How curiosity killed the blues
Finding nature on Brixton's Wuthering Heights
After the summer I had allowed my mood to drop. There was no one thing behind it. Rather a combination of factors conspiring together.
The anti-social behaviour in the middle of Brixton had got worse than it had ever been. And calling it out had resulted in physical threats to my person.
For example, I had confronted a man openly urinating in front of M&S at nine o’clock in the morning in front families and shoppers. A slanging match between us was about to veer off into something worse before I decided to call it a day and pedal off.
The second factor I was aware of was that my parents’ house in west London could finally be put on the market. Nine months of probate had been a kind of phoney war. There is only so much admin you can immerse yourself in to distract you from the reality of loss. Their home of the last 40 years, a visible expression of their lives and personalities, would soon be someone else’s.
Finally, a diagnosis of pre-diabetes was a reminder that I was in the middle of the ‘sniper’s alley’ of late middle age and its attendant health conditions.
It was only at that point when I was feeling sluggish and down that I realised it had been a month since I had been out and about in nature, properly. It’s not like I had been stuck in doors all summer. But I had certainly forgotten to take notice of the living world around me.
I’ll never forget stumbling across a field of Kate Bush lookalikes recreating her 1978 ‘Wuthering Heights’ video
The most immediate thing I thought I could do to pull myself out of the malaise was to take myself off to my local park, Brockwell Park.
It used to be part of a rich man’s estate. It even has its own walled garden. Set on a hill there are fine views of the London skyline.
Like the rest of Brixton it is an eclectic melting pot that can veer from eccentricity to chaos.
The first time I visited Brockwell Park was over ten years ago for the annual free summer festival, the Lambeth Country Fair.
I’ll never forget stumbling across a field of Kate Bush lookalikes recreating her 1978 ‘Wuthering Heights’ video. They were flanked on one side by the dub-step stage and on the other by a display of medieval jousting.
Now as I stepped in through the gates of the park last September, I breathed in the open space, the skies, the trees not yet tipping over into autumn colours but not far off.
The fencing was still up around the wildflower meadow that had been sown that spring. It owed its existence to the same ‘Rewild London fund’ of the Mayor’s office that had brought beavers back to my birthplace in Ealing and was re-wriggling Yeading Brook in my childhood playground of ‘Streamside’1.
‘When do the fences come down?’ I asked myself. ‘When does the meadow get to be robust enough to thrive amidst all the park users and the dogs?’
I then moved on to the main pond of the park.
‘Why is that heron following that cormorant round and round?’ was my next thought.
‘Does the cormorant have a better knowledge of where the fish are than the heron does?’
A gulp of swallows shot overhead. No, I didn’t know that was the collective noun for them either.
‘I’ve never seen swallows in Brixton before. They are obviously off back to Africa now. I wonder where they spent the summer?’
It was then that I realised that one of the reasons I enjoy getting out in nature had been hidden to me till then.
The skies and the space and the fresh air are all great. In fact they are all more than great. But I love the way that my curiosity is awakened when I am out there.
Feeling a lot better, I booked in my next trip out the following week. It was further afield, back to the county of Essex where I had spent most of the lockdowns2.
Blue House Farm is the exotic name for some rewilded land on the banks of the River Crouch, curated by Essex Wildlife Trust.
It is now a favourite thanks to its proximity to North Fambridge station on the line out to the Dengie Peninsula (another fabulous name). I love it as it is as close as you can get to wilderness within an hour’s train ride of London.
It was still September, around harvest time, but there was nothing ‘all things bright and beautiful’ about the place. What was a gentle breeze in London felt like a force eight northerly on the Essex coast.
Flocks of linnets, siskins and meadow pipits were gathering and getting buffeted around in the wind.
Rooks, crows and jackdaws were having the time of their lives, wheeling and cawing up and round and down at the sea wall.
A murmuration of starlings were making their way across the meadow like a First World War creeping barrage, those at the back constantly on the move like a game of devil takes the hindmost.
And dozens and dozens of swallows were hitching a lift to Africa on the northerlies.
‘See you on your fly-by at Brockwell Park, I hope’, I called to them in the wind.
Just then the phone rang. I could barely hear it but I took the call as it was showing up as from my surgery. It was the doctor calling about another set of blood test results.
I know that if I had taken the call back at home I would have brooded and gone down rabbit holes about terms that I barely understood.
However out in the Essex wilderness I breezed it, literally.
In fact, to continue the puns, it was water off a duck’s back.
Nothing to worry about.
I’m not going to forget to do nature again in a hurry, however hostile the weather or whatever is weighing me down.
In fact I learnt that September that those are both good reasons to be getting out and about more in its midst.
Covered in my post ‘Rewilding my childhood’
Covered in my post ‘The only (fly) way is Essex’.
There’s the beginning of a useful guide in here Mark. About “The nearest wild places to big cities that can be easily got to on public transport.” I could contribute Hilbre Island and other places along the Dee and Mersey Estuaries, as well as the mud flats north of Southport.