Bodies of water

on herons, home, friends, and the struggle to be still. Featuring Grey heron, Pennyghael, Bittern, Silverdale, Little egret, & Hampstead.

I haven’t posted for a few weeks. Duck Month is over now, and I had 3 pieces that I wrote and didn’t post because they haven’t finished cooking yet. They also all got bigger than I meant them to, and I got cold (webbed) feet and wondered if maybe I was exposing a bit too much of myself in them. They cover meat, morality, mortality, men, magical thinking, and that one time I ended up trapped on a farm with the leader of a far-right organisation.

I will gradually post them in the next few months, I’m just letting you know that if you see anything with duck in the title in the future it will be a big, greasy, personal essay.¹

I also wrote a mini-monograph (except it’s not mini at all) on Meadowsweet on my other substack Foraged and Fermented.

On Herons and homes.

I dream about moving to Mull, about making my home in a landscape carved out by glaciers and volcanoes, living under a sky that gets visited by the aurora borealis every winter, falling asleep to the sounds of curlew calls and howling wind, and filling my lungs every morning with the smell of salt air, seaweed, and sheep shit. I wonder how long it would take for the landscape to get inside me, for me to be shaped by it too.

The only reason I went to Mull the first time was as a base to visit the much smaller island of Iona from. You can’t get to Iona without going through Mull, and 20 minutes into the drive west from the ferry port in Craignure was all it took for me to fall in love with the larger island’s craggy beauty.

I’d been wanting to go to Iona ever since seeing the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead. I was on a date with a man who made me mixtapes, and sent me letters, and always had clammy hands. I told him not to be surprised if I wept a little into my popcorn. A film doesn’t need to be a tearjerker for me to cry. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be a film, I’ve cried at the trailers before. Cinemas are just emotionally charged spaces, like the 253 bus and bathtubs and the ocean and mountains. Crying at a tourist board advert for a tiny Scottish island was a new one for me though, and I took it as a sign that it was a place I was supposed to go, a pilgrimage I was meant to take.

Much later I realised that I’d only cried because The Waterboys song soundtracking the advert was one I’d listened to with an ex I was still in love with. A man whose sweat I would have happily worn as perfume.

It was 16 years between the advert and the first trip there, but Iona was always floating around in the back of my mind. In the meantime I fell for other places and wondered where I was meant to be. Because surely there is a place I’m meant to be, where there is community and all the best birds and every season smells great and I wake up and think yes this is my home, this is my place, this is where love lives, this is where the happiness is at. 

It feels sacrilegious to say it but, in spite of its beauty, Iona didn’t do it for me. 16 years of building it up as an answer to a question I hadn’t even articulated yet was probably too much pressure for any one place.

I’d been told Iona was “a thin place”, a sacred place where no matter what your beliefs you would feel holy, but Mull had already evoked all of the feelings Iona was supposed to, and it did it when my heart had been caught off guard, not expecting anything.

June 20th. Grey Heron. Pennyghael, isle of Mull.

We’re staying in an old croft house, thick white walls and a bright red roof. We stayed in the same place last March and, after falling asleep on the sofa downstairs, I dreamt the living room filled up with ghosts. I asked them to be quiet because I was trying to get some sleep but they said, "This is our place. You go back upstairs". I woke up immediately and ran upstairs with my duvet trailing behind me. It makes sense to me that the isle of Mull would be populated with ghosts, all the people forced to leave during The Clearances² coming home to haunt the land and the Airbnb’s their old homes have been turned into.

It’s the third time I’ve visited and I’ve thought about ghosts every time, about the ghosts of people in places and places in people and people in people. I’ve also wondered if land misses people, if it ever longs for us in the way that we long for it.

It’s summer solstice and we’re sitting on a rock in Pennyghael (aka Peighinn nan Gàidheal) looking out over Loch Scridain, hoping to see an otter. If you want to see an otter you have to be good at being still, or lucky, or both. I’ve been feeling especially lucky the last few days; lucky to see bottlenose dolphins swimming next to the boat on the way to the Treshnish isles, lucky to see swallow chicks with gaping mouths getting fed by their parents, and lucky(ish) with the weather.

Being still is the hard part. I’m a naturally restless person, but I’m also worried we’ll settle in the wrong spot. What if we spend 2 hours being completely still and the otters are further down the shore? What if we’re stock-still and nothing happens except that I have to listen to my thoughts?

I keep my brain busy looking at misty mountains in the distance, trying to work out how I’d mix the colours to paint them. Mars black, titanium white, and a touch of ultramarine blue? I’d never do it justice anyway, not just because I’m shit at painting but because I don’t think any painting could do it justice.

