LOCAL

Written by Ben Tallon

Grovely Woods is a short drive from our house, so to see out our first half-term school holiday, I bung the kids and the dog in the car with a a packed lunch. Biophilia has been high on my parenting priority list from the get-go but now amplified since discovering the essential work of Richard Louv. The reasons are innumerable and shouldn’t need spelling out, but go and read his books and it’ll blow your head off.

My big takeaway is the quiet. Something covered in The Nature Principle is the difficulty to find silence, without the incessant churn of cars, without human activity. It’s here, and we sit for long spells, on logs, without words passing our lips, Fiddling with sticks, picking up autumn leaves and analysing the blends of green, yellow, orange, red, and brown. We navigate boggy bits, negotiate brambles, and stand on various sticks and roots, working those muscles for flexibility. Needless to say, the dog loves it and comes and goes, tail up like a car aerial, ears pricked.

There are signs about ‘ash dieback’ and stumps where ‘thinning’ has taken place and I have to grasp for thought processes to avert a mental landslide. This stuff hurts me badly. The downside of sensitivity. The kids, thankfully, are not there yet, but they won’t be shielded in years to come. Their creativity will require a bond with nature more than any previous generation. They already ask big questions of grandparents and educate them on the damage litter causes, and why we must fight for nature. It’s a strange thing to hear between 4-year-olds and octogenarians.

That night it’s a friend’s birthday do in the local pub. We get deep after a couple of pints. He’s an artist/graphic novelist on a painting MA, and has hired a big, more affordable barn in the countryside. He’s purposely left technology elsewhere, so when he goes there, he’s in a big space, and there’s just him, the art, and some music. We talk about space and its impact on mindset and creativity. I recount the big factory spaces of my graphic design BTEC, and how I’d love to access such space again now. The MA, he tells me, is awesome. One day a weel, part time, with tutors who have very different takes and tastes, who push hard. The people on the course are an energising mix too - people from all over the place who are there because they want something from this experience in a different way to higher education, when we’ve not quite lived enough life to need it in the same way.

We get onto nature somehow, and he hits me for six when he tells me he heard it said that humans are nature’s way of seeing itself. He takes a sip of his drink and watches me spluttering, trying to find the words to come back from that, but there are none. I’ll leave that with you. I might get there eventually.