Thinking about important things

Taking the back roads home, the folded hills behind the town, sinuous, narrow, empty roads, the way marked by poetic and intriguing names of farmhouses, Lestagne, Brios, Gagne Petit, La Tuque, La Berline, Courage, Jean Sans Peur, that hunker down out of sight down stony tracks, and pastures full of sheep, green of meadows, stone dwellings barely emerged from the earth, wooden-shuttered, tiled with moss and lichens.

Stopping at the Château de Quissac, not an nineteenth or eighteenth century pile with spires and turrets and towers, steep-pitched slate roofs mimicking the châteaux of the Loire valley, but centuries older, a massive stone cube, colour of dry earth, with tiny windows only on the sunny south and west, flat tiled roof, ancient as the church across the way at the top of an alley of massive ash trees, the perfectly preserved private chapel for the local seigneur,

then winding through Monpezat, Laugnac, Grateloup and suddenly the road drops to a pond, runs alongside, crosses a bridge over the Ourbise, and the trees are familiar, the old houses, Les Baudets and Pléydé with the ancient oak in the horse pasture, the pigeonnier, the keep still inhabited, and more bridges, watercourses, the Torgue, then our own Caillou, the Château Fond de Roche and we are suddenly home, sunlight pooling in golden coins on the terracotta tiles through the cracks and knot-holes in the shutters, the smell that is the smell of the house when we first walked through the door, of chimneys and soot and hay and the sweet smell of water that isn’t of damp but the veins that run beneath the house, that I can hear pulsing in the silence of summer nights.

And there are the birds, the squabbles of flocks of jays and crows and woodpeckers laughing, the circling buzzards, hovering kestrels, the red kites that flap slow and merciless as the helicopters in Apocalypse Now, herons and cormorants cutting low, daring anyone to comment, chiff-chaffs and warblers in the fig tree, redstarts, chaffinches and the blackbirds that take over from the thrushes in the spring and sing and sing and sing into the last of the sun and the start of the moon. I cannot imagine a world without blackbirds. I cannot imagine a world without peace and green trees, wild tulips and bees in the honeysuckle tree that flowers all winter.

Sitting in the spring sunshine where the green is so green, and the silence is only birds and bees, I feel a million miles, light years away from the world of Stripe, the IRS, the administration that starts wars in foreign countries safely distant, and the people who complain about the price of petrol but never the loss of human life, the pillage of the oceans, the forests, the brutalisation of what we used to call human civilisation. This, the herons and orioles, the trees, the green, the crumbling walls with unseen veins of water running beneath the cool deep earth and the hedges full of blackbirds are what matters, and the time we have here is better spent with them and the promise of the next grandbaby, hanging onto the last hours of its untroubled amniotic ocean, than the irrelevance that is the virtual, the scrabbling for the next hit, the competitiveness that hides the ugly selfish side of our natures and calls it healthy, natural. I would rather the discomforts of this raw world of smoky chimney and the scampering of rodents in the attics, the perched owls beneath the porch, and say what I like about injustice and obscene wealth, wars and famines, because I needn’t fear the consequences of frightening off the punters who are happy about the wars in distant places as long as petrol is cheap and there are plenty of eggs in the supermarkets.

When they say to go and touch some grass, don’t waste your time touching a lawn mown to within an inch of its life. Go and drink the birdsong in the air, beneath the trees growing gnarled and twisted and unfurling year on year their new greenery, embrace what causes no suffering and hope to remember how it felt to be as clean and unsullied as the new baby on the brink of birth.