The scene isn’t still. Forked Swallow tails flash past continuously, a couple of comically bright-billed Oystercatchers are bumbling around, and down on the shoreline is a very active Sandpiper. I worry that I’m near its nest but the Sandpiper is a restless, skittery bird, teetering and bobbing as it paces back and forth wherever I see it. Always calling out, with shrill little peeps. I’ve learnt that a lot of the times when I’m feeling annoyed by something or someone it’s actually some aspect of me being reflected back that I’m really feeling irritated by. So, when I’m uncharitable and think, “hey, Sandpiper. Why don’t you relax for a minute and maybe shut the fuck up too?”, it’s directed more at myself than at the bird.

It’s not just the birds that are busy, everything is moving. It might be imperceptible to my eyes, but even the mountains are moving, fidgety stone giants that “sway to the seismic song of Earth”. I’ve read that millions of years ago the Scottish mountains and the Appalachians were joined together, forming the central Pangean mountain range back when the earth was home to a single supercontinent, before we all drifted apart.

This is the calmest I’ve seen any water here yet, but it’s full of life and the surface is constantly being breached. A fish jumps out, a gull does a perfect impression of a dive bomber, and then I spot something else emerging from the loch - fur! My perspective is off, and it's all so quick that I think I’ve spotted an otter at first, then a dog, it only takes on its final form as a common seal for a moment before going back under again. It’s infinitely more exciting to see one swimming around than all the ones I’ve seen basking lazily on rocks.

A Grey heron flies into the scene, and even though I’ve seen a hundred herons before, I feel lucky whenever I get to spend time around one. There’s an old Scottish superstition that the heron waxes and wanes along with the cycle of the moon, taking on it’s plumpest form when the moon is full. We’re two days away from a full moon but it looks as slender as any heron I’ve seen. I’m a rapt audience, binoculars focused and my body mirroring the stillness of the bird. Every time the beak daggers down into the water, heron meets heron reflection, and comes back up with a fish I feel like I’m being rewarded for my patience too, only with a dopamine hit rather than dinner.

Herons belong to the family of birds known as Ardeidae, and there are 3 species of regularly occurring heron in the UK; the Grey Heron, the Bittern, and the Little Egret. In explaining the etymological origins of the Ardeidae family the 17th century writer John Swan wrote

in Latin she is called Ardea, of ardeo to burn; chiefly because she is an angrie creature, or because she is greatly inflamed with lust;

This heron doesn’t appear to be furious and horny, but you can project all kinds of things onto a still and silent bird. Let the motionless shapeshift. It’s a 1920s flapper, feathery dress shimmering in the wind. It’s a cool boy, slicked back hair blowing in the breeze, but every bit the gangly teenager as soon as he walks. It’s an old Zen teacher, here to give us all a lesson in stillness and how to make peace with your reflection.

Taken on my phone, held up to binoculars

• Otter count: 0

• Heron count: 1

June 23rd. Bittern. RSPB Leighton Moss, Silverdale, Lancashire.

I’ve used “Colin” as a verb, and a silent punishment, for years. I didn’t answer my friend George’s calls for a week once and he sent me a text, “have you Colin’d me?” (I had). If I changed someone’s name to Colin in my phone it was a great way to stop myself from texting them or answering their calls. I couldn’t rely on my self-control to stop me, but I could rely on my revulsion at that name. No Colin has ever wronged me, I just don’t like it as a name. It makes me feel the same way that the word “moist” does for some people.

There’s that one Marks and Spencer’s cheap chocolate caterpillar-shaped cake that gets a lot more praise than it really deserves, that’s done a little to redeem the name. But it’s this Colin, RSPB worker Colin, welcoming us to Leighton Moss nature reserve, that really changes how I feel about the name. I won’t be able to ‘Colin’ anyone anymore, because now I’ll associate it with friendliness, warmth and enthusiasm. I tell Colin we’ve come because we’re really hoping to see Bitterns and otters. He shows us a map of the freshwater wetlands, goes through the highlights of every hide, tells us how to spot the difference between the male and female Marsh harrier, talks to us about the Bearded tit population there and when to come back to see them, and wishes us luck with the Bitterns and otters.

The Bittern is a streaky brown, stocky, thick-necked heron who lives in dense reedbeds. It went extinct in the UK in the 1870s, partly due to being hunted for food, but also because of draining of their wetland habitat for agriculture. It was rescued from the brink of a second UK extinction in the 1990s by conservation efforts, but remains one of our rarest breeding birds. They’re masters of camouflage, and described by all the field guides as shy, secretive, and hard to spot. I’ve never seen one before, and it’s absolutely not a given that I will see one here, but we’re at the largest reedbed in northwest England (at least that's what Colin tells me) and I’m still feeling lucky.

Queuing up for carrot cake and coffee in the reserve cafe I start to imagine how I might feel if I get to see a Bittern, my nose gets cold and a couple of excited tears trickle down my cheek. I’ve always been a big crier, but this year it’s been off the charts, and it doesn’t take much to evoke it; a bit of golden light, a Mount Eerie song, a Bittern flying through the reedbed in my imagination, me freaking out about where I’m at in my life and where I should be. I’m starting to wonder if my body is all water, if I’m just a body of water.

The walk to the first hide is soundtracked by Cetti’s warblers and me, talking too much; commenting on every single patch of meadowsweet, doing an impression of Ivor Cutler saying gruts, wondering out loud if we’ll see otters, and “did you put sunscreen on? Isn’t this weather great?” Mum, who is much better at being still than I am, suggests I stop talking for a moment and listen to the sound the reeds are making as they rustle in the breeze.

As I’m watching a male Marsh harrier, an outrageously beautiful bird of prey, gliding over the water, I hear excited chatter in the hide. It’s two men, one telling the other he’s spotted a Bittern. The one who spotted it is promising his friend it really is a Bittern, he saw it crane it’s neck, he swore it moved just seconds ago. I scan the reeds and the water but can’t see anything, so I ask him where it is. He makes room for me to look out from the best spot, and gives detailed instructions - go left of that rusty dock leaf and right of those three swans and just up behind the tuft of grass, see that brown streak? That’s it.

I know Bitterns are good at being still, and maybe there are chicks and it doesn’t want any movement to alert the Marsh harrier to their whereabouts, but this is something else. This is beyond “master of camouflage”. I can’t make a bird shape out of the streak of brown, even through the amazing binoculars we’ve got on loan from the gift shop. After spending forever feeling like I’m looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures, trying really hard and seeing nothing but squiggles, the friend of the Bittern-spotter whispers to me that he thinks we might all be looking at a leaf.

Mum and I spend 20 minutes walking to the next hide, hoping to see otters, but leave (otterless) after 5 minutes because it’s too crowded and noisy. I suggest we check back in and see if the brown streak has moved, thinking if it has maybe I can say I’ve seen a Bittern. Pointless though, I know it won’t matter if I can say it, because I won’t have felt it.

A man with a big lens budges up so that I can sit down, and my bum’s barely warmed the seat when he shouts, “BITTERN!” He’s so excited he forgets to take any photos, but no proof’s needed. There’s no doubt this time, no trying to make out a shape, it’s at eye level, flying past just a few metres in front of us, and my whole body feels it.

You know that feeling when you’re falling for someone and you’re years away from changing their name in your phone to Colin, and their whole existence feels like a miracle, and you feel lucky to be living in the world at the same time as them? That’s how I feel when I see the Bittern, like I’m giddy with new love. There are no tears, just my stomach doing somersaults and my heart going BOOOOM.

Wikimedia pic of the Eurasian Bittern

• Otter count: 0

• Heron count: 2 (1 definitely real, 1 probably a leaf)

June 23rd. Little egret. RSPB Morecambe bay, Lancashire.

We could have walked here from the Leighton Moss reserve gift shop, it’s only a mile and a half away, but it’s getting late and there’s an almost 300 mile journey ahead of us so we’re a bit rushed for time.

A flying visit to the Eric Morecambe hide overlooking the saltmarsh gives us Avocets, Knots and Godwits. There’s a man in there who helps me identify if they're Bar-tailed or Black-tailed Godwits, but I forget as soon as he tells me because I'm busy thinking wow, everyone here's so friendly, and there's all these birds I don't get at home, and I bet the rent is cheap. I should look up the rent prices. I could go to Leighton Moss every week (free with my RSPB membership), I could see Bitterns and Curlews and Bearded tits all the time. On top of that, I'd only be 90 minutes away from my little brother, my friend Naomi, and the last man I Colin'd.

I know I've got to be quick, so I'm in gorge mode with my eyes. Take in the rufous bellies and the upturned beaks and the soar, swoop, and swirl, and oh, what's that? First I whisper, “mum, I think I just saw an otter”. I keep watching, the sunlight is glaring and bouncing off the water, but I can see warm brown and a hint of green. I can’t think what else it could be. A bit louder, “I really think this is an otter, it's eating something. Maybe seaweed. Do they eat seaweed?” I'm so focused in on this creature that everything else is background noise. “Oh my god, it is. It's a fucking otter”. I'm about to hand mum the binoculars, when the otter rearranges itself, turns an angle and becomes a duck, a Teal. Warm brown head, green streak, bill.

