I think it stopped raining in April, I hesitate because I’m not sure if I am making it up, but the back end seemed to be fine weather. My journal tells me that dog walking has been in glorious sunshine and blue skies. It makes such a difference, the spirits lifting along with the clouds. The Magpies have been busy, but also attracting attention from Crows, I’m hoping nothing devastating hapens. My bird watching is progressing. I still cannot see the birds I can hear, a friend pointed me to the Merlin ID app that is fantastic, it listens then tells me what birds are singing, I still cannot see them but hearing and knowing is half the battle. When I see a bird it is such a thrill, and getting home to look it up in my book and tick it off is very exciting. I won’t be resorting to what I believe is called twitching, that has always had connotations of another countryside activity I have been told about. And I no longer have a car, anyway. Of course I am going to need more books, a special coat, probably one of those fancy shoulder bags you see in Country Living adverts, wellies might be good too, and another Barbour. Keep it simple.

We had a week in Norfolk at the end of the month, a first time for me. A cottage just outside Cromer, a National Trust forest and country estate literally over the road, gave us some wonderful walking. I like walking across agricultural land, fields of crops, sure there is the smell of chemicals at certain times, but on balance I find it very interesting. We drove through Lincolnshire to Norfolk, its obviously planting time, the activity was tremendous. Lincolnshire has vast flat lands, beautifully ploughed fields, piles of wooden crates stacked at the field edge, tractors pulling machinery all ways along the roads. Norfolk has fine fields, a lovely walk along hedgerows, long vistas over the sandy soil all neat and shaped wonderfully, the furrows drawing geometrical diagrams over the landscape. Norfolk has woodlands too, and tiny villages and hamlets with old churches and old ways connecting each one. We walked to the county top, parking close by, then ascending the three metres until we reached the tall flagpole on Beacon Hill fifty metres away. The view out to sea was wonderful. The crashing noise for the USAF fighters practising dog fights over Cromer not so great. In the woodlands there were some fantastic old trees with intricate lattice work bark. Many of the tall trees were felled, some a hundred feet or more, I guess from the storm of 1987, the hurricane that was never going to happen. I think we will go back and explore more, may even join the National Trust, wear that Barbour and some Hunter wellies.

American strip cartoon, Calvin and Hobbs

In April I celebrated another year of sobriety, this my thirty-sixth. I work a total abstinence model, neither drinking nor eating alcohol.

I drank for twelve years, finally stopping after a two week blackout, having interacted with the world but having no cognisance at the time or recollection after. I knew if I was to have any future, including staying alive, drink was not the way. It was one of those singular moments in life where I had the clarity to take the path signposted ‘Hard.’

Most addiction recovery methods use the twelve step programme, devised by Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s, as a foundation. The principles are simple; acceptance, understanding, humility, and gratitude. For many, a belief in a god is central, and for those like me who do not believe in a god, those principles form a framework for living. Being with like-minded people, having that common goal of ending the day well is more than just not drinking, though I cross that red line and I’m unlikely to make it back, it’s also about learning to live.

I was twenty-eight when I put alcohol down, but it took a few years before I began living. My old map was poor, prone to wrong turns, lots of pathways missing, the topography unlike anything on the ground. Mapping a different way to live destabilised the old connections in my brain, my mind resisting the uncertain ground of the new.

I was a high functioning active and recovering alcoholic. As often is the case in my type, while I perfected not drinking, all those hours gained not sitting in a pub, my career took off, money rolled in, materialism filled the holes, all that masking my inability to deal with life. I was dependent on how I thought people saw me, overflowing with impostor syndrome, and terrified of screwing up. I ignored my own invalidation on a daily basis. The world look like a battlefield, and I was sure I would lose. They were grim years, not drinking and not changing is one hell of a tap-dance.

Accepting how I saw the world was not the reality, whatever that reality is, for there can never be a reality, it being a construct of my mind, experience and bias, was the beginning of a new way of living. Coupling that with the concept of impermanence, that nothing will stay the same, helped me accept that life is not a straight line, people come and go, places change, my own perspective changes with age and experience and circumstance. This led to letting go of the past and future and, when my asbestosis came along, learning to live in this very moment, giving my full attention to hitting the K in the word key. It has simplified life, the rumination has gone, the desire to change the past or avoid the fantasy of the future has waned.

It took a long time to understand that what is important is the moment, people. That mistakes happen and that when they do it isn’t the foundation of a lifetime. That some people and places are toxic and being in such an orbit is not good for me. I often wondered why I never liked going to a function or gathering, it’s because I don’t like gatherings of people, in fact, I realised I’m not a people person and having accepted that, life became a whole lot easier.

The word and concept of humility gets a hard time, people convert it to being humble, and that to being weak; here is a quick google search definition ‘the quality of having a modest or low view of one’s importance.’ That is not how I understand it. For me, humility is having the ability to see and more importantly say, how things are, from the perspective of my understanding of reality. Take when someone pays me a compliment; my reply used to be, that I was lucky, or someone else was better, some way of diminishing the compliment. In reality what I was doing was fishing for more compliments. It took a friend to tell me I was calling them a liar when I refuted a compliment, for me to realise what was happening. Having the courage to say, ‘yes, that was good, I did a good job of that, I was pleased that went well, glad you appreciated the effort,’ and not be bragging, just simply stating the thing as it is, is humility. Similarly, holding the hands up and saying, ‘I screwed up big time, I don’t think you should ask me to do that again, I made a real hash of that, I need to put a lot more work into that,’ not only requires some courage, but it also needs a good degree of honest self-reflection, and acceptance. It certainly makes life a lot easier than trying to make excuses or avoid responsibility.

