Paying Ready Attention

It was Friday and I was stuck in traffic. I engaged third gear for the first time in a while and almost immediately depressed the clutch. I drifted to a halt about 50m closer to the Grampians. At this rate it was going to be a long evening. The car in front of me had a broken driver’s-side brake light. The driver to my left had a beard and to my right sat a Carlton supporter. Up ahead the blue and red flashing light meant that somebody was having a worse night than me. One brake light man nipped into a gap to his left and moved twenty meters forward. Beard man seemed to be shouting into his phone. Flocks of silver gulls flew with heavy lazy wings towards the river. Two pelicans drifted past. Eventually the movement started to outlast the pauses, and we went forward. People gathered around the crumpled front of a damaged car and pointed at the crumpled rear of another. Cause and effect. A bad way to start the weekend. I pulled round the witch’s hats as a man swept red glass from the roa...

I was reading last month that otters have been recently seen in every county in England. This is a good thing. In the same article I saw otters described as “wanton killers” – this is clearly not a good thing. This brutal assessment of the otter was penned by a fisherman. By a fisherman whose articles and books I had read as a kid. By a fisherman whose words, thoughts and tips I had tried – largely without success – to apply to my own fishing. I never got a good view of an English otter, just a single dark swirl under a bridge on a cold winter’s morning. I had to wait for an Irish otter with a sea caught eel, to watch one. It was all over in minutes, quite possibly seconds, but it has lasted a life time. When I was a kid and I spent hour upon hour at the water’s edge, otters were a spectre, an ecological ghost from another, greener if not gentler, time. They really did seem to exist on the edge of reality and getting a good view of one would have made any fish I caught seem trifling a...

It was my turn to get the paper. As I drove I tried to ignore the bird on the telephone wire. I tried to believe that it was a mistake – but it wasn’t. I tried to believe that I had slept in and that it was the afternoon – but I hadn’t. It was a kingfisher, it was the morning and The Theory was in ruins. I could not even take sanctuary in the old adage that “it’s exceptions that prove the rule” – because they don’t. It’s basic science that exceptions disprove rules. Exceptions no more prove rules than internal belief makes things true in the outside world. The kingfisher was not there on the way back, and neither was The Theory. It was back on the drawing board, and a theory that says “kingfishers only sit on the telephone wires in the afternoons (except on Thursdays)” does not really have the feeling of elegant symmetry that good theories often have. I was so distressed that I had an extra piece of toast when I got home. And another cup of tea. We drove past the wires again on th...