I’m lying, as you do, on the pavement.
It’s comfortable enough, as pavements go. I’ve managed, for once, to get myself into a position – lying on my right side, propped up on one elbow – that doesn’t have parts of my body screaming in protest.
This isn’t a random act. I’m not given, when walking down the street, to plonking myself down willy-nilly with a cheery ‘Time for a nap!’, regardless of the needs of my fellow pedestrians. I do have a reason.
The pavement in question is on the street corner opposite our house in South London. It’s the kind of corner you might find in any town or city. It’s deeper than many pavements because of the postbox, and the Victorian stone drinking fountain set back a few feet from the road. But otherwise it’s normal enough. The road is main-ish, and when the traffic lights at the top turn green, there’s a steady stream of cars and bikes and buses trundling down the hill, but sometimes, just for a minute, all is peaceful and you can hear the soft throatiness of a wood pigeon or the merry tinkling of a goldfinch above the background London hum.
Behind is a large vacant lot, ripe for development but somehow neglected, closed off with an untidy wooden hoarding that leans drunkenly inwards – much complained about by the locals, occasionally daubed with graffiti. Every so often someone dumps an old sofa or a wonky IKEA bookcase or a broken TV here. It’s that kind of corner. Despite the reassuring presence of a few mature trees, it’s a nondescript place – plain, unwelcoming, not an invitation to linger.
Earlier this year the council hatched a scheme to spruce it up a bit, the kind of scheme – increasingly common – that gives one a shred of hope for humankind. A group of people had had enough of squalor, and pulled together to create a little nature oasis, something to brighten up the neighbourhood.
This corner is a special place for us, not just because it’s local, but because my wife designed it. Some well-placed planters, a few raised flagstones, all imaginatively planted – instant regeneration on a small scale. The kind of thing that makes a difference. Now, when you pop out to post a letter, you can say hello to Verbena bonariensis, Stipa gigantea and Linaria purpurea rather than a scattering of friedchicken cartons, empty cans of Stella, and an inexplicable shoe.
On this occasion I have, as it happens, popped out to post a letter, and as always I take a moment to check on the plants, to see how they’re doing. Someone has used the low planter by the fountain as a bench again, gently squashing the ivy. Perhaps it’s time for a handcrafted sign along the lines of one I saw a couple of weeks earlier in another part of town, a piece of A4 in a plastic sleeve, lovingly decorated in large, childish lettering: ‘PLEAS do not sit here it is NOT A BENSH’.
I cross the road, and my eye is caught by a movement. A fluttering, scattery movement, as of one not quite in control but going there anyway. As of, in fact, a butterfly.
I trace its skeetering path, and watch as it comes to rest on one of the plants. A year ago, it would have flown on, might not even have been lured to this corner. Today it’s stopped for a rest and a drink. It settles on a flower, looking set for the medium haul. A motionless butterfly is always worth closer examination. In flight they’re eye-catching but often frustratingly transient, flitting away on apparently random zigging paths, and usually out of my sight within a couple of seconds. But when they settle, it’s nice to move in for a closer look.
And that’s when I lie down on the pavement. Because, you know, why not?
I manage to do so without casting my shadow over it and making it fly away. So far so good. I inch closer – and to hell with my trousers, they can always be washed – until I’m no more than two feet from it. It stays put. I feel trust has been established.
It is, to my eyes, a thing of transcendent and eye-catching beauty. In flight, a delicate wisp of ultramarine, insubstantial-looking, vulnerable to the merest puff of wind; and then, settling on a purple flower whose name I don’t know, it’s transformed, a delicate patchwork of white and black spots on a soft beige background with orange teardrops at the wing edge, the only hint of blue a silvery tinge at the base of the underwing. Fine, intricate, fascinating.
The kind of thing, in fact, you might lie down on a pavement for.
I don’t know about butterflies.
That’s a quarter of a lie. I didn’t know anything at all about butterflies (cabbage white, umm, that’s it) until the resurgence of my interest in birdwatching a few years ago. A scant grasp of butterfly identification came along with it, almost as collateral – birds go quiet in July and August, just when butterflies are at their peak, so it’s a natural progression. Now I can recognise a few species almost unfailingly (brimstone, orange tip, comma, peacock, speckled wood, meadow brown), and some with a bit of help from a field guide, as long as they sit nice and still, which they don’t. But whole swathes of them remain mysterious, especially those orange and black masters of disguise, the fritillary family, damn their fluttery wings.
This one, though, I know. It’s a common blue. Or, so my field guide tells me, Polyommatus icarus. The male of the species. Widespread in the British Isles, in flight from May to September.
That word ‘common’ doesn’t do it justice. It dismisses it as something nondescript, unimportant, not really worthy of attention. But here it is in front of me, transfixing me with its delicate charms.
I become aware of a movement, and look up. A small girl, four or five, running up the hill towards me. Behind her, a man – presumably her father – making slower progress. Phone out, head down, obviously trusting to peripheral vision that everything’s fine and that his daughter’s not going to die a grisly death under the wheels of a truck.
