my own forebears first lived when they also arrived in England in the 19th century.

They had been led to believe that they were now in New York when they disembarked, their ‘Promised City’. Frederich Stein, my great-great-grandfather came ashore in London under the same mistaken impression.

The young Henry was then put in for and passed the scholarship exams for Merchant Taylors’ school, which I was to do over half a century later. And I then followed the same route as the fictional Dr Selwyn went to Cambridge.

If that wasn’t strange enough, Werner Herzog’s ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ features in the story, a film I had literally watched the day before picking up Sebald’s book.

All coincidences I am sure (?) but deeply unsettling, even ‘uncanny’ in the original sense of the word. As is often the case, the German sounds spookier - ‘unheimlich’.

Of course how could I be anything other than hooked on the books of W.G. Sebald from then on.

A couple of years later I tackled ‘The Rings of Saturn’ which traces the author’s efforts to shake off a depression by means of a walk along the coast of East Anglia.

This was my gateway to the mysteries of Orford Ness.

He described the place as: “the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere’.

Which made me think that the walk didn’t really sort out his depression.

Sebald’s fascination with Orford Ness was a fascination with war and the scars it leaves behind, both physical and human.

The peninsula was a site of military research during both World Wars and the Cold War. It was where radar was invented and atomic weapons were dropped to test the reliability of their componentry.

I returned to the place more recently after a 15 year absence, now for the first time in my nature-awakened state.

The Ness was recognisably the same place. Framed by the same East Anglian sky, the skyline dominated by the town’s 12th century castle built for Henry II.

But that autumn day some things were different. Both because I had a better idea of what I was looking at in terms of nature. But also because the landscape had literally shifted in the intervening years.

It was now a joy to be able to recognise the different birds there.

I was aware of why the swallows were flying in the direction they were that autumn, out to sea rather than inland. Their African homelands and a perilous 8,000 mile journey to get there beckoned.

I could also see and appreciate why the National Trust had closed off much of the shingle beach since the last time I had visited.

Orford Ness holds 20% of Europe’s vegetated shingle in its ridges and valleys, deposited there over centuries. The specialised plants like Sea Thrift and Yellow-Horned Poppy that grow there offer food and shelter for a variety of wildlife including brown hares and Chinese water deer.

Thanks to the closure of the beach, a colony of seals had recently established themselves on the shingle. Previously human presence would have been too intrusive for them and their pups and they would have moved on elsewhere.

There was also another reason why the path no longer ran across the shingle.

Orford Lighthouse used to be one of East Anglia’s most iconic landmarks. For over 200 years it had provided a navigation marker for mariners as that section of the coast had always been hazardous. For example, in 1627, before the construction of the lighthouse, 32 ships had been wrecked there in one single storm.

Despite all the lives saved since, the lighthouse had to be demolished in 2020. The ever-shifting shingle on the Ness meant that if it wasn’t taken down, the lighthouse would fall into the North Sea.

The building I had climbed to the top of in 2009 was no longer there in 2024.

The remaining structures on Orford Ness, with chilling names like the Bomb Ballistic Building or the Black Beacon, now contain an interesting variety of installations and exhibitions.

As well as learning more about the 80 years of occupation for top secret research, there were more reflective pieces.

I found myself nodding in agreement to the display that compared Orford Ness to Tintern Abbey on the banks of the River Wye in the west of England, whose ruins became the symbol of picturesque decay for the Romantic poets of the late 18th century.

For William Wordsworth, for example, it stood in for the changes in English society at the time, from a bucolic Eden to a rapidly industrialising society.

Despite a very different landscape of a wooded river valley, in his poem ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth found the landscape could help “connect the landscape to the sky”, as it did for me that day.

But now Orford Ness was proceeding in the opposite direction.

Instead of marching on the path of ‘progress’ towards a bright future of modernity, here was a post-industrial falling away.

As Sebald would have it: “I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe”.

Here I felt humanity recognising that the time had come to voluntarily dismantle its structures and let nature do the rest.

For Sebald, the six pagodas on Orford Ness used for atomic weapons tests were where “the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold”.

Yes, here was a “terrain of melancholy” but for me not a place of depression, more a quiet joy that nature was taking back its rightful place.

Here was a place so toxic, literally and metaphorically, that was decontaminating itself with little or no help from us.

To go from being an atomic weapon site to an internationally important coastal nature reserve in less than fifty years was quite a feat.

