#thisplaceifound

It fits!

This place I found is great! I’m not usually allowed up here.This fruit bowl is usually filled with apples and oranges. But today it is empty. My people have disappeared and another human comes in to feed me. It means I can explore different areas of the kitchen that I am normally chased off. I like this bowl, it fits me well and makes me feel secure and warm. From this worktop I can see the whole kitchen and keep an eye on things. I can even see into the garden. It’s quite near my feeding bowl, so I can smell my food and biscuits, which is reassuring. The feeding human laughed when she saw me here, I don’t know why. I think it’s a perfect bed!

We are on a narrowboat on a canal in North Wales. I am sitting at the front of the boat which is being expertly and smoothly steered by my son.

There is a gentle breeze, soft and mild at the end of August.

The only sounds I hear are the boat engine, which is not loud - the engine is at the back of the boat, which is a long way away, and the occasional splash of fish jumping for flies.

I see soft coulds in a blue sky. Suddenly there is the electric-blue flash of a kingfisher. He flits from the trees alongside the canal, ahead of us for a while, then he pauses in a tree as if waiting for us to catch up. He does this for a long stretch of the canal, so although our glimpses of him are brief, they are many. We are so lucky to have his company!

The narrowboat moves at such a slow pace - slower than someone walking on the tow path - that I can almost feel my heartbeat slowing. This place I found is peaceful and calming.

Landmark Bar. Bergen Kunsthall. 

Bergen’s skies relentlessly try to empty, to no avail. My jeans are rain-sodden behind my knees as the chair that I sit on presses them against my legs. 

I stare up at the mountain outside the window: obscured by round-edges of clouds and trees. There is no sign of the sun but a dull neon rainbow stands vertically beside the window. 

 A toddler roars a beautiful clumsy song in a way that only toddlers know how. Her big sister sits quietly whispering dialogue from one plastic toy to the other. 

This place I found is sterile yet warm. Spot-lit pot plants line the mezzanine-shelves below the ceiling. The [faux] leather chair beside me shows more grooves than my own. More worn. More loved? 

I peer through the door to my right. It frames the doorway in the distance which, in turn, frames the doorway behind it. The carpet is brown without being drab. The clean lines of the room reflect the straight grooves in the wall. 

I hear cutlery tap crockery as the family to my left tuck into their meal. I have a specific projection that they are a reunited family who have travelled from the corners of Norway to be reunited here. Nobody can disprove my fiction. 

This place I found: Thoughts on Skomer Island

  It’s very windy but not a cold wind; it is bright and clear with the sun breaking through from time to time.

It’s noisy: the background sound of the sea breaking on the rocks and cliffs; the laughter of the gulls, the cheep of the oyster-catchers, the indistinguishable sounds in the melody of mixed birdsong, the clamour and chatter of the guillemots and razorbills nesting on the cliff face – all speaking to each other and shouting like a room full of excited people.

It’s beautiful: clear and clean, just nature, nothing else. Sea, rocks, cliffs, scrubland, ferns, rock plants – and burrows, hundreds and hundreds of burrows. Some for rabbits, but the vast majority are home to birds – Manx shearwater and puffins.

It’s peaceful. The concerns of day to day life are put in perspective by the ever-changing yet changeless beauty of nature.

I feel refreshed.

Words and photograph by Wolfiefan.

Half-submerged in the undergrowth, I catch glimpses of the pond through long stems. There is a mother coot with her chick dallying on the surface. Occasionally she plunges beneath to look for food causing a little splash every time.

An electric strimmer that lately motored through the wilderness is now resting and still. I can hear snatches of bird song sung in repeated phrases from a tree nearby. A song thrush I guess, and looking up: so it is! I am so pleased to have guessed right that I smile.

It is warm, warm, warm, but with a perfect breeze that rustles the leaves around me gently. It caresses the hairs on my arm but otherwise makes no intrusion. No chill, just a welcome coolness in this heady midday sun.

Although the birds are what draw my attention most, I notice there is other life here, too. A blue-bottomed dragonfly and a rusty-bottomed bee. There is life in this place I found, and the air is busy with it.

The Thames

Basking warmth. The river a murky brown. It smells of the sea today. A smell that brings with it the idea - the possibility - of an escape.

The day is a slow-moving day. It is a lazy Friday.

Over the footbridge, which is suspended high, high, up above me, people make their ant-like way from the north side of the river to the south and back again.

In the background, beyond the chatter of the office crowd out for its lunch-time dose of vitamin D, and beyond the pounding and panting of joggers busy with the need to make every minute count, there is a background hum. It is the perpetual buzz of a city at work. The engines of trains, planes, buses and boats overlay each other, a mesh of industrial sounds that I have learnt to tune out. It is barely perceptible to me until I stop, in a moment like this, and really listen.

Out of nowhere, a seagull calls out, and pulls me back to my thoughts of the sea. I follow that thread up, out and away from this place I found.

Aller and Beer Woods, Somerset

High above the latticed woods, a tree in blossom shivers against a bright blue sky, alive with eddies and currents. The cool breeze carries memories of new-grown grass, and the acid note of fecundity.

The woods below are deep and shaded, steeply sloping and sprinkled with bluebells, wood anemone, celandine, and ankle-high dog’s mercury. 

A crow caws lazily. Birds chatter and echo snatches of song. A sheep bleats from the fields below.

There are cowslips in this place I found, and lush green grass, long and thick and rough to the touch.

I lie back and breathe in the scents, watching a white butterfly lollop above. I am jolted back to an early time of childhood, spent very near this place, and I realise that this landscape slots into my consciousness as the ideal expression of ‘world’. My first impressions of nature were formed in fields and woods like these and I suppose my child’s brain seized them and squirrelled them away as a foundational idea.

A stick lies deep in the grass. The sun slants through grass blades and young leaves. The first day of summer’s wind nestles and rustles and softly roars, like the sea.

Somewhere on Mare Street

I watch as a professional dog walker is dragged along the pavement beside me by the two dogs in his right hand as he, in turn, drags the slower pair in his left.  He takes my eye line to the word “BELLY” which is scrawled across the building beside the canal:  tall school-desk-graffiti.

Freelancers sit in an orderly fashion along the inner edge of this establishment:  each with its back to the glass as if to provide insulation.  They have identical MacBooks which have seemingly been issued with the free tap water.  I sit facing them with my notebook and mechanical pencil.  

I adore the music:  Michael Jackson’s hits playing out a little louder than might be expected in a place like this place I found.  It is not too loud so as to drown out the sounds of the communications between staff and patrons.  In the space between songs a gentle tapping on keyboards can be heard.  There are no conversations here.  

The cobbled road beside me has been partially covered by a rectangular slice of cement that looks like it has been torn from a magazine as two familiar yellow lines provide a edging.  The inner decor reflects the outside:  cement intermittently interrupted by gestures of trees.  I wonder if they’re real.  The flashing, frosted Christmas tree is not real.  

As the tables around me begin to be cleared, I reach for the final mouthful of coffee that sits as a perfect circle in the bottom of my cup.