Probably the most important life skill is gratitude. It leads to so many riches in life, so much joy, the precious opportunity to appreciate the moment and people. I have a lot to be grateful for in my own life, Alison, good friends, a life full of interesting moments. I am extremely fortunate. I like to give back whether that is a listening ear to someone struggling to stop drinking or volunteering my time to some cause like picking litter off the street, or simply making sure Alison has a good day. All of this began by deciding not to pick up that first drink.

These four principles form the weft and weave of my life today. It is a fine cloth with few ruffles in the surface and enough imperfection in the pattern to make it worth studying more.

We have eaten so well this month. Alison once again laying out wonderful meals. Potato curry, shredded cabbage with carrot and ginger. Bunny Chow, new to me, from Meera Sodha, Chickpea, spinach, pepper, onion and spices, in a warm crispy cob. Roasted turmeric cauliflower, burnt red pepper, spicy chilli and baby tomato sauce. We dressed the table with tableware from Jars Ceramists, David Mellor, Alison Counsell, ate while we talked and listened to Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Bjork, in the background.

I decided to make April a month of nature reading in honour of spring, choosing eight books, some read before, some new. I didn’t manage the full eight, Richard Powers, The Overstory, running into the first week of May.

I began with The South Country by Edward Thomas. What a wonderful elegiac account of a journey across the south of England in a time now lost, a time that was already changing. Thomas recounts the farms being lost to development, the tramps working their routes, their settling places, and their kindness. The buying of breakfast at a farmhouse, the quiet villages and lanes, and the flowers of the hedgerows. It is wonderful. More so when you know of his own travails and what he was walking to. Next up was new to me, one of those books that everyone knows, though I suspect a smaller number have read on this side of the Atlantic. The first book from an American author, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I had little expectation, adding it to my TBR pile because everyone raved about it. I was not disappointed. In the book, Abbey records his time as a ranger in the Arches National Monument (Park) near the town of Moab in Utah. You get the taste and feel of the heat of this desert landscape, the edging forward of civilisation, the roads being pushed further into the wilderness for easier access by tourists, the litter. But also, the wildlife, the rocks, the flora that springs from nowhere after rain. Abbey’s satisfaction of his solitary life, he drives into the ranger station once a week for supplies, drinks in a bar, rushes to leave when the people, noise, and life become too much, and the solitary nature of the desert pulls him back. The book is well written, and easy read, the pages skip by, always a good sign. Next came another American and another classic text of the nature- environmental genre, Silent Spring, and Lost Woods by Rachel Carson. Silent Spring became and is a cornerstone of environmentalism, one of the first books to poke a stick at big corporate profiteering, who fought hard to denounce Carson’s work. It is a hard read, for me at least, lots of figures and technical words, lots of acronyms. I guess, because of the nature of the beast, that’s the reason that things seem to get repeated, after a few chapters I found myself getting tired of the same argument, the same problems. That sounds ungrateful, I don’t mean it to be, after all the book is over sixty years old, and it was groundbreaking when released. Lost Woods is an anthology of Carson’s writing, letters, essays, speeches. It gives a rounded view of her life, work, and the hostility she stood against from corporate and government agencies. The poignant moments when she accepts her illness and coming death are inspiring, and saddening. I thought I would stay in America and take up another cornerstone of the nature-environmental genre. The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry. This is another anthology of journal entries, speeches, writings and essays from the earliest times of Berry’s writing career into the new century. His farm features large, as does his old time working practices, the use of horses to plough, planting trees to stabilise soil, famously no computer or typewriter. His thoughts on what we as a race are doing to the land, the greed of corporate farming, the ownership of seed, the chemicals used, all of it working hand in hand, the farmer having to take what is allowed. It is a sustained and important argument and has made Berry a focal point of the environmental movement. Perhaps it is the translation across the Atlantic, maybe its just me, but there is another side that did not sit well. The use of the ‘N’ word, even in historical terms, the seemingly misogynistic view of work and responsibilities, his married partner, ‘The Wife’ a possessive term that now grates for me, who would type up his handwritten work, the use of motor transport to visit the next farm a few miles up the road, all of this nudges the hick image out of the frame, and I’m unsure what I am left with in the person. Is it a case of do as I say not as I do? Back to England and another time of change when horses left the farm and tractors took over the work. The Worm Forgives The Plough by John Stewart Collis seemed to be the English version of The World-Ending Fire, and likewise reflected mirror images of the period, predominantly world war two. Collis a former military man opts for field work rather than joining up. He becomes a farm labourer, learning the job from farmers and farm hands, working alongside a range of characters. It is almost like a social experiment, Collis for the upper classes, mixing with the working class rural man. His writing edges towards patronising at times, others he is on awe of. His intellect gets in the way, his great find of a farm hand who loves literature gives his days meaning and some welcome conversation. He does learn and does not shy away from the work. The second part of the book is a record of his time restoring a woodland, the skills he learned, the people he met. But more so the woodland nature and wildlife takes centre-stage, and it is here that I get the full appreciation of Collis’s skill in observation and beautiful writing. This makes the book worthwhile and urges me out into the woodlands of home to see what Collis sees. Finally, Claxton by Mark Cocker nicely timed to be read just up the road from the village. It is a lovely read, think J. A. Baker, think walking out of the house for a few hours on a cold winter day to watch waterfowl. This book made me want to go out and look. Look at birds, at hedgerows, at trees, and record my thoughts and feelings, what I saw. Then go back a few days later and look again. I have my magpies in the back garden that I watch several times a day, logging in my mind their comings and goings, hoping for their young family, lifting with joy when I see them. A wonderful book, an east read, the text evocative of how to be in nature.