Take bow, Nature!

I am not sure how much hope I hold out for humanity but my return visit to Orford Ness made me confident that the natural world will sort itself out in the end without us.

The probate process ran through 2024. During that time, my siblings and I kept their house in good order for when it could go on sale.

But the garden was another matter altogether.

It had always closer to kempt than unkempt but not overly so. My parents each did their bit. My mother kept on top of the weeds. My father was handy with the mower.

They both loved their garden.

In fact, in lockdown I’m not sure they didn’t just move out of the house and live there.

But with them both gone, that spring the garden let rip.

It was my job to get Robert the gardener in to ‘tame’ it. We agreed on a day in late April.

I decided to arrive early and I was so glad I did.

The garden’s unrestrained beauty left me speechless.

Flowers that they had carefully tended like lobelias and forget-me-nots had taken centre stage but others had cracked on without the usual adult supervision about.

The unmistakable waft of untended wild garlic in the front garden would stop passers-by in their tracks.

The family of foxes that lived underneath the decking of the shed clearly appreciated the extra cover it gave them judging from the detritus they had left by the door.

The spring after my parents had left this life, their garden had come into an over-abundance of it.

This was accidental rewilding in action.

Nature was stepping in to fill the void that their departure from life had created.

We had seen this same phenomenon during the first lockdown five years ago.

Mountain goats on the streets of Llandudno, wild boar in downtown Barcelona, coyotes in Central Park - nature was on the move in our absence and we all found it both amusing and moving. What happened in my parents’ garden was perhaps less spectacular but all the more poignant for me.

A few weeks later I had an encounter with accidental rewilding in a professional capacity.

I was on the Isle of Wight scouting a campsite for a client. It had been unoccupied for some time, just like my parents’ garden.

The ghosts of holidaymakers past were visible in the rows of trees and hedges that used to mark out the pitches. The serried ranks of tents and caravans had been replaced by thistles and molehills.

Nature was returning after the temporary incursion of humankind that had lasted just a handful of decades.

Accidental rewilding has not always been of a peaceful nature like this. ‘War wilding’ is a term that has been recently coined but it has been around since man first made war on man.

Ukraine is no stranger to the ecological benefits of man-made catastrophe. The radioactive exclusion zone created in 1986 by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is now two thirds tree covered and self seeding. It has recently been designated Europe’s third largest nature reserve.

The current conflict with Russia has seen the destruction of dams in the Ukraine by both sides for defensive and offensive purposes. The dynamiting of a dam on the Dnieper River was described by President Zelensky as “the largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades”. It certainly was a catastrophe for those who lived downstream of it.

However nearly two years on what was described as a war crime is now widely seen quite differently. The bed of the former reservoir is re-seeding itself with willows and the river has re-discovered its former wiggles and long-lost channels1.

The war zone most close to home for the English are the First World War battlefields of northern France2.

On the front line of the Somme in 1916, a Private Norman Ellison could not “recollect any spring that thrilled me more”. With “amazing suddenness” out of nowhere came “swallows, warblers and nightingales” seemingly oblivious to the death and destruction below their flight path:

One felt that man might destroy himself and his civilisation through the incredible stupidity of war, but the annual re-birth of nature would continue.

My own city London also knew a blossoming of biodiversity after the pummelling it took from the German Luftwaffe in the Second World War. It has been well documented how the rubble-strewn streets encouraged hitherto rare plants like rosebay willow-herb and birds like the black redstart to thrive3.

When I came to start writing about my discovery of nature here last year I was well aware that my parents’ deaths were a key motivation.

The title I gave to my writings (The Diary of an Accidental Rewilder) was a conscious riff on my part, both on the zeitgeist and on my fascination with post-apocalyptic landscapes.

But the evolution of their garden over the last year and the realisation that it will soon be in the hands of new owners has made me realise that ‘Accidental Rewilding’ is more than a catch-phrase to me now.

These photos of their garden, both with and without my parents, will be some of the important images I want to remember them by, now and for years to come.

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Six years ago I was profiled in the trade rag ‘Marketing Week’.

The headline wasn’t exactly flattering.

The journalist had picked over the bones of my CV and discerned a pattern.

That my timing had been off at nearly every place I had worked.

That definitely proved to be true of my first sallying-forth into the world of re-wilding.

And that was before I was even aware it was a thing.

