Bird Berries!

In her memoir, literary-editor-turned-writer Diana Athill describes going with her brother to gaze at the bull on the neighbouring farm when they were children. This was ‘not a random whim but an accepted pastime. A bull is a spectacle in himself. We hoisted ourselves up the stout timbers of his loose-box, and with our elbows on the top of the partition would stare at him while he stared back.’ I remember this so well from holidays when I was small: looking as a pastime. I have been re-remembering it this summer, watching my own children. Let’s look at the horses. Let’s look at the butterflies gathering around the rotting apples. Let's look at the birds feasting on berries (perhaps the most magical sight of all).

 

A mid-August entry in Virginia Woolf’s diaries gets at exactly how that state of mind has changed for me as I’ve grown up. Coming back home across Sussex after seeing her sister at Charleston, ‘all my nerves stood upright, flushed, electrified (what’s the word?) with the sheer beauty – beauty abounding & superabounding, so that one almost resents it, not being capable of catching it all, & holding it all in the moment.’ The act of noticing has been complicated, even spoilt, by the desire to grasp at what it is that one is seeing. To capture and preserve it in some way.

I took the first photo in mid-August when I was driving the few miles between Charleston and Virginia Woolf's home on a research trip for my book on home-making – almost exactly a hundred years from when Woolf made her diary entry. The second photo is my children in Cumbria last week.