I am held in the hug of a cold, white fog. A muffling, wraparound duvet of listening quiet. The weather dampens sound and vision (with a profound noise-cancelling effect), anaesthetises the landscape and heightens the senses to the small close details that are revealed almost as I am upon them.
The downs have vanished, so I keep within the park pale of the Big House. Trees loom as if their ghosts have walked up to meet me: elegant chandeliers of horse chestnuts, broken, brittle ash and the wiggly limbs of oaks, squiggled by a fading marker pen on a blank white page.
In response to this year’s strange weather, oak leaves, usually a dull, unburnished copper on the ground by now, swirl a marmalade orange into the fog, like watercolour bleeding on to wet cartridge paper. Butter-gold field maples diffuse a porch-light glow into the vapour.
A tall Lombardy poplar appears like the shock of a narrow, high-rise building. It seems out of place: as if, with the weather pulled over our heads, there is no reason to look up, or remember the concept of height.
Other treasures appear: hazelnuts jammed into the barley-twist fissures of a sweet chestnut trunk, like fat copper currency – the work of a nuthatch or woodpecker. Small birds are in their subsongs, whistling introspectively to themselves, or making confiding contact calls.
Fog lends an invisibility cloak for a trespasser’s disguise, but it also muffles and confuses the senses. A short, slim man appears, with what seems to be a pheasant tail feather in his cap. It’s not a gamekeeper I know. I begin to speak, but the “man” falls towards me, alarmingly. I yelp as he materialises into a roe deer stood on its hind legs, feeding. It comes down with a startled bark. The “pheasant tail feather” is a single antler, the other having already been cast. We have frightened the life out of each other.
The deer turns and fades instantly, leaving a nibbled, lichened twig rebounding in its wake. My heart hammering, grinning to myself, I pull the intimacy of the fog around me again and walk into a pearly, mistletoe light.
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