After weeks of brain-melting pressure of work and 16-hour days in the office, the project I was working on went to press last Thursday. Therefore, as is only right and proper, the next day was devoted to a celebration of my freedom via fishing and kipping outdoors, bush stylie.
Imagine if you will, how gloriously indulgent it was for me, after wringing dry every corporate minute to hit that press deadline, to be living in my favourite little world for 36 whole hours. Only those that know the polar opposites of restrictive stress and pure freedom can feel what I felt as I flicked out my baits at first light on Friday morning. As wonderful as the moment was, the magic had merely begun.
My swim was a leafy cave created by the sympathetic snipping of alder, oak and sycamore, braced by a random scaffold of ivy and traveler’s joy. How apt, under the circumstances, although the creeper's other name of 'old man's beard' would probably fit the bill just as well by the time the session ended.
With everything in place, the mobile switched off and the morning sun skimming off the margins and creating giraffe-skin patterns on the inside of my brolly, I stretched out on my bedchair to watch that favourite world go by. Within minutes, I saw something that I'd never seen in 50 years of studying the countryside. A pair of cuckoos, calling as they flew, engaged in an aerial combat-ballet right above me. I still don't know if their tumbling and power-diving was the product of aggression or passion, but it was a fine thing to see on that magical morning, I know that.
Then, as the cuckoos closed their show, two shrews received their cue and began to fight each other not three feet from my face. Again, in half-a-century of studying nature, I had never seen this spectacle at close quarters, and the sheer ferocity of it amazed me. The combatants sat back on their tiny haunches, open-mouthed and screaming insults at each other, before launching simultaneous attacks that created a soot-grey blur of thrashing fur that was too fast and furious for the human eye to capture. Then the shrews would break and stand apart, squaring-up, their flanks almost vibrating as they gasped for air, before flying into each other once more.
The two minutes or so that those shrews were trying to kill each other ranks as the most spectacular piece of wild animal behavior I've ever witnessed. When the defeated shrew finally backed into the foliage, leaving the victor panting and shrieking its triumph, I nodded my congratulations to it. The shrew caught my movement and vapourised stage-left. It left me smiling like a loon, with the sun on my face and 'something in my eye'.
I also caught some huge fish but these were only bit-part players in that morning and its magic.
Anyhoo, just sharing like.
)
Fair point, Jonny.
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