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800 words written in two hours for a five minute read. It’s a bit like cooking; an hour or two of preparation and heating, for only fifteen minutes of eating. But it is so much fun making pies and cakes and then tasting them.
Wild
[ 5 minute read ]
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I once got caught short and had to take a leak behind a hedge. To be honest, I have done it thousands of times. I used to be a long-distance haulage driver, including on the European continent and there are no toilets for hundreds of miles sometimes. On this one occasion I have in mind, I had, of course, gone behind a tall hedge so no-one would know I was there; you know:
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‘Ugh! That man is weeing!' as they drive past.
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There isn’t much you can do while you are ‘weeing’ in the countryside, except look around. There wasn’t much to see on this day though, so I just looked down into the undergrowth and leafless brambles and ‘saw’ a whole new world. It was as though I could suddenly see in colour when everyone else was already seeing, except they can’t. Oh, this is unreal! I thought. This is what ‘they’ are all talking about, except they weren’t. This is so, so...I don’t know.
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It is strange that I later mentioned having a piss behind a hedge to my brother. I think every boy or man has done it. It is nothing unusual or interesting. The only time you might tell someone is how you got caught by an irate or surprised person who has suddenly come upon you. I said, to my brother,
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‘I looked down and just saw…’
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‘Wild’, he said. That was it! Wild! It wasn’t like seeing wild through David Attenborough’s eyes. For me, watching amazing wildlife cinematography was like going to a zoo and seeing a tiger only a few feet away with my own eyes. If the tiger had leapt at me and I was saved by a thick sheet of, I suppose, laminated glass, I would certainly have experienced a shock, a fun shock.
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‘I had the fright of my life.’ (You will have to put your own expletives or blasphemy in there).
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If the tiger had actually gotten to me and bitten my arm off and had to be pulled off by keepers, I would, of course, experience a ferocity beyond anything I had encountered before. I witnessed a boy get 'attacked' by chimpanzees at Twycross Zoo when he stepped over the low barrier separating the public from the cage, and 'handed' some nuts to a chimp. Instead of taking the nuts, it grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm into the cage. Somehow, another one managed to get the bag off his back and the other whooping chimpanzees emptied it on top of the cage. One 'read' a book upside down, while others opened his lunch box. The keepers, hearing the racket, had to bring fruit for the chimpanzees before they released the boy's arm. I bet he thinks he experienced wildness, but he didn't, because the chimpanzees emulated humans; they had experience. My vision was different. The experience I had of urinating on some dormant brambles in Winter was a blending of the world I live in; buildings, roads, people, jobs and so on; and the wild. What was distinct was that I saw a world without our rules. Wild.
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That was the first time I ever fully realised that there are other worlds. Not physical worlds orbiting distant stars. Patrick Moore used to tell us that in ‘The Sky At Night’. Now, it is Professor Brian Cox who delights us.
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Of course, when I was sixteen, I knew there was something else. I knew that there was ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Well, I thought I did. It is a lot more complex than that, I know. But, this ‘wild’ I discovered twenty or so years later, was an entirely new and different ‘fish’.
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I suppose that experiencing it has left me with an indistinct portion of me still in it, perhaps the very end of a tip of a gossamer-light finger. Yet, if I look really closely all I can see are the ripples in a still pond that, that finger tip makes in the wild world. I can imagine that the pond is not really a pond but is instead an entirety that is a raging storm that derives from the animals and organisms that make up the wild world interacting. I want to go there. I once, I think on a spiritual level, wished to be part of it. I wanted to be more in the wild world than the human world. I have, on many occasions, felt the bite of nature; close to death from hypothermia for example, but realistically that is how to be confused, even fevered in believing you are warm when you are not.
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I am having ‘difficulties’ with the animals that come into my back garden; Muntjac deer, badgers, foxes, and I suppose domesticated cats from over the road that kill pigeons and leave the feathers everywhere. My plants are eaten and trampled and they make holes in my jerry-built fences. I have even spoken to the obvious ants and snails;
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‘Go away.’ But they don’t understand me.
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I want to tell the animals to go somewhere else and let me grow some plants. But I know that is just plain mean, and I know that I would have to leave the human world to do so. I don’t want to do that. I will just have to be content with ‘seeing’ a tiny pond; through a minuscule hole in the fabric of the veil that separates us, and be patient with something I know is there but really don’t understand.