Mark Mattock shares a September of chuckling nuthatches, peeping kingfishers and clumsy butterflies.

“In a country you know by heart it is impossible to go the same way twice. Changes of time, mind, weather, and light make all ways new.
To one whose eyes have opened, any place is compounded of places unending to the end of time, and travel is well accomplished by standing still.” — Wendell Berry

I’m imagining myself as a wood ant on a fag butt at the grass fringe of a puddled lay-by as I sit here on the tilting loose-slatted jetty in awe of the enormity of another morning. A large lone shore crab out on the shining mud plain like the last rhinoceros on the savanna. Or a robotic space rover vehicle on the surface of a planet discovered in the future, gathering and analysing. Assessing the potential for a last chance sanctuary for the remnants of humanity expelled by the planet they treated like shit, the elite of whom having poured all their last hideous wealth into the desperate project. The water slowly filling the channel, yet to spill over the mud plain, teems with life, boiling in different grades of ripple; from pin-prick circles to glitter-fish-fry-balls, to heavy bow waves of milling mullet meandering just under the surface like mini basking sharks. The blinding sun, just risen free of the eastern crowns into the bleached blue, lazers a steaming molten path, a strip, from me to it as if a giant magnifying glass is being held above us all. The whole scene like a giant smack foil.

Steve the plumber gently gathers the large house spider, from the kitchen sink he needs to fill, and that I haven’t been able to use for a while, with affection and familiarity. He has a completely indigo arm; a collection of sixty tarantulas and other spiders; his favourite is a Gooty sapphire tarantula, Poecilotheria metallica, which he proudly shows me pictures of on his phone. His wife was arachnophobic, she isn’t any more.

I drop the phone and pluck the binoculars from my chest and focus, just in time, on a sly projectile scudding at speed low over the rippled river, fiercely locked tight onto some unwitting target in the twilight over the purslane beds. The dozen peewits, just risen, bouncing like animated paintbrushed ‘m’s against the pink wash sky totally unaware of the rapidly approaching sleek plumed missile. I briefly lose visual contact with the peregrine as she crosses the shoreline onto the flats before she rockets up from the ground under the flapping plovers and plucks one as if it’s the ripest fruit. As she turns and drops away she lifts the punctured prey, tightly gripped by her sinewy knuckled talon, to her hooked beak as she crooks to deliver the coup de gras. The struggling peewit suddenly drops limp as she severs the spinal column with a barely discernible tweak. Its wings now flail disjointed like torn cardboard flaps as she circles just above me, manically plucking away, breast feathers floating in her wake, gently falling like autumn leaves, in absolute contrast to the sudden violence. She carries it off towards the horizon. I feel like I just watched murder, feast and funeral all condensed into one smooth, brief, shock and awe moment. I pick up my phone and resume the text conversation.

The wren is having a total meltdown, a massive noisy tantrum totally disproportionate to its size, on the corner of the deck as I sit here in the warm dim, ’suppering’ on a bowl of spicy hot diced chicken-of-the-woods and tomato pasta. The last of the three large flame-orange lobes I cut from the totemic oak bole cum fungus frill spiral staircase that I passed a few days ago. A second flush, in a totally, so far, un-fungal year. The tiny irate bird’s protestations so loud. It did the same last night. Wrens have previously nested in a space in the wood supports directly under the corner and, I’m sure, it’s being used now as a roost site hence the verbal abuse and gesturing at my presence.

The dark closes in, damp aromatic ambience exudes from the rhizosphere, surround sound hiss and patter builds steadily to a zenith where the crashing knopper galls and heavy drops raining down on the deck momentarily sync perfectly with Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ from the speaker behind me. There’s not a single un-mutilated acorn among the bumper mast of micro wasp-induced galls. More deep unease that this year ‘ain’t right.’

Days earlier, sunnier, I checked in at the fleabane field, off of the path up from the cabin, an area cleared for for the pheasant poults, and at the end of summer as if a wood with a golden pool. Constellations of butter yellow fleabane flowers from edge to edge. Giant nectar bar. This time last year dozens of day-glo brimstones. Late season meadow browns and gatekeepers, peacocks and red admirals, second brood whites. Bees: bumble and honey. Hoverflies. This visit, one lone brimstone crossed the field during a whole hour. As if all the yellow was now toxic sulphur.

