Another train running on empty through the countryside, windows without faces, carriage after carriage lit for no one. Nobody to cast a passing glance towards a lone figure in the thick fog, looking up from beside the track.
In these conditions on the common, the railway line was my north and south, a fixed compass over ground with few bearings. I had lost an hour half-playing at being lost, enjoying the befuddlement of trees and bushes that came and went in the mist, my self-inflicted isolation shared with the invisible company and chatter of winter thrushes as they crisscrossed above. But I always kept an over-the-shoulder awareness of the wires along the track, as if I were freefalling with a strung-out bungee for safety.
I had enough solid map memory to strike out east for the river, knowing that it traced a wiggly parallel to the railway. I wellied down into a cattle-poached ditch, rose through wet grass spattered with goose droppings, then caught sight of the water at the exact moment the river express tooted its warning. I turned to greet the sound.
How would the medieval commoners have seen and defined the shape that pierced the fog? I saw a dart, a pencil tip, a jet fighter, a 21st-century image with wings as propeller-like blurs on either side of a short fuselage. Shooting along the river at eye level, it didn’t bear the hallmarks of a bird in flight, for it did not seem to flap. This was speed personified. Once I even dreamed myself as a kingfisher, not flying but zooming.
The bird came close enough and I saw it side-on for an instant. On a sunless day, there was no possibility of heady elation from brilliant blue. The kingfisher flashed a body of indeterminate grey, then sped past, disappearing into the murk.
The adrenaline rush subsided, and I pressed on downstream to a broad bend where a family trio of swans were loafing. One of the adults feigned industry by making a dilatory dabble in the water for food. The young bird wore the dirty colours of roadside slush long after snowfall. Its parents were virgin gloss – dazzling white standing out in a matt world.
• This article was amended on 25 November 2020. Because of an editing error, an earlier version included an unintended sentence at the start.
