Catkins are absurd. They dangle in the dark woods, waggle in the wind, absurdly fragile and ephemeral yet exposed to the harshest weather. They cannot be a sign of spring before there’s a proper winter, but they just cannot wait.
From little bullets on the twigs they begin their stretch into the new year with a spirited innocence. Hazels in Northway woods grow on the dark side of Wenlock Edge. Where the scarp slope plunges through north-west facing woods the winter sun barely gets a look in. These woods are in shadow until Valentine’s day.
The tail-end of a storm rumbles through the tops of larch trees with the sound of sea waves shifting shingle. During the small hours the wind has been rough and raw, shoving roofs about like tents, cracking branches. Nowhere near as strong as it was further north, the storm nevertheless has spilled an Atlantic electricity into the air. Now on the ground there is mossy quiet, ferns and muddy stillness.
Rain thickens down near vertical banks with lots of young yews creating a new-old wood under the masts of the larch plantation. Honeysuckle is the first in leaf. Little grey-blue leaves stick their tongues out from the strangling sprawl of vines to taste the mild damp of January.
A few white flower buds open in the brambles where wrens make stone-knocking calls as if to lure a wanderer from the path into mischief.
The old railway line runs through Northway woods. It once sidled along Wenlock Edge to Church Stretton but now, where it bends southward, the woodland ride of the trackway heads into the sun. Light floods down the space between the trees.
The catkins are effulgent. As the light catches their dandling movement they glow with a green-gold light like the comet Lovejoy passing overhead.
The two together - catkin and comet - make the idea of time absurd. One has a few days to shake its golden pollen into the wind for the next season; the other burns rock and ice dust on a journey through space and will not pass this way again for 8,000 years. Each is escaping from the death of winter, seeding the void, becoming light.
Twitter: @DrPaulEvans1
