There’s tin foil on the floor which sort of mimics the
clouds in the sky. This morning the sky was clear and bright blue but now it’s
got almost Simposnesque clouds and I’m going to have to look up what kind they
are. They are moving quite quickly because the wind has picked up a little bit
and one of the clods looks quite grey but it’s got a silver lining. It is very
cotton wool like and I can see kites soaring above and the sort of black of the
power lines cutting through the natural surroundings. I’ve got horizontal rows
of barbed wire and fencing, vertical columns of concrete, holding up said wire
and then diagonal strands of cable and all of this running directly in front of
trees which are at least 30ft tall and clouds and the sky. And then I look further
up and I can see a plane cutting through it all and if I look further down I can
see a man with a stick walking across the cricket pitch, which of course has
got all the equipment there. It’s a landscape we are carving up, sometimes not
even doing it mindfully, these people are not thinking “I am going to destroy
this view” these people are just there and the cricket structures are there as
they always are and the pylons are just there and the fences are just there,
and they interrupt your view and become silhouettes against a natural
background. A human made foreground.

There are bits where trees have broken off and fallen onto
spikey railings, and either side the landowner has decided to leave it unless someone
complains and they won’t keep growing because they are dead. Then other bits
where trees have engulfed the human fences and grown around the metal. And I love
that, because it reminds me that whatever we do, we can hunt things to
extinction, we can obliterate landscapes, we can pave over everything but some
form of nature is always going to prevail, there’s always going to be something
which grows back. We are not everything, we are not omnipotent, and whatever we
think we are, we are not. It reminds me of dystopian films and novels where
high rises have been taken over by ivy and tarmacs been torn up by weeds. It’s
a tiny glimpse of nature reclaiming its place and saying “you’re trying to put
up barriers and stop us getting from here to there but it’s not going to work”

I can see one tree which is enveloping one of the wire mesh
fences and someone could get annoyed by that and cut the tree down and cut it
so it won’t grow from that bit again, but it’s an oak tree and I can already
see its dropped acorns nearby and there are new oaks growing up. And you could
pull them out, but you may leave the acorn behind or a bit of root which will
grow again. It take s a lot of effort to destroy. And we are very good at that,
we should be thinking maybe we should leanr to live alongside that, with
nature, as part of, not apart from.