The girl stops a few feet away from me, perplexed. And now the man looks up from the screen, takes in the situation, and calls across, at the same time veering away from me to turn the corner. He beckons to her.
‘Come on, poppet.’
I can’t blame him. A middle-aged man lying on the pavement is very much the kind of thing you might want to keep your daughter away from.
But it seems a shame. What I really want to do is call over, summon both of them across so they can share this everyday miracle, the casual and phenomenal beauty of a common thing, so easily overlooked.
‘Look at this. Isn’t it beautiful?’
It overtakes me sometimes, this urge to share. There’s nobody quite so zealous as the recent convert, after all. At times I find myself fired with an almost embarrassing missionary zeal, enthused by a mundane and passing spectacle. I see a feral pigeon execute a particularly impressive landing, or a silver birch with finely coiled peeling bark, or a dragonfly just being a dragonfly, and part of me wants to yell, ‘Look at this, everyone. LOOK AT THIS!’
But no matter how enthralled I am by the butterfly, I am also aware of how strange I must look. So I stay silent, restrained by a self-consciousness of which I’m slightly ashamed, and off they go, the girl, pleasingly old-fashioned, skipping along the pavement, the man, inevitably modern, buried once more in his phone. After a few seconds the butterfly flits off anyway, and I go home for a coffee, and it’s only an hour later that I realise I forgot to post the letter.
They stay in my head. The girl, the man, the butterfly. Something about the juxtaposition sticks: my extreme enthusiasm, the girl’s curiosity, phone guy’s obliviousness. Three levels of engagement.
I remember the moment with mild regret. Imagine I had called them over. What was the worst that could have happened? He might have ignored me completely; he might have come across, looked at the butterfly with polite interest, nodded a bit, said, ‘Oh yes’, then made an excuse and left, forgetting about the incident almost immediately. But maybe, just maybe, the little girl might have remembered it, noticed the next butterfly, and the next one, and an interest would have been seeded.
And in any case, it would have been nice to show it to them. As they were there and everything. It really was startlingly beautiful.
Not that I would have had anything profound to say beyond ‘Look at this gorgeous butterfly.’ As I say, I don’t know about butterflies. I am, truth be told, a nature-watching Johnny-come-lately. Ten years ago I was like phone guy, head down, looking at the natural world, if at all, through unseeing eyes. But now I’m the man in the park staring through binoculars, examining the lichen on the tree trunk, pointing at the swifts as they re-enact Top Gun above my head.
Something in me shifted in that time, something fundamental. Decades had passed between my birdwatching-obsessed childhood and the resurgence of interest in my late forties – fallow decades during which the natural world more or less passed me by.
It’s not quite true to say I was blind to it all. I didn’t walk around with a cardboard box on my head, oblivious to the natural world around me. But nor did it engage my attention in anything but a cursory way. Yes, I enjoyed going for walks in the countryside – particularly if there was a pub or restaurant at the end – and yes, I was aware of wildlife if it thrust itself upon me: rutting deer in Richmond Park; an urban fox, late at night, trotting along the road as if it owned it; the wren that flew in through the kitchen window that time. But I would no more have gone to a wildlife reserve than I would have danced a merengue wearing an Eeyore onesie while eating a tub of desiccated coconut.* It simply didn’t occur to me that this would be a worthwhile thing to do.
But the interest, seeded during a childhood in a small village in Oxfordshire, was merely dormant. And sometimes things sneak up on you. As middle age exerted its flabby grip, I found myself, almost without realising it, noticing birds again. And not just noticing them but reading about them and relishing them and going out of my way to find them. And before I knew it, they possessed me utterly, consuming more time and energy than many people would consider necessary.
I wrote a book about it, a description of one year in the grip of this obsession. Some people, I think, assumed it was a passing thing, a convenient peg for a humorous book about being a middle-aged man, and that having written it I would return to some semblance of normality, whatever that means. But no. It was just the beginning.
If I describe myself as a birder, then that’s because birds have been the primary focus of my nature-watching activities. But they can’t exist in isolation. It struck me soon enough that there was a certain irony in the disconnect between my depthy knowledge of a bird – its scientific name, size, plumage details, distribution, favoured habitats, migration patterns, nesting habits, diet, clutch size, and even its name in Finnish – and the graphene-thin extent of my knowledge of the tree it was perched on. And almost everything else, for that matter. It was all about the birds. The other stuff – the trees, flowers, butterflies, lichens, otters, moths, foxes, fungi, hares, lizards, frogs, grasses, dolphins, bats, weasels, arachnids, fish, bees, beetles, seals, dragonflies, mosses, voles and ladybirds – well, they were lovely, of course, but they weren’t birds, were they? I couldn’t get obsessed by them.
Or could I?
It turns out I could.
