About

To walk is to experience the landscape – and myself within the landscape – as different, fresh, and peculiarly alive to that moment in space and time. On my best and most intense writerly walks, I have felt that bursting pressure of words welling up from the landscape – like petrichor after rain – and the feeling of having to get them down before they dart off and are lost in quicksilver streaks of lightning. The collaborative co-effusions of my own thinking and the work of the path under me to bring these thoughts into the light of day are, I suppose, what I mean by walking words out of myself.

To inosculate

This is how two trees come together as a verb: The action of wind and weather rubs the Trunking stems, wears down their hides of bark Until, shedding the singular, they fix and engraft.

Reading

Containing some of my recommendations in truly great nature or walk writing, with a selection of the covers or quotations from my favourite titles as well. Deakin, Roger: Waterlog: a Swimmer’s Journey through Britain. A jubilant and often humorous account of the writer thinking and feeling and travelling ‘in his element’; the writing is as lucent as the water which is its idiom. Joyful and a refreshingly supine perspective!