Woke up again, ragged, with the first glimmer of dawn. Worried about the house sale, the wretched solicitors dragging it out so long that I wonder if we will complete before the hurricane hits. Two terrible weekends at the shop portend of what's coming, and I dwell on my part in that. It feels calamitous. I try tea to beckon a couple more hours sleep, but it doesn't work, so I dress and drive up onto the Weald with the dog.
At the water tower there is already a grain lorry loading up from the store, though it's only just after six. The farmer is undoubtedly counting his blessings at having held some back, prices through the roof due to the bloody war. The light is beautiful, mountains of white cloud. The barley is suddenly turning, last weekend it glowed, now it is already decadent. Wild oats are growing tall through it at the edges. The skylarks are up again, and on full song. I stop and record them on my phone, for they'll be done for this year soon. The track is sticky from yesterday's rain, and the cloud-defused sun is already hot on my back, so I stop, unravel camera paraphernalia, and take my jumper off, but when I go into the forest it is dark, cool and damp, and it smells of peat and leaf mould. Strands of fresh, green bramble have grown across the path only in the last couple of days, Owen's 'clutching and clinging like sorrowing arms'. I try to make sense of the trees for the camera, try to find semblances of order in the chaos, but I can't do it. How do Amar and Mark LJ and the others decipher it, I wonder, again, to myself? The soft light on the fields at the edge draws me back, but the flat-bottomed clouds don't work for the camera when I get there.
I choose the longer route back, taking the path through the meadow, soft now with hayseed, and over the oddly named Marconi Occupation Bridge across the railway, down past the ruins of the old Redoubt. At the top of the track down to the farm I can just pick out my house, almost hidden by the poplars and the chestnut tree, perhaps 3 miles away. I am looking back at myself from my own horizon, soon to be gone, at least to me. The sky is luminescent, glowing. At the foot of the hill I lean on the gate and watch the white cattle for a while, the calves sheltering from the morning sun under the two trees. There's someone feeding horses as I walk through the poor, tragic farm buildings, once a model for the Scottish arrivals of the 1890s to emulate, now falling into pitiful ruin. Primrose McConnell wrote his original notebook for them here, to guide them through the peculiarities of the heavy Essex clay. There's an enormous Limousin bull in one of the elegant brick-built yards, the outgrown pot-bellied pig in the next, and the long-horned store cattle awaiting their fate in the open-fronted sheds beyond, breathing cow-breath and snorting at the dog. One of them accepts a rub on the hard ridge behind his horns, and tries to lick the salt from my skin with his rough, sticky tongue. The garden at Dial House is full of colour, the potager, as always, neat and well-stocked, a sign on a box hanging by the gate with hand-painted instructions for parcels to be left - no innoculations here - and no sign of the incumbents. I photograph one of Paul's roughly-carved figures, dear, strange, talented Paul who made people care, and who didn't wake up one morning a decade ago.
My footsteps ring back sharp from the the brick lining of the tunnel beneath the railway, then up the long track to the water tower. I can smell cattle on the other side of the hedge, and I'm dive-bombed by a squadron of 'stuka' flies until I'm further up the hill.
The grain bulker's gone now, the farmers are scooping the rest of the golden grain to the back of the store with a vast articulated mechanical shovel. Their Landrover has the letters MOO incorporated into the number plate.
So, onto the day.
