The Delayed 14.29 to Taunton, Reading. 14.51.
England swelters under the glare of an unseasonably ferocious sun. For the second day in a row, the temperature is pushing well into the thirties. It’s all the news can talk about. Trains are running slower due to speed restrictions, three children have “gotten into difficulties” while bathing (a tactful way of avoiding the potentially triggering d-words associated with fatal water incidents) and the whole of the South seems to have jumped into the car and carved out a four-square fiefdom on Bournemouth Beach.
I’ve hopped out east to pay my mother a visit, and in so doing stepped right into the hottest part of the country – bar London, of course, which is usually a couple of degrees warmer than the rest of the island. England is rather pretty in May, though she wears her best dress in the first two weeks of the month, when the flowers are still fresh and the wind is cool. Now, the early summer sun is at that particularly British angle where it’s high enough to burn but low enough to blind, and the heat feels more like the first week of August than the last week of May.
Retreating before the summer’s wrath, I have sought solace and shades along the banks of Hampshire’s rivers.
England is at its most beautiful wherever a river can be found. Crystal waters running over gravel, with shadowy trout and grayling darting from sunlight to shadow. Clumps of weeds and watercress wafting in the water as though in the wind. The trailing arms of a weeping willow gently tracing the water’s surface. Iridescent dragonflies of every shape and size – dragons, damsels and darters – hawking from bank to bank, playing a longer game than the mayflies, whose inert bodies drift downstream, their twenty-four hours spent. Chiffchaffs, wrens and blackcaps singing from the trees, the lazy purr of an overheated wood pigeon and, now and then, the explosive song of a Cetti’s warbler from deep within the darkest heart of a reedbed or thicket.
When I am traveling far from home, this is the image of England that I miss most of all.
Did you see the pike in that first picture? Don’t worry if you missed it – they are master ambush predators. Go back and see if you can spot it.
This corner of the River Alre passing through Alreston is supposed to have otters and kingfishers, but I was over the moon to see a pike. They were always my favourite fish when I was a lad, and it’s not hard to see the appeal for a young boy: fully grown, they’re huge, sinister, almost crocodilian monsters with soulless eyes and fins that move so slowly that their every twitch seems calculated. A perfect killing machine. Hardly surprising for a fish that outlived the dinosaurs, whose ancestors prowling Cretaceous rivers were not all that different from the river monsters that lurk in reedbeds outside Tescos and Sainsbury’s.
I can see why adventurous young lads might get a kick out of fishing up one of these ancient beasts, but I’m just as happy spotting one drifting between the weeds. It makes a change from chasing chiffchaffs through the branches of the tallest trees.
I’m racing home now, clearing the green fields of the Vale of Pewsey under a mercifully cloud-studded sky. I acquired a few books in a second-hand bookshop for a couple of pounds and a new sketchbook for a little more. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on the Horrible Histories books for a while, since they had an enormous impact on my art and my love for history and storytelling. Everyone seems to remember the enormously popular TV show (which, for my sins, I have never seen) but the books appear to have faded into collective oblivion. I dare say Martin Brown had more influence on my pen-and-line drawings than any other artist – besides the legendary Chris Riddell, of course.
Power’s running out. I’d better stop typing and leave enough juice on this thing to get me through the ticket barrier at Taunton station. See you around! BB x
The Book of Barnabas 