Niall Benvie. Clay Bolt. Paul Harcourt Davies.

On his last post Clay asked about the connection of our readers with nature, well I, for one, cannot imagine my life without being metaphorically ‘plugged in’ to what is around me. Through times of blissful joy and even deep sadness, of elation and deep depression, nature has been friend, comfort, saviour and a ready means of escape.

We have a ‘calenda’r here on the Italian hillside that anticipates the end to hard and prolonged winters. The first hoopoes call in mid March roughly contemporaneous with the yack-yacking that heralds the arrival of wrynecks: this year, on the 31st March (some four days earlier than other years) our nightingales sounded the first long notes of their  ’wind-up’ before they go full throttle, day and night. Orioles chimed the first liquid cadence five days ago and today, 18th April the ‘boys are back in town’…a squadron of bee eaters returning to their cliff holes some 500m from our house. Others who love nature will understand our joy: many would look askance if I even bothered to try and explain.

Most days, whether for an hour or much more, I engage in some form of manual work – it is the price one pays for living in (and simultaneously renovating) an old house on a hill in Italy. Other than the ‘building site‘  there is the garden some two acres of far-from-manicured land, where grass and other plants vie for supremacy and have to be kept at bay. Podere Montecucco (literally nutter’s hill farm) was an old farmstead and the residual nitrogenous matter in the soil enables us to grow immense nettles: the balance lies in retaining large patches for the larvae of colourful butterflies and being able to walk unstung.

I can survive repetitive (and occasionally painful) work by letting my mind wander – bringing it quickly back in control when using the table saw and other potentially lethal machinery. I never really know what the day will bring, but it inevitably means that memories are dragged up from the depths of my cerebral cortex. In fact, it alarms me that millions of useful brain cells are dying daily via the ageing process ad leaving those that store the inane words of and obscure 60’s surfin’ songs and 70‘s ‘prog rock’ riffs for example! There are also those moments of near-excruciating embarrassment where it is as if some inner imp says “having a nice day, my friend well…remember this. Cringe baby cringe.”

Smells are for me a most potent trigger (Smell – how does it affect your personal perception of nature ?) and I have written on this before. The act of pruning a straggling plant of thyme sends me back to my first trip to Crete to walk along a ridge in a storm where this plant formed the scrub or ‘phrygana’. The smell of a coal fire when first lit, with its complex tars and sulphurous overtones, catapults me back to a grey day in Pontycymer, the one-time mining village in the Welsh valleys where I lived for the first 4 years of my life.

Yesterday, I felt weary but happy for winter seems to have gone and I could work in a higher ambient temperature at a greater rate of production. I needed to escape the piles of sawdust and shavings and so wandered down our track to an accompanying film score of nightingales, hoopoes, cuckoo and wryneck…with blackcaps, blackbirds and many others also vocally denoting their territories. I crossed the ditch that marks our boundary  to the field beyond, splashed with dandelions and speedwell, to look back towards the house, still visible before the oaks and walnut leaves draw a veil over the old place. I wanted to try and get some panoramas using that very function in the Sony NEX 7 to frame things with the blackthorn hedge – food plant for scarce swallowtails and a source of materials for sloe gin!

One of my favourite butterflies is the orange tip (Anthocaris cardamines)

From the corner of my eye I saw the first male orange tip crossing the field  and the time machine within my brain thrust me back to May 1955.  This is an annual event where the delicious joy of seeing one of my favourite butterflies again is tinged with a profound sadness that always makes me well up inside as vivid and precious memories of a small life lost take hold.

I first saw this harbinger of spring in the grassland at the foot of the path at my paternal grandmother’s home flitting amongst the cuckoo flowers. The sense of its beauty enchanted me – the same emotion experienced since with so many other aspects of nature: the delirium is my drug of choice – both cheap and with no after effects beyond a feeling of well-being!

I was lost in my reverie and startled to hear my grandmother’s approaching footsteps – this was ‘forbidden territory’ where dire warnings had warned that there was a big fox (even then an attractive thought to me…). She was calling my name, but in no angry way and I turned to have her hug me and utter through her tears “ Paul fach, your little brother Philip has been taken to live with Jesus and the angels”…disbelief gave way to blind rage for, only the day before, I had been driven by my grandfather in his immaculate Austin 7 (Ruby) to see a new brother I longed for. This was an important occasion and my grandfather, always dapper, had donned his trilby hat and spats for the occasion. For months I had bored everyone rigid with tales of what we would do together. I had not imagined a sister for I already had one of those and now… that baby brother was not there. Philip had been born with a hole in the heart and he survived but three days in those times before repair became routine. The effect on all of us was devastating – I became a difficult withdrawn child (and proceeded to difficult adult…or so I am told!)  and my anger and hurt at my brother being ‘taken’ laid the firm foundations of my atheism. No benevolent deity – not even the brooding bible-black entity of my grandmother’s rain soaked chapel.

That memory is still vivid – people say five year olds have no real appreciation of death. wrong, wrong, wrong… I can see Philip in my mind’s eye now – tiny, seemingly perfect and blonde where the rest of us were swarthy, back-haired Celts from birth. The memory has never left me for, as a child I revisited it night after night before falling asleep

Two years later, my dear brother Peter came along and, when he got bigger, I took him everywhere with me – usually on my shoulders to look for butterflies, find ponds with newts, look for birds’ nests and a host of other things. Peter is both my brother and my very dear friend – guitarist extraordinary, fossil collector, cook and excellent company – kind to a fault. He is very much in my thoughts at the moment for, after a period of unbelievable (and utterly unnecessary) stress, he is recovering from a heart attack. I can hardly wait to get him back out here with us for a bit of Podere Montecucco nature therapy and some sunshine. His passion for fossils and minerals matches mine for insects and flowers…to outsiders we can bore for Europe when allowed to. We share a connection to the land around us via slightly different yet over-lapping routes.

A brother in a million – Pete saddles up his ’335′ guitar whilst vocalist Ash Morgan (he of the current ‘The Voice’ fame) lubricates his tonsils with water in preparation at my daughter Hannah’s wedding in August 2007. The guitarist choses a more traditional form of libation to get his fingers moving!