Photo by Simon Matzinger on Pexels.com

I’ve just got back from an exhilarating dog walk through the tail end of Storm Ciara, or maybe the head end of Storm Dennis, who knows. The lane follows the curve of a stream, which feeds into the river Hertford a few fields over, but you can see that it’s been manipulated at some point, the stream, to meet the requirements of drainage and farm land. In rough weather, when it’s rained a lot, the original river rises in the field, next to it, which once upon a time was a village park and cricket pitch. The old stream is slowed down to puddles of standing water, trying to speak its mother tongue, as if the compulsion to flow the way it has flowed for thousands of years is still strong. Whenever I see it, can see the track of it, the rises of…