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Let’s rewind the clock back to 2009.

I had successfully launched Feather Down Farm Days, a concept I had brought over from the Netherlands a few years earlier. Feather Down introduced ‘glamping’ (aka glamorous camping) to the chattering classes in the UK.

Feather Down’s take on a canvas version of a 19th century farmhouse struck a chord in the ‘shabby chic’ vibe of the early 21st century.

After a successful launch, the backers now wanted a spin off, the proverbial second album, based in the grounds of country houses rather than on farms. So I tramped round the UK looking for landowners keen to diversify their estates.

On my hit-list was the Knepp estate in Sussex. It looked like it would tick all sorts of boxes - close to London, a great-looking country house and oodles of lovely landscape.

The story of Knepp has since been documented in two fine books written by Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, the chatelains of Knepp.

The first was a bestseller that came out in 2019 telling the story of how they let their 1,400 hectares of unproductive farmland return to a state of nature.

The second book came out more recently as a ‘how-to’ guide to tackling a re-wilding project.

Oh, and there was also a docu-drama in 2024 which was also rather good.

However, back in 2009, the word ‘rewilding’ meant little to the proverbial ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’, myself included.

Charlie greeted me warmly at the gates of Knepp Castle that November afternoon. He was curious to find out more about the business of ‘glamping’ and I was there to see if he would let me site my tents in his backyard.

I jumped into a Land Rover with him and his estate manager and we drove for 30 minutes across waterlogged fields until we got to somewhere called ‘the Southern Block’.

As politely as only an Englishman can, I told him this was all very lovely (it was peeing with rain. It truly wasn’t lovely) but our glamping guests would want to be in view of the family ‘pile’, their home.

I had a wander and found the perfect spot, or so I thought.

It was the far side of a beautifully landscaped lake with a view of their early 19th century John Nash designed family home.

But that’s where we parted company.

Charlie was adamant that the tents should be situated in the heart of the land in the ‘Southern Block’. He said it would become a paradise for nature.

In my eyes it looked like a soggy wasteland that November afternoon and not terribly saleable to middle class families driving down from London. My solution compromised their privacy. So that was that.

15 years later, armed with a new-found passion for re-wilding and a modicum of knowledge about the subject, I returned to Knepp.

I have never been to the Serengeti or even a safari park for that matter but that spring day I realised I might not have to.

Here was an English version on my doorstep. I was in the midst of a glorious eco-system pulsing with life.

There were a series of platforms around the estate that you could clamber up onto.

From one I saw my first ever white stork, calmly minding its own business by the side of a pond.

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And from the next I was subjected to a sensory overload of birdsong.

The call of cuckoos to the left, turtle doves to the right and nightingales everywhere.

‘By Jove, I think they’ve pulled it off’, I whispered to myself.

All three of those species are becoming increasingly rare across the UK but they were all there and very much in earshot.

It’s sobering to think that less than a hundred years ago such a cacophony would have been normal in spring-time in our countryside.

Now we have to get ourselves to a handful of places in the UK to witness such a glorious symphony from nature.

And the glamping?

Five years after our meeting, Charlie had gone and set it up for himself. In the ‘Southern Block’ that I had turned my nose up on.

And it was a raging success.

Their shepherd’s huts, bell tents, yurts and tree houses are booked out months in advance during peak season.

And since 2024 there is an excellent cafe and restaurant, along with an art gallery and shop selling ‘rewilded meat’ from the estate.

I returned to what I had thought was the perfect spot for my concept 15 years earlier. The ‘bothy’ that I had earmarked for an honesty shop for the happy campers was now tumbling down. As I approached, a roe deer stepped out from the shadows.

At that moment, rather than kicking myself for what could have been one of the worst business decisions of my life, I felt quietly moved that wildlife had taken the bothy over as its home, rather than humans.

I went back to London a chastened but happy man.

A couple of months later Charlie Burrell and I caught up with each other in London. We were both marching under the banner of ‘Rewilding Britain’ at the Restore Nature Now demonstration.

We exchanged a few words and a wry smile at how things had worked out. I also met Isabella for the first time.

They are truly the king and queen of rewilding in England.

It was they who were on the cusp of the next big thing, not me.

They had the patience and guts to bet the farm (literally) on a concept that was unknown and unproven in Britain.

I for one am truly grateful that they turned me down and that their gamble paid off.