Fortunately in twenty one years, not much has changed around here, no real development greenbelt. Thirteen houses and three farms, mostly dairy and sheep. Two of them now been organic for more than twenty years, as a result the hedgerows are alive with an amazing variety of wild flowers. Primroses have done especially well and now the bluebells creeping in.

For a couple of years we had skylarks in a large field not a mile away but huge works undertaken by Severn Trent has scared them off.  The curlews have returned having been absent for two years but their numbers like the Lapwings are well down. One critter that is multiplying significantly is the rabbit and the hedge rows on the lanes I walk Sam, our rescue Lab, are honeycombed with burrows. I gave up counting the number I see when I got to a hundred.

Around dawn I will see odd fox or badger and occasionally water voles and pine martins, they say there are otters on the river but I have never seen one. But twice I saw a kingfisher.  In abundance are Herons, buzzards, duck, snipe, geese, swans, and something I’ve missed. There are huge varieties smaller of birds unfortunately for them we have a pair of peregrines and in an explosion of feathers one took a ring collared dove in our garden, and the sparrow hawk is a regular visitor to the bird table.  After sunset tawny, little and barn owls and what I took to be a night jar. Sadly I have not seen or heard a nightingale since I lived at the The Boot in Willington, but we have hedgehogs.

Recently on our way home from Oswestry we saw a Red Kite, the first I have seen within forty miles of here.

After initial insults and greetings have been made and the pattern for the round established the conversation ambles along with a few pleasantries and then, we talk at each other, over each other, in earnest with each other, with concern one on one, or we listen before  mocking, confessing, denying, avoiding, enjoying, challenging or enquiring.

And so it goes: pogroms beyond the pale, patent rights for pharmaceuticals, Arsenal vs Barcelona, the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup, the price of fuel, netsuke with amber eyes, and Sebag’s ‘Jerusalem’, oak framed buildings, the strain of the herd being tested for tuberculosis, the number of dead frogs after the artic winter, Rilke’s letters, USAF losses in WW2, Audis, Bond movies, Katyn forest, Beria, Afghansitan, Egypt, the University at Delft, torn rotator cuffs, tweeting and davenports, Richelieu or Talleyrand, train journeys in South America, Lorca’s grave, sucking it in when you walk up the beach in Barbados, callipygian ladies, and tattoos lubricated by successive pints …… rambling, bumbling, stumbling for words, cracking into abuse and laughter at some stupid aside or new joke, dwindling at pee breaks or buying the next round.

We have been meeting for some years on and off and apart from the two who are wedded to their land, we are a peripatetic lot having lived and worked on all five continents, married, divorced, ups and downs, doubts and fears, but like homing pigeons always coming back to same part of England and the land know as home.

Six pints in 1985, 1975 I really can’t remember? Six pints today at £3.20 equals £19.20 x 6 rounds, is that a high price for an afternoon talking bollocks? For that’s what we call it and always have done. ‘I’m just going down the pub to talk bollocks with my mates.’

You can’t put a price on it because you cannot measure the pleasure, the psychological well being or that sense of easy familiarity and belonging. You can’t determine the educational content or the delight of learning or informing, the latter always with that edge of satisfaction of airing your knowledge, of bamboozling your mates of challenging or being challenged with the ultimate interjection,

‘What a load of bollocks.’

Hate Monday mornings always a reality check, and having to get my head into a business mode. I was musing on what I’d really like to be doing and right now I would like to be somewhere where I could turn off all media television, radio internet for a month. How good would that be? (Descartes said, ‘He who lives hidden lives well.’ ) Well I would like to live well hidden and you know  nothing would change.  Turn it all back on and the same sad rubbish would come out, politicians gibbering on about the economy, oil spillages and ecological disaster another sixty people blown to smithereens by a murderous car bomb, another poor boy killed in Afghanistan and the sudden rush of sadness thinking of the sixty, or the one parent somewhere receiving the news.

How jolly to know that according to the World Health Organisation, depression will become the second leading cause of worldwide disability by 2020, second only to heart disease. Yet research has shown that doctors have been regularly labelling people as depressed when they are simply sad, and that sadness is good for you. Researchers have also undertaken studies to ask happy and sad volunteers to judge the truth of a range of urban myths and rumours, and found that sad people tended to be more sceptical. This is because negative moods lessen the likelihood that a person will rely on simple stereotypes when responding negatively to minority groups and that when you’re sad, you pay more attention to new information in the outside world

Sleeplessness, lack of concentration and changed appetite are all side affects of normal sadness but the way that doctors interpret these criteria of sadness is to describe them as depression, which they then treat yet more antidepressant drugs. How sad is that?

Things that make me sad right now are the physical distances between my children and me and how little I get to see them. Success and fame have their downside and the far side of America is a long way away.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov