Chapter One

July and there is already less birdsong in the woods, the birds have coupled and reared their offspring into an uncharming adolescence of hopping around, not flightless but almost, sometimes landing in the mouth of a passing dog, leaving the dog dumbstruck at its own hunter abilities. July, less birdsong, it's the height of summer yet you know time has turned, you are moving away from it again, not toward it, you missed it again, you didn't catch redemption, and the knowledge churns up a terrible feeling of loss in you, and the worst is when you tell yourself, I missed it again, I missed redemption, redemption will never come, and the reply you hear yourself give is it would, if only you were - what? clever? talented? tuned-in? relaxed? meditative? worthy? - if only you were something enough to catch it. To have caught it.

They have ruined my little woods, they've cut down trees and turned up the forest floor and are creating yet another footpath through it. I can't fathom why, the wood was already enclosed by footpaths, the triangle formed by them could be walked briskly in fifteen minutes, and there were little paths through it anyway, and the footpath they are building seems the width of a country highway. I love paths, I love finding old paths in woods, paths that used to take people from somewhere they were to somewhere they needed to go, or wanted to go. You can see them in the forest floor, even when the undergrowth has returned there's an indentation, a particular look that you can recognise if you've seen it before.

None of these woods are a forest, of course, they hardly even merit the title "woods". Anyone read Günter Grass's The Rat? I read it a good few years ago, while still in Wales, when my children were small, or maybe I only had the one, I can't remember. I do remember liking it profoundly (and here I must confess I haven't read The Tin Drum, I haven't seen the film (fell asleep to it very recently, but that's no comment on the film really - I have a tendency to sleep to films), I didn't even see the theatre adaptation in Helsinki this spring which was highly praised and which I really did mean to see, the woman playing the lead was said to be astounding. So there's a hole in my well-readedness you could punch your fist through, but at least I'm honest about it), although when I looked it up online now, most reviewers called it, basically, a "boring jeremiad". Good word, jeremiad. Anyway - in The Rat, the characters from the Grimm fairy tales are organising some sort of effort to save the world because the forests are dying, and with the forests, the fairy tales will too, because if there are no forests big enough for a child to get lost in, the fairy tales will die.

I want a forest big enough to get lost in, but my current world doesn't have any, even in my countryside the forests are little patches in between agricultural land, and that is not the same, that is wilderness lost and tamed, I want it the other way round, if anything, I want the agricultural land as little side-remarks in the margins of the forest, nestling in the nook of a wood, comfortable and necessary yet clearly secondary to the uncultivated wilderness. My childhood summers were spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland, the forest went from shore to shore save the odd rocky outcrop which usually faces the open sea, and the fields were as I described them a sentence or so ago, patches between the wilderness, oats and potato, mostly, although from photographs taken from an aerial survey aeroplane in the 1930s you could tell the amount of cultivated land had been much greater then, people on the islands were fishing folk with self-sufficiency farms, and each patch of land flat enough to be ploughed had been taken into use. There was a tale from the war years of how the islanders heard someone speaking Russian in the woods, and there was panic, no men around, just the women and children and maybe some old folks, but nothing came of it, no-one knows if it was the Desantnik, the parachute troops, or if it was a case of nerves strung too high, for too long, which made someone hear things which weren't really there.

This post is called "Chapter One" because a friend I've known for a long time said just recently that I should write my autobiography. Bless him, but I hope this post shows conclusively why it isn't a possibility, I'm way too rambling. Anyhow, this post is dedicated to you, my dear friend The Elder. Petite pomme, as we say.