Cabin Fever

New year, new reading list: I have finally got round to reading one of the books on a list compiled from various scraps of paper and internet bookmarks.  The title Deep Country - Five Years in the Welsh Hills had insinuated itself into my brain thanks to Caught By The River. CBTR is a gem of a site put together by a trio of sometime music executives who rekindled their passion for angling and nature and decided to inspire "anyone who looks out of an office window and thinks Christ, there's got to be more to it than this." (quotation from an interview by Hole In Corner magazine)

Deep Country distils one man's experience of solitude over the course of five years. Neil Ansell occupied a remote cottage without mains electricity or water. He had no car and no phone. Friends visited and he invited the local sheep farmer in for tea, but most of the time he was totally alone and sometimes saw not another soul for weeks on end. He was consumed by the daily chores of collecting firewood and water, growing food or foraging for it. He was intimately anchored by the habits and habitats of the local wildlife. An owl eludes him, then he notices its silhouette hidden in the perfect daylight shadow cast by an ancient oak. A woodcock is entirely camouflaged in leaf litter until he sees movement: his own reflection in the bird's eye. A diseased squirrel makes an agonised super-effort to reach the hole in a tree it has in mind before it curls up to die.

Ansell writes that he'd decided to live this lifestyle as a challenge, but "if it had ever been a test, I had long ago torn up the exam paper and walked out of the room; this was just me, living the life that I had chosen." He never felt bored, or lonely, or even introspective. Ansell has a new book out now: Deer Island, published by Little Toller Books.

Tucked away within Caught By The River I discovered their Nature Book Reader, a list of recommendations and reviews by contributors such as Bill Drummond, Edwyn Collins and Tracey Thorn. It's a neat compilation of dog-eared nostalgia and reverence for the fine aesthetics, wisdom, lyricism and facts found in the publications that influenced love and understanding of the natural world.

Thoreau's Walden is in there of course, plus some of my favourites such as Waterlog by Roger Deakin and The Peregrine by J. A. Baker.