On the second day of being practically snowed-in at home in our village in West Berkshire, I decided it was time to get out and get some fresh air. We have a 'green block' walk of about two and a half miles which we do from our house fairly regularly. It is all on tarmac lanes and which form a loop around wooded farmland. The Berkshire/Hampshire border bisects the circuit so half of the walk is in each county. Snow was laying about 3 inches deep, with some drifting.
Keeping a note in my sketchbook of the bird species observed as I walked, I began thinking about something I'd read last night by McKenzie Wark, in his introduction to The Beach Beneath the Street: the everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International:
"We are bored of this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don't buy it. It's time to start scheming on how to leave this century."
(Nuthatch calling.)
This was backed up this morning in a report by Oxfam reported on Radio 4. They had calculated that the richest one hundred people in the world could resolve world poverty four-times over from their personal wealth. What on earth that could mean in practice is another issue - but for how much longer will the poor majority continue to tolerate the glaring injustice of the accumulative Capitalist system?
(Sparrowhawk over. Flying like an arrow into a row of trees across the snowy field. The lattice pattern of tree-scattered hedgerows describe the contours of the fields, receding in aerial perspective towards the horizon.)
I remember Jurgen Moltmann said something interestingly related to this train of thought in his interview in Third Way Magazine last year:
"The Occupy Movement is a bourgeois youth movement but where we are really suffering is in Africa and Asia - if you want to learn the power of hope, go to these miserable quarters of humankind. The rich don't have hope, they have only anxiety because they have something to lose, but those who have nothing to lose but their chains, as Marx said once, have real hope in an alternative future.
"Today I think we need a movement to liberate nature from suffering and violence and injustice. I think humankind will learn either through insight or through catastrophe, and I think most of the people in the First World are waiting for the next catastrophe".
(Time to stop and make a quick sketch of the snow-covered field and the tree-line - looking from Berkshire across to Hampshire. Behind me, children and youths with sledges are playing on the steep hill into a dip beyond which is the village. A flock of seven Fieldfares overhead; handsome winter thrushes)
(A Red Kite approaching at tree-top level, hanging majestically on the air, it's wings tilting and adjusting constantly - the forked-tail twisting like a rudder, the orange-tan and grey patterns of its plumage clear in my Leica Ultravid binoculars.)
We were talking about this in the run up to the end of 2012, when some cranky new-agers and other suggestible people thought the end of the world might be about to dawn. It seems easier, we concluded, for people to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of the Capitalist economic-system. But it will end and we need to be imagining a better future than the miserable barbarism that is threatened by those who have too much to lose.
(29 bird species spotted on a walk of about an hour and a half - the snow is falling again, with a cold wind making it slightly too uncomfortable to make any more sketches).
While I have admiration for the psychogeographic urbanism of Laura Oldfield Ford; her reflection on edge-places and the built environment in decline, I have to admit that I am a country-dweller; that most unfashionable sub-species - a villager! Although I love the excitement of the city, taking a flaneur's perambulation around Southwark, or sharing a few pints of Pride in the pub, the natural environment excites me more. Not that our countryside is really 'natural', admittedly, since we have a man-made/managed and farmed environment in almost all parts of England. Even so it has its own edge-places and habitats in decline. Farming and its impact on the landscape is an interesting area for political and social investigation. Naturally conservative and reactionary, the lifestyle and issues of the farming and countryside communities appear to be outside the scope of contemporary art. Is this really the case and if so, why is this? The idea of 'rural idyll' is an Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century delusion. Life in the country was always hard and bitter for the majority, riven as it is with inequality and injustice in the distribution of resources. Nonetheless, a sense of well-being and tranquility it to be found by pulling-on walking boots, taking a pair of binoculars and watching a winter-flock of finches feeding on a stubble field - or up on The Berkshire Downs, seeing an over-wintering Short-eared Owl scudding along the grassy tops of The Ridgeway.
And so it was that I found the opportunity this morning to get out from my studio and onto the Winnall Moors wildlife reserve, on the western edge of the South Downs National Park. A small area of reedbeds and wet woodland beside the River Itchen, I see Winnall Moors daily just outside my studio window and on a clear, bright morning such as today's, it calls to me.
With diffused sunlight shining through the bare branches of the willows and alders, the habitat required nothing of me other than to be left as I found it.
It was very cold out, just above freezing, and I sketched with un-gloved fingers for as long as I could bear it. A Long-tailed Tit flitted across the tree-line and, as expected, was soon followed by seven or eight of its friends and family.
The 'stuck-pig squeal' of a Water Rail pierced the reed bed; and on artificial board-walks, chicken-wired to avoid slips (and insurance claims), a lone jogger puffed past, exhaling rhythmically, in time with his iPod.
Across the Itchen, people were at work on the Winnall Trading Estate, Lesser Black-backed Gulls perched in their rooftops.
Leaving the wildlife reserve at the northern end, my route crossed the footbridge to the playing fields, where dog-walkers were emptying their pets. Beyond the rugby pitches, the St Swithun's Way leads north beside a stream towards 'The Worthys' and Itchen Abbass. This is the first stage of the ancient pilgimage route from Winchester to Canterbury; a walk I completed last spring (see my book here!)
In the summer this stream is a good place to see Water Voles doggy-paddling across the water, their round noses poking up for air. They were probably cosy and asleep in their burrows this morning. Two Chiffchaffs were flitting silently among branches at the water's edge. Normally thought of as a herald of spring,with their slap-dash, chiff-chaff song, these neat little birds are now wintering in Britain in increasing numbers.
Further along the path, the scene opens out to the right across the wetland and grazing land of the reserve.
Two Little Egrets were fishing the streams across the northern end of Winnall Moors, and a flock of Lapwing jumbled across the sky. The path reached farmland on the left, where a hedgerow was filled with brilliantly-coloured Yellowhammers, reflecting the sunshine. By this time my body indicated it was time to return to civilisation (or at least a lavatory) and so I turned and made my way back towards the studio. I had seen only 34 bird species (obvious absences including Reed Bunting, Starling and House Sparrow) but it had been an ideal morning for being outdoors with sketchpad and binoculars.