I’ve been so honed in on this one duck masquerading as an otter that I’ve missed that everyone else has migrated over to the other side of the hide. We’ve got to leave, load up the map, feed the CD player, and get going, but I want to see what they’re all looking at. Bright white, hunched up like a sulking toddler, a quick glimpse of a gorgeous Little egret.

• Otter count: 1? Okay, fine 0.

• Heron count: 1

July 1st. Grey heron. Ladies pond, Hampstead heath.

I love swimming, but when I’m in a pool my brain can get noisy, so I list things in alphabetical order to keep my mind too busy to go down annoying avenues or shame spirals. Sometimes I list plants, sometimes people I know, sometimes people I’ve loved, but mostly birds.

Avocet, Bittern, Cetti’s Warbler, Dunnock, Egret, that guy’s going too fucking fast in the slow lane, Fulmar, Gannet, Hen Harrier, ugh water in my nose, Ibis, Jay, Kittiwake, oh shit my nipple just came out, Lapwing, Marsh Harrier, have I got dinnerlady tits?, N, wait what begins with n, nothing begins with n does it, n must be a letter without birds, you idiot there’s nuthatch, isn’t there a night heron or something? Oh my god, nightingale and nightjar, how do you forget your favourites? Osprey, Peregrine Falcon, Quail, Reed warbler, Serin, T, hmm can I just go with tits (blue, great, long-tailed, bearded, dinnerlady) for T because there isn’t anything right? Oh no am I going to bump into him if I do backstroke? I’m probably not doing backstroke right, Oh wait yeah T, Teal, okay we’re onto the super tricky letters now so I can just go back to A. but first Whimbrel. Wheatear too. Water rail. Whinchat. Water pipit. Okay that’s enough. Aquatic Warbler, Balearic shearwater.

There’s no intrusive thoughts to drown out if I’m swimming in the sea, or a lake, or river. I’m just there. My most present moments are my most heron-like ones; focused entirely on my dinner, inflamed with lust or fury, or hanging out in wild bodies of water. There’s a nationwide shortage of clean and accessible places to swim outdoors though.

A snapshot of the waters where I live could be anywhere in England.

• Our local river has had 4,500 hours of untreated sewage pumped into it by Thames Water this year, but it doesn’t make the top 5 most polluted rivers in England.

• There’s a stream and waterfall a few miles away on a private estate that spans thousands of acres and has been in the same family since the 16th century. The county newspaper recently wrote a gushing piece about the “enchanting cascade”, saying “While you can't touch or jump in the water, a bridleway allows members of the public to experience the beauty spot from afar and take photos.”

• My favourite body of water as a child was a big lake near my great granny’s house, home to Great crested grebes and grey wagtails. It’s owned by a fishing syndicate now and I have to do a little worm-like wriggle on my belly to get under the big fence they’ve erected around it.

Being able to go swimming in the clean waters of Hampstead heath ponds whenever I want is one of the very few things I miss about living in London. In fact, it’s just that, walking across Walthamshow marshes, and living down the road from some of my best friends.

I’ve had an on and off love affair with London for over 20 years. I started going up when I was 14 with my friend Helene, we’d spend most weekends partying in a massive nightclub that hosted 24 hour raves under some railway arches next to the river Thames. It was little details that made me fall for London; like the warm, dusty air that hits you when you descend the escalators into a tube station, the crackle of fluorescent lighting in a newsagents open past 5pm, or the thrill of being able to catch a bus at any time of the night. I loved all the things that made it feel the most foreign from where I was from.

The first home I ever lived in was a privately rented flat next to a pond in Surrey, we got kicked out of there and climbed up the social housing ladder. All of our homes were in rural places, places where there’s now very little social housing left, thanks (in part) to Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. We were really lucky that we only had to spend 18 months in halfway houses before getting a flat, and then a house with a garden. The house we got was in a village where the bus came once a week and the school only had 14 pupils. Backing onto our garden was a field with swings and a slide where bats would fly around your face at night, and between the field and an ancient woodland was a sewage works that all us kids were certain was haunted. It’s the place that has felt most like home out of all the places I’ve lived.

We moved house twice after the haunted sewer place. The last place I lived in before I moved to London had thin walls that meant I could hear every time the neighbours called each other morons (neither of them were wrong) and they could hear every time I screamed at my mum, “I FUCKING HATE LIVING HERE".”

