Blogging is what writers do. Apparently.

My blog-writing for years has pretty much been; what I can see out me window.

First it was, What I saw out the side hatch when I lived on the narrowboat, then it was, What I’ve seen in Australia (often from the balcony), culminating at last in, What I see out the window of my midlands three-bed semi. I seem to have been watching hedgerows my whole writing life.

Now I got binoculars. Sweet. Although I worry the neighbours opposite will one day catch me peering intently at a jay eating an acorn with a smile that, from their angle, will definitely look salacious and think I’m perving on them. Then the facebook group will go off.

Well. Let’s reflect on that. No, not the facebook group, or the perving. Put the binos down. I’m realising in the instant that I’ve spent all my blogging life writing about nature because I … like writing about nature. The world can be pretty horrible. After the pandemic, austerity, the climate crisis and now Gaza (what a merrie little list that is), retreating to folky, old-world appreciation of plants and animals, including writing and singing about them, is a balmy reprieve. I think I’d rather look out the window and tell you about that than look at the world and write feisty things about, say, the decline of the cuckoo. Or my opinion about female shaving. I got many opinions on that. Or about why I smell more now, isitmyage?

So, that jay really is cracking, you know. In fact, there’s two of them now. In the hedgerow in the last two days I have seen:

• Five blackbirds
• Two jays,
• Three magpies
• Two crows
• Four long-tailed tits
• One chaffinch
• Four bluetits
• Two great tits
• Three more blackbirds I’m starting to suspect may be young thrushes
• Eight sparrows
• One robin

And there they all go, fluttering. The gentle potterings of little creatures eating haw-berries and hanging out with the avant garde squirrel, just existing. And I think it’s important to know what they are. Because if you spend some time looking at them – you get all the good shit your Instagram and the NHS tell you – you slow down, you’re mindful, you rest, you look at green space. And if you watch and learn what they are and do, you have a relationship with them. You become complicit, accountable. And I think there is nothing more important.

To avoid becoming to didactic, I’ll take you back to the hedgerow. In the woodlands on my walks this week I have been scared the shit out of by precisely:

• One very large deer
• Three panicked pheasants
• Twelve squirrels
• One haphazard golden retriever.

That’s turned itself into a festive little song, hasn’t it? Yeah. Now you’ve got twelve days of Christmas in your head. That’s my gift to you.

So I know Hardy is out of fashion. Banging on about hawthorn and ash trees is twee or genre folk. But if A.S. Byatt can write literary fiction that names periwinkles, oxeye daisies and great campion, why the hell can’t I? You’ll have to wrestle the dead flowers out of my cold dead hands! I shall never capitulate! Rebelliously, I have nothing useful to say about narrative perspective this week – although I learned lots of things I’ve failed to apply because every time I sat down to attempt, it came out identical and I got frustrated and went back to listing birds. Nor do I have a quirky little list of winter skin care dos and don’ts. But I have never blogged for these things. Which is probably why no one reads it except my friends.

I’ll have to make more friends. Come and look at the blackbirds.