During the years I spent in the hills, I kept a journal. It is erratic, I wrote it only when the mood took me, and there are long gaps, as it never crossed my mind that I might one day want to make use of those notes. When I read my notebooks now I can see a dramatic change taking place from beginning to end. For the first year, it is a fairly straightforward diary, an account of where I went, what I did, and how I felt. By the second year it is strictly a nature journaclass="underline" a record of my sightings and perhaps some notes on the weather. And by the third year it is virtually an almanac: arrival dates for spring and autumn migrants; nesting records; perhaps interspersed with an occasional piece of prose capturing a fragmentary moment, say a description of the flight of a single bird. I have disappeared entirely from my own narrative; my ego has dissolved into the mist. I came to the hills to find myself, and ended up losing myself instead. And that was immeasurably better.
I live in town in England now. I see foxes here almost every night, far more than I ever saw in Wales. There are sparrowhawks aplenty here too — for those who care to look — dashing along the hedgerows between people’s gardens, circling over the parks in their display flights. And from my window I can just make out the peregrine eyrie at the top of a tall tower block. But my life here is very different; sometimes I feel that I have not lived a single life but a whole series of quite distinct lives, perhaps because the change from one lifestyle to another has not been a gradual progression but the result of a snap decision here, a sudden switching of tracks there.
I try to visit the cottage as often as I can, engineering my life so that at least once or twice a year I can make it to Penlan alone for a while. Of course this is a very different experience from that of the years when I had no other life, in the same way that a short package holiday is different from the open-ended travels of my youth, when I just kept going, on and on, until I ran out of money, or health, or inclination. But there is a curious thing that happens to me on these visits. For the first hour or two, I race around, checking the slates on the roof, bringing in firewood and lighting the fire, filling the lamps, unpacking the food I have brought, making up my bed. And then at some point I sit down in the old wicker armchair in front of the log fire, put my feet up and forget myself. It is as if there is a switch in my mind that takes me back in time. All the intervening years just fall away and are gone, and it is as though I had never left.
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First published 2011
Copyright © Neil Ansell, 2011
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Endpaper illustration by Andrew Farmer
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96133-0