It rained and it rained and it rained. All night. The unceasing sound soothes unlike the silence. Subconscious self knows it’s safe, like latent primeval intuition associates singing birds with peace.

Look up to catch a pair of slimy latex ribbons snaking through the air in some zombie-tape-worm looking pursuit of the heron, as it crosses, neck stretched in indignation, low over the dulling samphire beds, before gravity overwhelms the giant bird’s morning mute. The osprey now sits at the top of its favourite tree. They are unwilling to share. Loose clods of nicotine-stained clouds race across the scene, under the vast leaden skyscape of morose inconstant greys: cold greys, warm greys; pink wash, purple rinse, blue flush; from the north east, from the distant dirty refinery roaring on the horizon beyond the tree line. But on my right cheek a fresh breeze from the south west. The flooded marsh again a vast lake bar the strips of the highest saltings. Giant sweeps and swirls of paisley pattern slicks and sheens: matt, silk, semi gloss, gloss, reveal the alternate flows and channels beneath the shower hammered surface. The first flock of winter teal drops out of the sky and lands in tight harmony. An optimistic choreography of wagging and bobbing on and around the jetty, now a skyward slanting stage, or launch pad. Drenched pair of pied wagtail juveniles, their parents; a grey wagtail, a clockwork sandpiper clambering along the purslane fringes. I run out for a few casts in between the heavier deluges and cups of tea. In the shallows of the receding water flickering fry swirl in tight clockwise fish swarms, more are scattered like split seed over the fertile mud. The kingfisher launches repeatedly from a post, sparking electric blue every time it returns; first with a gobi, then a crab — which it clumsily drops — then a bassling; as if the fisher bird is reconnecting with its power charger. Each time a weird stubby tail flex and head bob of pleasure, before it smashes the life out of the fruit de mer. A gust blasts through the canopy and a deluge of heavy drops splat on the decking like eggs dropped into the frying pan before vanishing into the thin slats. The puddles have disappeared, the baked summer ground has succumbed and become sponge. The grasses flattened, shining silver like slicked back hair. The tall marsh-mallows cowering under the heavy burden of excess wet. Yellow foot the egret is panning for silver in the re-exposed channel, picking nugget after tiny nugget from the ripples he obviously still sees clearly through. I spend almost the whole sodden dark day marooned indoors watching my weird garden birds, and working on some still lifes.

There are several seats with no windows at all in every carriage of this train, all are occupied by people on their phones, many window seats are empty. No one looks out any more.

The vast choppy purple-rinse ocean of heather stretched out before me now tea stained and tarnished. Fading like the disappointing summer. A white blob speeds low from one furze island to another, like a bee. It’s the rump of a wheatear. Another white blob glows in the distance like some large mislaid egg. A big perfect horse mushroom. Dinner sorted! But it’s the only decent mushroom I find, in the middle of mushroom month. Bickering posses of swallows appear out of northern nowhere, swirl around me, slicing and shimmering, low over the shaven turf, pebbled with pony turds, tors of cow shit, like sky lures, then just evaporate into the warm south.

I reach the cabin late afternoon.

The radiant fisher king stares down its dagger beak, aiming intently into the frying shallows from the footbridge as House martins hawk insects in the glitter-mizzled air above. The bats from Golgotha the oak join the voracious feasting. Glints on wet wings, feathered and membraned. Late summer madness in the photon and ultra sound charged brilliance of the dipping sun. Over as quick as it began. I pitch the dregs of my mint tea and pick up the rods. Cross the wooded promontory now in deepest shade; just the odd luminous glimmering flecks of leaf, frond fans and spider silk clipped by sun rays, cutting through the wood from beyond, like deep ocean life in the beam of a submersible. Blinded momentarily by nuclear bright solar flare as I step out from the dark, from the shining spiked and spiny portal in the hollies, from wood to marsh, into an hallucinatory landscape where the kingfisher is now the sky. A sky full of tempestuous cloud like torn and ripped wads and layers of floss and shag pile. In between, intense electric turquoise and cyan, against which, about to settle on the horizon, the burning sun, looking like the little perfect spherical drop in the crown of a frozen splash of a single drop in a hi-speed photo. The lower clouds brilliant yellow and orange, like giant lumps of sponge used to soak up the spilt wet fire from the glassy river. I try fishing but just keep gawking, constantly take my phone from my pocket. Again, pictures completely inadequate. As the sun sinks further a beautiful eerie dark and luminous gloom creeps up the shore, douses the giant oak crescent, the tops of the crowns briefly cresting polished bronze against the heavily bruised sky. When I look back again a giant luminous column of brilliant spectral vapour is beaming up through the canopy, arcing up into the cloud like the ephemeral glow of some strange after-burn, arcing over towards the southern horizon beyond. It takes a few moments before…of course! I run frantically back through the trees, praying I make it before the rainbow vanishes. Rush past the cabin, and out into the open. Over, but not over, the little jetty, over the bay, over the salt marsh, over the eastern oak bank; arching across the immense, dark, pink and orange stained sky, the complete giant triumphant electromagnetic arch of pure colour. I stare euphoric, I know this light fantasia of refraction and reflection is just for me, I know what’s being said, it’s impossible to understand it in any other way…

