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every zip and button, and slop down to Lower Meadow, my shoulder a prow into the spray. The clay base of the field is again saturated, and holding a good half-inch of water on its surface. It is dark, the way only a January night in a rainy, lightless valley in the middle of nowhere can be dark. Thick, cellar-dark. I cannot see the water on the surface of the earth. I can tell its depth by the plash of my wellingtons.

    24 J ANUARY No bird is less of the meadow than the kingfisher; in five years I have never seen it deviate in its flight from the river bed, its sole route-finder. But itis often there in the periphery of the field and of my vision, a neon-turquoise spark, which leaves an iridescent flash in the atmosphere, to die away slowly. A radioactive particle decaying.
    Now the kingfisher comes, flying on a perfect horizontal plane, suspended equally between the river and the sky.
    This is the halcyon bird of mythology, which allegedly laid its eggs on the ocean, an act by which the sea was calmed. Hence the ‘halcyon days’ of poets and Shakespeare. Some believed that a kingfisher could divine the weather as well as determine it; a dead kingfisher, suspended by its head, would turn its beak to the wind like a multicoloured weathercock.
    A field is a landscape is a soundscape. The ‘zeep zeep’ of the kingfisher is an occasional contribution at the edge of consciousness.
    I’m in the promontory, where the alder logs are spread with a caramel layer of velvet shank mushrooms.
Flammulina velutipes
is one of the few mushrooms that fruits in winter; it is also edible. In Japan it is the prized culinary delight
Enokitake
. Only the Jew’s ears on the elders which are lolling an arm’s length into the field rival the velvet shanks for hardiness.

    26 J ANUARY I’m out when Roy Phillips the contractor comes to cut the farm’s hedges with a flail cutter on the back of his Ford County tractor. The hedges should be ‘laid’, slit and woven by hand, but this is one of those time-consuming jobs that is on the end of an endless list. Because Lower Meadow is suppurating water Roy has only been able to get the tractor into part of the field; only one and a half hedges have been trimmed, giving the field a dissolute, half-shaven look. The flailed hedges are stark and square. Scalped to the skull. The serpentine ivy seems to be the only thing holding the bushes together. On the uncut hedges, drooping claws of alder catkins and bunches of plum ivy berries pose in flaunting juxta-position. But the intoxicating melon aroma of the shorn hedges makes them beautiful to the nose.
    There is evening sky to delight a shepherd. The vapour trail of a microscopic jet catches the crimson light so that the aircraft is illusorily powered by flame.

    27 J ANUARY Snowdrops and dog’s mercury are out in the hedge along the farm track. The days are perceptibly lighter and longer.
    I climb into the copse; in the centre, amid the sombre trees, the fox’s earth has been undergoing renovation, and there is evidence of digging aroundthe muddied main entrance. Aside from bits of dead animal (rabbit, song thrush) lying around, there is that unforgettable proof of fox habitation: a sour, pungent odour when one sniffs over the dungeon hole.
    By now the foxes will have mated. Assuming successful implantation, the vixen will begin a gestation of about fifty-two days. Red foxes have the shortest gestation of the dog family.
    On the floor of the dripping copse lies a dead blue tit, a startling jolt of colour amid the darkening leaves. I doubt if the fox, as per folklore, hypnotized the blue tit to come down from its tree. The arctic blast and the relentless after-party rain murdered many a bird.
    Low winter sun comes strobing through the coppiced hazels.

FEBRUARY
    Jackdaw

CANDLEMAS, 2 FEBRUARY. A morning of stultifying mist, which cloys like sweat on my face. At the far end of the field the unseen raven voices a mindless metronome of croaks. She is sitting