Well more like seventy-five actually. Simon is in Blighty for a few days visiting his parents in Dover. He just managed to fly into Stansted airport before the snow rolled in and closed the south east of England.
So I am here on my todd, in the momentarily sunny stillness, with a snoring dog and some very trumpetty chickens to keep me company. It will be nice when the llamas can be in our own land around our new house. They would be wonderful company for a solitary hermit, if they weren’t so damned far away.
Solitude is an uncommon thing. It always takes me a day to get into it, and to get used to the fact that there isn’t someone in the other room with whom to share my thoughts, and my dinner. The general business of living takes up more time when the tasks aren’t shared but, paradoxically, time somehow seems to last longer.
This morning has been lovely – absolutely still, with gentle, hazy-silver sunshine casting faint shadows in the silent air. When I returned from the heavy-carrying slog of the morning llama round (the buggers are drinking inordinately large volumes of water these days), I decided to make the most of the spring-like weather and take the dog for a long, slow walk down into the valley.
The land is still sodden from the never-ending rain of the last three months. The earth, like a living sponge, is filled to capacity and has no more space to soak up water. It drips and gurgles and runs from gaps in the rock layers, tinkling out of a multitude of little springs in the track-side banks, forming crystal clear pools above muddy depressions, that transform into sludgey brown puddles at the slightest splash of a clumsy dog’s feet. The dripping, chinkling, bubbling, guggling sounds are everywhere, like fairy bells and pipes chiming and fluting in the hedgerows. There is a palpable sense of the ground’s fullness, as it overflows and seeps with water that bleeds, and streams and tumbles relentlessly downwards, hastening towards the lowest of the low places, however near or far away they may be.
And with no one at home to get back to, time stretched out dazily before me. A seemingly endless moment of absorption in this strange flowing, this indulgent wet-emptying of a land that is usually so set and unyeilding, and stoney-dry.
Solitude empties time of its small, daily deadlines and makes the world anew. It’s so much easier to do Nothing alone.
It’s nice, for a little while.
