Bonny on Clyde
It was mid-morning as the plane banked for one last time and settled down to its long approach. Small clusters of houses, woods with arterial bike tracks and capillary branches, fields with horses gathered in anticipation round feed stalls. Each growing bigger in the plane window by the moment. Each adding to a patchwork countryside typical of a city edge. Greens. Browns. Off-white buildings flanked by regulation lawns. A football pitch, where dozen of kids chased a ball: ebbing and flowing, a school of little fish. Factories and shopping centres. Normally the houses seem to go on for ages and ages, as if the whole land is swamped in urban sprawl. But this is different. Just over there are hills, and beyond those, more hills. I suspect – maybe imagine – the glitter of water, spreading wide and long in valleys still rebounding from the loss of ice. This is not London with its ge...