I need to re-read Brambly Hedge.

I am the recent inheritee of a new title. Albeit temporarily, I am now a dog owner. Well, a non-permanent landlord of some friends’ dog for a little while until some waves settle. Having been trusted with the care of an ageing dog culminates in a few minor adjustments in one’s life. The first being the company of a chaperone when working from home. The second: regular, but short-ish walks; achy joints are well-renowned in old age in both dogs and humans. The third may not be a given for all in this situation, but my bedroom door is now permanently ajar to allow for my new roommate to grab a drink of water in the night if he so needs.

While I have always valued the natural world, I find it can be hard to find time to really appreciate it. Or rather, it is sometimes easier to find an excuse to do something else. With the recent addition to our days, this dilemma has been pushed to the side, and a nightly walk is now compulsory.

Spending time in nature alone holds different emotions and appreciations to spending time in nature with others. The quiet is louder, the smells stronger, and the breezes all-consuming, but this changes, moreover, when in nature with an animal. In my limited pet experience (cats, the occasional dog, and briefly, a holidaying Russian Dwarf Hamster), I have come to conclude that I see nature differently through each of their company. Okay, perhaps the hamster experience was not as profound.

I’m not sure that this theory is so profound in itself anyway, but I have been forced to pay attention to it these past few weeks. I find myself paying closer attention to the smells on my walk, as I watch the dog’s nose quiver in all directions, and appreciating these for longer as he stands stoic against my advances on our journey to unapologetically smell the daffodils for longer. I end up tailoring my interest to what he perceives through his strongest sense, and as a result, see new amongst the familiarity of my home.

Seeing the world through an animal’s eyes is no foreign concept to people raised like me: through the lens of The Wind in the Willows, Brambly Hedge, and anything written by Beatrix Potter. I lived and breathed for the magical English countryside. Hours spent up trees looking for tiny windows and doors, making houses for fairies if they so happened to need a place to stay as they flew past, finding voles and shrews drunk in the fallen apples under the tree, and moving them to terracotta plant pots, out of reach of the prying eyes of cats whose domesticated evolution remained back in the house as they prowled the garden.

Looking back now, the nostalgia bleeds into wonder, and a tinge of confusion. My memories of endless floral Summers seem to still glisten with that magic: my memories are still a truth; one where animals live personified lives, and fairies flit about, and the butterflies swell in formation, following the direction of my hands. I think I have become cynical of these stories as I have grown up. I suppose it can be put down to that progression into adulthood that we all meander through. The loss of naivety. An inevitability. A must.

Of course, we know that these frilly pictures are not completely realistic; the ones where badgers smoke pipes in armchairs, fieldmice hang laundry on twine washing lines, and toads live in mansions and wear tweed waistcoats, but whatever happened to these humble, romanticised ideas? It’s a dichotomy in its finest form: I have studied Biology and History, I know logically that an animal lives their life without many distinct parallels to that of a human, and that humans are intrinsically self-obsessed; it’s in our nature. It is no wonder, therefore, that we yearn for our culture to be reflected in our surroundings, whether that be organically or artificially.

If we take a short stroll to the other edge of the sword, however, an innocence can be found in the desire to see ourselves reflected among the leaves. Through the undiluted beliefs of my younger self, I see why I loved this media and ideology as a child. Magic, by definition, must appear unattainable in order to maintain its exclusivity and lustre, hence why we saw the natural world to be abundant with it as children. I may have always wanted to catch a fairy or hold a furry little mole, but the magic of the world made it nearly impossible. The unattainability of these creatures swayed my perception of superiority well away from the general human consensus: that humans are the predominant organisms in our world. Through my consumption of such media, coupled with unbridled curiosity of the nature around me, I came to the conclusion that these beings were the superior within our world. Their value was higher, if not equal, to my own.

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I was practically writing Petrarchan sonnets to the inhabitants of my garden well before my knowledge of such a literary structure. I think I should be thinking and viewing and living like this again. A focus shift from cars, houses, jobs, bank accounts, clothes, deadlines, peer comparisons, social media, irrelevant perceptions and the trendiest trainer, to the romance and magic of nature, art, music, literary classics, illustrations and nursery rhymes, old wives’ tales and wishing on stars.

With this resolution in mind, here are my observations from a solo dusk walk with my newfound best friend:

Red kites tumbling around one another, yet still managing to stay afloat.

Ratty speeding across the lane in a blur.

The quiet that is actually so immense and consuming that it is not quiet at all; the last proclamations from the dogs before they go to sleep.

A rogue sheep bleating in the distance, the tweeting of roosting birds.

The fluttering wings of a blackbird as she dives into the hedgerow, bramble adorned. 

A hearty rumble from the farmer hard at work on his tractor as we all tuck in to bed.

Tiny black bats flirting with the trees as they cross the sky.

Fresh new grass poking through for Spring beside rolling, curling, dry, hay bales.

The smell of warmed earth and early blossom curbs the jagged chill still held in my cheeks; Summer is rising from her sleep.

Your secrets can be told here. When there’s no one but you, and everything else in this world.

It is a silent cacophony. A blur of sound which, through a lifetime of listening, fuses to the outer edges of your thoughts; a silence made up of only noise

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