On the meadows by the river, I’ve seen this three times: a couple approaches a small group of heifers, quietly, slowly, a little cluster of three or four curious but wary animals, and then someone reaches out towards one, it stretches its head towards them and for a moment allows itself to be stroked on the nose. And the people and the cattle seem to study each other, standing calmly in the field, for long minutes. Do the people take their stillness from the animals, who were much more frisky in spring when they first arrived in the field, but who seem to have taken their slow calm from the freedom they now enjoy in those extensive and varied acres, thorn and bramble scrub, marsh, meadow, reeds, willow, river?

The third time, I took a photo from some way off, and this young man saw me and waved, and I approached and said in a wooden manner, that I was interested in people and cattle relating to each other, or some such awkward phrase, and would they mind if I took some more photos, and they were very gracious, as were the cattle, or so it seemed.

I said they seem so friendly! I said nothing about Arcadia.

The girl looked as if she were drawing strength from her communion with the animals, her companion, the boy, was more in the background. She was boldly, blackly dressed, with heavy make-up and a gentle manner. On her pale left arm, from shoulder to elbow, she carried the scars of dozens and dozens of short horizontal cuts, neat as patient embroidery.


2. Approaching Ely from Peterborough on the train a few weeks ago I saw such a pretty scene in the sunshine, a slow moving line of cows by the river bank, some of them drinking, an illustration of pastoral happiness, the kind of scene which makes you feel complacent as a human being: see! We can organise the world harmoniously, we are stewards and guardians, kind to all creation, and the cows reward us with this picture of calm contentment, and our children can grow up believing that nature is a kind of friendly farmyard. But by the time I had got off the train and walked to the river, the last one was leaving, they were all leisurely walking away. I’d missed the moment.

3. The other day I saw a squashed hedgehog on Broad Street. Hoping to give it a kind of burial place in a corner of a front garden nearby I tried to pick it up by one delicate-toed foot, but its severed leg came away in my hand.

I went to see if it were still there, on the south side of the cathedral, growing out from the hedge on the corner of the unmetalled road that leads to the Deanery, a fine deadly nightshade. So public! I hadn’t seen one for years; when I got home I looked it up to make sure. Apparently it’s not deadly to cattle or rabbits. It was still there, half crushed and suffocated by a Range Rover, big, grey and armoured, and illegally parked, though the hedgehog, poorly defended as it is, would say that all vehicles are armoured.

4. They said we could have a month’s rain in one day, but they didn’t tell us that the month would be this month – or last month, or the one before. There was enough to make a difference though. Two days later and the grass already shows hints of green. All around and high above the spire of St Mary’s the swifts display every evening until it’s nearly dark. Sometimes a screaming, plunging squadron, sometimes a twisting group that breaks up, disappears, comes together again out of nowhere in a different formation. As if they are both compelled to be together and to separate. Soon they’ll all be gone.