Paying Ready Attention

As a kid at school a Welsh music teacher told me that a good story was like a fish, with a distinct head, middle and tail.   At the time I thought it was clear that he had never seen an eel, but in a rare moment of student restraint I said nothing.    Like many other teachers of his generation, he mistook his ability to declaim without challenge for an access to the truth.     And for all that the prophets of Post-Modernism would have fainted at such a simple notion of narrative, the vision of that idea has stuck with me. The idea of the story as a fish is too simple to apply widely, but if ever there was a single place that held the head, body and tail of my story it is the Lake District – The Lakes – in the north western corner of England, just below Scotland.   But even then it’s not that simple.   Some of my stories came to an end in the Lakes, some began and some found the full expression of the middle.   I first arrived in Th...

There were house sparrows bathing in the dust and barn swallows hawking for insects above our heads.    Starlings, with their electric crackle voices, chattered     on the wires. The low hum of bees and hoverflies spread out from the flowerbeds, and an occasional wasp, yellow striped and predatory, flashed by. In the distance, the dull roar of waves, still pushed by yesterday’s winds, added a base background to the noises around us. The farm buildings stand solid and thick walled against the wind.   Most of the windows look south and west, away from the cold fingers of the East wind.   A small herd of cows adopt a similar alignment; backs to the wind, showing how good design can flow from observation.   Classically black and white and wet nosed they stared over the fence, agricultural but domestic.    The soil around the gates is poached to muddiness by their heavy, lingering feet.   Beyond a neck stretch and tongue length, a ...