When I was 18 I moved to Holloway road in north London, taking all my belongings up in carrier bags over the course of multiple train journeys. I lived with Helene (we shared a bedroom and pushed the two single beds together to make one) and 3 women that were strangers; Abby, Emelie, and Lotta. The strangers turned into great friends (one of them is still one of my best friends), dusty tube air started smelling like danger to me so I walked everywhere, and my favourite things about London became the things that reminded me most of home; it’s green and watery spaces. Richmond park, the river Thames, the Walthamstow marshes, and Hampstead heath (where the ponds were free to swim in for the first few years of living in London).

I can trace almost all of my friends in London back to Helene. She was in the year above me at school and we had no friends in common, but one day she came up to me and asked if I wanted to bunk off and go swimming, and I needed very little persuasion to bunk off school or to go swimming. It’s through moving up to London with Helene that I met Emelie and Lotta, and through Emelie and Lotta that I met Sophie and she became one of my best friends too. How lucky that my my friends friends are wonderful people, that one little moment when I was 14 has snaked outwards into all these other people coming into my life.

Why do I feel so childish whenever I write ‘best friend’, like it should be written in scented gel ink with a heart dotting the i? There’s a natural ebb and flow to them, but my friendships with women have been so much more expansive and romantic than my ‘romantic’ relationships with men or women. They’ve lasted a lot longer too.

It’s been 2 years since I moved out of London. It wasn’t only because I couldn’t afford the rent anymore, I missed the nightingales and nightjars and hills of the county I was born in, and all the air in London started to smell dangerous. I’ve come to north London to see Sophie, to go to the cinema and have a sleepover and try to cram a million conversations into less than 24 hours. It’s a bonus that we’re going swimming in Hampstead ponds, a cherry on top of a cake that I’m gorging.

In the coffee shop before our swim we're planning our next zine. We haven't made one in years, not since Amtrak Adventures 7 or 8 years ago, and we have this loose idea that this one will be about longing. It's always played such a big part in our friendship, a shared yearning. We think we're going to make a zine about all the years we spent going to Los Angeles, pining for it and pinning our happiness to a place on the map, making the good times into a destination you can visit. But also about the crushes we got on the Americans who showed us just enough that we could turn them into whatever we wanted to see, about reading Leonard Cohen poems to each other in Forest lawn cemetery, about trying and failing to recreate the smell of Pappy & Harriet’s on an August evening.

Over coffee and toast Sophie tells me about Doggerland, about how the sea between us and where Emelie and Lotta live now was once land, marshland, heavily wooded valleys, and swampy lagoons. We talk more about the zine and and the plan for it morphs, it becomes a zine that we’re going to write about our friendship as a place. Our friendship as a house. Our friendship as an island. Our friendship as a mountain. Our friendship as the water between two islands.

The post-coffee swim doesn’t last for long, not long enough.

If you read anything about swimming in the Ladies pond at Hampstead, or speak to anyone who’s been swimming there, you’ll hear the same words come up over and over; Eden, paradise, haven, heaven. You probably wouldn’t have to pay £4.70 to get into heaven, but I don’t think it’s hyperbole. It does feel like a sacred space.

Sophie’s friend has joined us, so there’s 3 of us in the water, looking up when the heron flies over. Neck pulled back in, massive wings outspread, soft grey belly directly above us. There are moments in my life that when I think about them later, I think I could happily freeze that moment and live in it for a bit. This is one of them; swimming with two brilliant, funny women in the reflection of a flying Grey heron.

It’s only when I’m climbing out of the pond, up the little ladder, that I start pining. I want all the amazing women in my life in one place, bring them from Sweden and Surrey and Manchester and Cumberland and London and Los Angeles and Ohio and put them in one place with a big pond and herons flying over. Make that my home.

• Otter count: 0 (but London remains the only place I’ve ever seen otters, in the zoo)

• Heron count: 1

• Times I worried I was just writing a long version of “the real treasure is the friends we made along the way” meme: countless

Heron from another day on Hampstead heath

I’ll leave you with a great poem by Mary Oliver, a podcast, and a playlist by me.

Heron Rises from The Dark, Summer Pond - Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

1. This ended up being a big greasy, personal essay too but it was nothing more than a bit of heron admiration when I sat down to write it.

2. The Clearances took place from about 1750 to 1860 and happened across the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Crofters were forcibly removed from land they’d be living and working on for generations by landowners who realised they could make more money from grazing sheep on the land than they could from the Crofters rent. Sometimes cottages were burnt down to force people to leave. Just five miles from where we stayed was the ruined township of Shiaba. The Scotsman writes, about Shiaba, “In 1845 the Duke of Argyll ordered an eviction notice and within just two years had managed to clear 90% of the residents to make way for sheep farming. By the start of the 1860s, only three families remained. Occupying the shepherd’s cottage, the very last family moved out in 1937.”