Night air moves in the spaces between the trees. Moths make dusty circles about the lamps. I look down and see each pale blade of grass casts two separate shadows from the two nearest lamps, and so do I, and in the distance comes the collapsing echo of a moving train and somewhere closer a dog barks twice and there’s broken glass by the path and

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though

I love it because of all the places I know in England, it feels to me the wildest. It’s not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness. It’s rich with the sense of an alternative countryside history; not just the grand, leisured dreams of landed estates, but a

It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’ I was as bewildered as a child. ‘What should I do?’

‘Excuse me? Is that a goshawk?’ He’s in his forties, with glasses. A thickset, cheerful man holding a wriggling toddler. ‘Hang on, Tom,’ he says. ‘We’re going to get an ice-cream. I just want to talk to this lady for a second.’ I grin. I know how it feels to hold onto a creature who wants to be somewhere else. And then my heart falters, just a

SOMETIMES WHEN LIGHT dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its

deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.