Unlawful Night Walk

This is the long grass that grows in a sixty-acre field just fifty yards from my home. There is nothing notable or special about the grass, it’s the kind of plant that takes full advantage of somewhere we don’t take much notice of; it seeds by chance, is grown by apathy and lives out its life on poor soil.

The sixty-acre field is such a place. It straddles a boundary between the city and the country. Years ago they were going to build a bypass on it, thereby providing enough concrete and out of town infrastructure to qualify it for the full transition into liminality. By the time that photograph was taken it was already sanctified as a green belt meadow, a bulwark against further development.

By day, no doubt, the meadow was a riot of colour, sound and sensation, alive with meadow flowers, skylark song, a soft, warm breeze and the warmth and light from an ample sun. A world of colour and fertility, dressed to impress, the painted face of nature.

But by night, it becomes another face entirely. A different perspective and viewpoint on the world; by definition, a truth hidden from view, a realm of the unintelligible subconscious (when sensible people are unconscious). It is nature’s dæmon spirit, an inner aspect of self where the merely physical coexists with Panphage, the nocturnal, all-devouring appetite of a rustic pagan spirit.

There’s information tagged in the picture that tells some of my story.

Here is the rest

Ten minutes before

I use my foot to lever the garden gate. It has sagged half an inch on dropped hinges and I need to lift it slightly to free the stuck bolt from its keeper. In the middle of the night, I try to get out as quietly as I can. In every sense, I am attempting escape: I built the cabin that is my office in our back garden and I am now in my office in the middle of the night because Covid is in my house.

I walk past the last few houses at the top of our road towards the dark meadow. I trigger the security light of the last house on the path and feel the chill of adrenaline as I am suddenly illuminated. I do not want to be seen and, while I don’t need to duck the beam of a sweeping spotlight or roll under a barbed wire fence, there is still some jeopardy involved. I curse a little under my breath at all those who live in a cul-de-sac like ours and feel a need to keep an eye on comings and goings, but at 3.45 am, the net curtains do not twitch. Instead, a dog barks from inside the house as I walk out of the security light's range up into the field.

Everything from the garden gate and from hereon-in is not only technically illegal, but also non-technically, actually illegal. The grass heads nod and wave in front of a low full moon. Everything about the night is illicit.

In daylight, the path I tread is blistering midsummer, but by moonlight it is cool and calm. One step in front of the other and then another step and another is a mantra. The act of walking is prayer, an orison to everything beyond the bone cage of your skull. Everything other than you. I might be living in isolation but I’m also trapped inside my head.

My mind is a fever of regulations that insist that I am not allowed out. None of us are. Millions are effectively under medical house arrest, prisoners of healthcare in our own homes with sourdough starter recipes and the kids’ home schooling to keep us occupied. It is not the place for that debate, but in the context of an epidemic that has already done away with many like me, it is not oppression keeping me at home but common sense. I had my own lockdown a full week before it was mandatory. On the day this picture is taken, however, walking around, out and about, is something only a dog-owner is allowed to do. With a dog.

To say nothing of the dog

There’s something British and rather sweet about how our first thoughts were for our animals when the TV news was showing telephoto shots of occupied hazmat suits wheeling bodies out of terraced housing.

We do not have a dog, but I do have a bark, just one of the symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. COPD is the reason why, in the last week, I had a phone call from my doctor. He wanted to know, if the worse was to happen, whether I would like to be resuscitated?

I had not bargained for this – a phone call asking if I wished to inconvenience the National Health Service with my continued existence, après-exacerbation. I had not expected to have to state, explicitly, that I wanted, if it was at all possible, please, to live. He corrected himself in the middle of my answer, noting I was married with 10 and 13 year-old daughters so, of course I would want to live. Just checking, was all.

After escape, I walk to the spooky trees. I have a strange fixation on this line of Coronation Trees and have enough pictures of them in every sort of mood that I can hear my wife and kids’ eyes rolling every time they happen to see them on my phone.

Tonight the line of beech and copper beech most at home in a leafy suburban street looks threatening in the dark. I strike out around the perimeter of the meadow to avoid any more threat narrative than is strictly necessary.

Cabin fever diary

I assess my situation. I am as well as I ever am. When the kids got Covid, I came to live in a six-by-eight foot cabin in the garden. I work here, I worry here, I eat, drink and try to sleep here in a bed made every night from an office recliner, some garden chairs and a futon. Its design varies from night to night in a process of continuous ‘improvement’. I only venture into the house, masked up, to use the downstairs bathroom but, other than that, it is going to be weeks of 24/7 shed life. Birthday parties via iPad, website telly, and furtive early-hours walks in an adjacent field.

I walk for a whole hour before it starts to get light and I feel the need to attempt to sleep in tonight’s attempted bed. I close the garden gate behind me as quietly as I can, once again levering the gate up on its dropped hinges with my foot. I lock the office door and resign myself to sleep propped up in my office chair.