Day 89

Wednesday 17 June

So, if you put to one side the fact that, globally, we are in the grip of a viral epidemic and facing years of economic and social turmoil. And, that the earth is warming at an alarming rate whilst we also struggle to reverse the environmental impact of thousands of years of human interference. If you put that all to one side, the majority of today was pretty uneventful.

But after I left work. I mean literally as soon as I stepped outside of the building. Things started to happen.

I sometimes get a bout of occurrences that, on their own, might lead me to smile to myself. But when they come one after the other, in a fairly short period of time, and to the backdrop of a pretty ordinary day. Well, I can’t stop myself from thinking they’re a sign.

In the car park at work, whilst on a phone call, a kestrel flew casually across my view and perched on a tree no more than 70 meters from me and in full gaze. Her chestnut-brown chest was brilliant in the late afternoon sunshine.

I think everyone else must have had a close-encounter with a kestrel too because my drive home was a procession of courteous gestures from driver after driver. Even on the northbound strip of the A12 from Feering to Colchester (which is normally hellish).

Then we went for our evening walk in Mistley. The Stour estuary was doing it’s mad-tidal thing where you look away for five minutes and it has turned from bare silt to water. The sky was greying and the air was muggy and anticipating a storm. But you just knew a storm wasn’t quite going to materialise.

We walked past the Mistley Thorn restaurant and I read, for the first time, the wall-mounted information board that mentioned that Matthew Hopkins, the infamous witch-finder general had bought The Thorn Inn back in the 1640’s. I had enjoyed eating there (when we could of course) and never knew those floorboards and walls had once been walked on and touched by such history.

Then all of the happy, chatty groups of people that lounge about on the grassy verge overlooking the Stour very slowly shoe-horned themselves back home in their cars. It’s almost like a therapy for some to spend the evening there with a small picnic supper.

Finally, I watched the last three episodes of The Detectorists back-to-back. It’s set on the Essex and Suffolk border, and I decided a week or so ago to rewatch it all from the very start. I don’t mind admitting that I shed a tear at the end. Such a wonderful programme; the countryside, the history, the people. It’s so familiar to me. And the wistful love that the characters have for their sense of place is totally relatable.

When we moved to Essex twenty years ago I had no idea I would fall in love with East Anglia. But I have done. And I am in very good company.