Six weeks of travel for work had left me disorientated and anxious. Hollowed out by time zones, airport transits, successive hotel rooms and the press of world news, bed rest couldn’t fix me. What I needed was to feel grounded, I finally realised. I needed to make myself feel at home.
So I drove to a local nature reserve, a tract of lowland heath. This is a habitat familiar to me from my Surrey childhood. Open expanses of heather and gorse, dwarf scrub, grass and scattered trees, the heaths here in East Anglia aren’t the same as the ones I grew up with. They’re drier, for the most part, with fewer areas of bog and standing water, and the fine white sand underfoot is far from the rich gold of Bagshot sands, but heaths they are, and thus magical. No other landscape feels so intensely known yet insistently strange to me. Part of that strangeness comes from heathland soundscapes, which aren’t melodic, but percussive, electrical. Sizzling grasshoppers, taut vibrations of dragonfly wings. Rustle of lizards, the mechanical reeling calls of nightjars, woodlarks singing melancholy phrases straight out of Eighties arcade games where alien ships drifted down black screens.
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