How I got Covid, lost my parents and found nature

I started writing these entries in 2024 when it struck me just how much my world view had changed in a startlingly short period of time.

At the start of 2020 I was hard pushed to identify any birds beyond a robin or a blackbird.

A plant was a weed if it wasn’t brightly coloured and in a flower bed.

Back then a landscape was something I had just driven, ridden or run through at speed.

Four years later and I can show some prowess with birds from just a snatch of song emerging from a hedgerow.

I am now a ‘guerrilla gardener’ actively sowing wildflowers in unexpected locations.

Nature is somewhere I find peace and a modicum of hope.

There is not an agreed definition of ‘re-wilding’. In fact it is highly disputed territory. But in my mind it is about letting nature do its own thing to one degree or other.

And therein lies an antidote to the doom and gloom of the climate crisis for me.

Please don’t turn to me for advice or wisdom on the subject of re-wilding. I am at the amateur end of that spectrum.

Its practitioners write in deadly earnest on the topic but for me it’s a hobby, albeit one that I am devoting an increasingly large chunk of my time and savings to.

I also realised as I started writing these entries that I am writing out of grief.

No, not the grieving for the nature that we’ve lost. I’ve taken to this too recently to notice that. Although I’m sure I soon will.

Many of the places I describe are within walking distance of the houses in the suburbs of north-west London that my parents brought us up in.

They both died within months of each other in 2023 after long and happy lives.

I believe I am celebrating them as much as I am celebrating re-wilding when I write here.

As you will read, this is all down to the COVID pandemic and the twists and turns of fate it brought along for me.

That’s why I describe myself as a rewilder but an accidental one.

It easily might never have happened to me. But if it can happen to me, then it can happen to you.