One thing leads to another, and now, almost without realising it, I’ve accumulated a selection of field guides. Guides to wildlife in general, guides to UK butterflies* and moths,† guides to trees, wild flowers, insects and much more; where to see them, how to watch them, what they do, how and when and why they do it.
Going out to be in nature is now an unbreakable habit, a way to nourish body, mind and soul all at once. And nearly everywhere I go there are other people, each experiencing nature in their own way. Birders, ramblers, joggers, cyclists; dog-walkers, gardeners, photographers; loving couples, grumpy singles, nature groups, families; kite-flyers, frisbee-flingers, den-builders, grass-loungers; young whippersnappers, old farts, middle-aged ne’er-do-wells; millennials, boomers, generation X-ers, generation Y-ers, generation somewherein-betweeners; experts, beginners, specialists, all-rounders, or just people out for a stroll in the sun.
A lot of them don’t realise they’re experiencing nature, of course. They don’t tell their partners, ‘Just off out to experience nature, darling. Back in ten.’ No, they’ve just popped out to the corner shop or are on their way to work or meeting Vanessa for lunch or taking the dog out for a walk or just sitting in the sun with a pint and a packet of crisps. But whether oblivious or fully engaged, they’re experiencing it all right. Because – and this is a staggeringly obvious point, but I’m going to make it anyway – nature is all around us. You can’t get away from the damn stuff. And we are part of it, whether we realise it or not.
And yet we are, so we are constantly told, more remote from it than ever before. Our spreading conurbations gobble up what countryside is left, and that countryside grows ever more denuded of wildlife. We raise our children in concrete jungles, and they wouldn’t recognise a cow if it sat on them, don’t know of the existence of kingfishers or bluebells or acorns.
How do we square this, then, with the enduring and growing popularity of nature programmes such as Planet Earth and Springwatch? Are we merely armchair nature-lovers? Or are these programmes engendering an abiding interest in the natural world, inspiring us to go out and commune with it more intimately?
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. Interest in nature is a spectrum – from oblivion to obsession and myriad stops on the way – and each person occupies their own particular place on it.
These people – what they do, where they do it, how and when and why they do it – have come to be an integral part of my own experience. And I find them, inveterate people-watcher that I am, beyond captivating. I know how I respond to nature, and I know how I enjoy relating to it. But look at that man there, the one standing next to the ‘DO NOT FEED BREAD TO THE DUCKS’ sign, feeding bread to the ducks. Fascinating. And that woman, standing oblivious at the zoo while her child communes with a penguin. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, the warden of a bird observatory, living off-grid on an isolated island for nine months at a time, recording everything, no matter what the weather. Who are these people? What are their quirks, their foibles, their own particular ways of responding to and interacting with the natural world around them? I don’t want to climb either soapbox or high horse* about the parlous state of nature, but these questions feel more relevant than ever. Because when we lose contact with something, we stop caring about it; and when we stop caring, it’s gone before we know what we’ve lost.
If normal people and their relationships with nature are spellbinding, then so too are the experts. It’s one thing to notice a tree; another to be able to identify it from the fissures in its bark or the shape of its leaves; yet another to understand its function in the local ecosystem; and quite another thing entirely to devote your life to them, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
I find myself delving into the lives of the outliers: people who, at one time or another, have seen the world through different eyes, whose exceptional observations and deeds, to this admiring amateur at least, are unimaginable in their scope and reach. I’m infected with a version of the same insatiable curiosity that led Gilbert White to explore the wildlife of his local patch, or Anna Atkins to press seaweed between glass and make the first cyanotypes, or Peter Scott to examine the individual facial patterns on Bewick’s swans. Perhaps it’s making up for lost time; perhaps it’s a rebuke to my teenage self, that feckless do-nothing who rejected learning; perhaps it’s because middle-aged me feels time is running out, is desperate to catch up. Whatever the reasons, I need to find out more about all of this: nature itself, our relationship with it, and the people who have contributed so much to our understanding of it.
This threefold motivation leads me to plan a journey, starting at home in London and from there meandering across Britain. It takes in the places closest to us – our houses and gardens and local patches – before striking out, to zoos, wildlife reserves, country parks and wildernesses. The journey’s course is partly driven by links to the past, visiting the homes and neighbourhoods of the great and the good, whose achievements and discoveries lead me to examine what I see more closely and carefully. But I also want to study – however unscientifically – the people I meet on the way: their habits, their preferences, their ways of being in nature. And, of course, at the heart of it all is nature itself, in what Gilbert White called its ‘rude magnificence’.
Tempting though it is to strike out directly to the farthest reaches of the British Isles in search of eagles, otters and dolphins, there are rich pickings to be had under my own roof. Less glamorous pickings, but pickings nonetheless. So this journey starts in the home, where – like it or not – there’s enough nature to last you a lifetime.
* I do not like desiccated coconut.
* 60 species or so.
† 2,500 of them YOU ARE KIDDING ME HOW DO PEOPLE MANAGE?
* A really neat piece of contortion if you can pull it off.