“what the holy fuck have I Done?”

At the end of last month I gave the estate rentals office the required three months notice.

Heart torn.

The first quarter moon backlights the clouds surrounding it, icing the edges with cold silver plate; the mountain peaks of another world. Autumn night acoustic of distant silence spattered with the odd honk and peep from out on the marsh and an occasional hammer-house-of-horror hoot from the deepest sub-oak dark. Cold feet up on the sliding window frame. Thumbing through the day’s captures glowing on my phone. Suddenly I’m being beaten around the face and head as giant frantic shadows riot on the pine panelling. I switch the head torch off (why did I have it on to look at my phone?). I feel tiny puffs of displaced air, from stiff little cuticle wings. A sense of red; a red underwing? But there isn’t the vibration of moth wings. The creature lands on my top lip. I feel the tiny hooks of its feet gripping. It takes off again, continues to crash around my head like a bat. Then it lands on the screen. Completely surprised, it’s a very battered red admiral. It looks like some diminutive dwarf Dracula. It walks onto my hand and settles comfortably. I continue browsing.

Morning notes. The distant flotilla of clouds, lit by the sun yet to fully emerge, like embers just needing a blast of oxygen. OP flew over just as the sun hit me with warmth, as it cleared the eastern crowns. Above in the infinite blue, giant white feathers and wool, sky-hooked on invisible barbed sky-wire.

Robins and wagtails. Slaps and beats of woodie wings. Curlew. My nose running and water smoking. Cold clear, calm. A baying donkey from far. The 7.30 incoming circles over the marsh and woods. Dorsal fin tail, a mullet cutting slits in the mirror surface. Patches of rust in the boundary oaks. Bare sun exposed boughs and branches like veins and arteries. Some sylvan circulatory system of sap now weakening as autumn takes a grip. Rusting. Brittle leaves. Shining stiff stiletto pin point blades of dew-fall grass.

Other side, in the shade of the oak crescent, cold, very cold, it can only be just a few degrees. Fingers burn with pain, eyes stream burning salty tears down my cheeks. The small cold blooded bass that hit patchinko in the scum feels like a silver hand warmer. Nuthatches chuckle loud. Peep of the kingfisher. The warming sun welcome. The ebb with hardly any flow.

I find the red admiral on the side of the mattress, wings tucked tight. It slept with me. I tuck my forefinger under it, enticing him to step on. He flaps weakly, drunken, falls to the lino floor. Staggers like a bird hit by a car. It only has three legs and two and three quarter wings. I leave him in a hot spot of direct sun on the Lino floor with little hope.

A plop behind me. Kingfisher just plunged from Golgotha’s only decent bough glowing like a golden wing. Below me a large mullet, just feet away, circling over the mud in crystal clarity, scooping up mouth fulls of mud. Shitting it out behind. Its torpedo body like a slo-mo flying fish without wings. Watching it is like taking deeps breaths: holding, releasing, rush of calm, peace, pleasure. Floating metallic motes, glittering like smashed glass from a car window in a lay-by, or a shining slick of fish scales from some predator’s feast, snake away from the end of the jetty. Small bass peck from below.

When I return to the cabin the red admiral is gone. Around midday two are floating about in the warm glare above the shinning mud. One is very clumsy.

*

Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club