Four Fields & some big sky thinking with Tim Dee

Four Fields by Tim Dee, as I mentioned a while back, is a book that has had a bit of a history with me.

I had invested in a paperback copy as soon as it was published having started my Beating the Bounds project around the fields that surround us here in the Tamar Valley and with a view to uncovering all the original field names. That project grew into a close look at everything I could find within a mile radius of home...at the time I compared it to that thing we used to do at school, you know, making a square of a wire coat hanger, flinging it over your shoulder and then closely examining everything that lay within.

Tim Dee's premise is the story of four very different fields spread around the world...

'walkable, mappable, man-made, movable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing...'

I am sure there will be a series of posts to come on Four Fields because it is a book to savour and consider slowly along with the astonishing depth and breadth of Tim Dee's writing. The book becomes a meditation, lyrical and meaningful and with deep resonances that I find somehow echo through my days.

For example I read this early one morning... Tim Dee has moved on from the Fens of Cambridgeshire and is now in Africa as night descends...

'After the lone tyrant sun of the day, barging all over, came the democracy of night, ancient lights, a myriad silver pin-suns. Their waltzing spangle said you are there and we are here, here and there and everywhere; a concert of stars spun through space, distant, open-mouthed, silent yet shouting; now is yesterday, here was tomorrow.'

We do that concert of stars here in the Tamar Valley too and are so fortunate to live in an area of nil light pollution barring our own. If we switch off the houselights a velvet dark descends and the sky becomes our own private planetarium.

Suddenly, as I read, and in that way that a book has of being able to take you somewhere else in your mind, I was thinking about Offspringette in New Zealand. Our tomorrow is always yesterday for her, and of course we miss her hugely, but she is happy, has a wonderful new job, we talk a lot and one of the things we often do is hand over the sun. I will send a picture of the sun setting here...

...Offspringette will send me back a picture of the sun rising there.

Just imagine how long that would have taken back in the day. I'd have taken a shot on my Instamatic, waited until the film was finished, sent it off to be developed, forgotten I had taken the picture, eventually written a letter and included the picture, posted it off... heavens, we'd be through an equinox at least, summer would be into winter by the time I had handed over the sun and that moment.

'Coming your way,' I say, ' get ready to catch it...' and I ping off a picture of a Tamar Valley sunset as the sun sinks below the horizon.

'Got it,' will come the reply and a picture flashes up of dawn sun creeping over the South Island garden.

The world and the distance that felt so huge and so far suddenly feels a little bit smaller to both of us and we often say we're looking at the same moon too,  something that really resonated when I was in New Zealand visiting last year and Offspringette and I sat and watched that full moon rise over Kaikoura. I think we both agreed to etch that night in our memory banks and think of it when we watched the moon and the stars in future and were missing each other.

Meanwhile Tim Dee looks at the vastness of the stars in an African sky...

'The shock comes, once again, at the demonstration of so much other, a star for every lark, a star for every grain of sand. And once again the oldness of the view, the way looking up shreds your life, strips it back, joins you to all those who have looked up, millennia of watchers, a star for every gazer.'

A star for every gazer...isn't that just perfect.

Just about every thought has me dashing off to Alice Oswald these days; my go-to poet along with Gerard Manley Hopkins... something Miss Maud circa 1972 Nonsuch Girls A Level English would never have credited. Mention of stars had me reaching for Woods etc and a beautiful poem entitled A Star Here And a Star There..

'the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
a candle sound, too far way to read by

the first whisper of stars is a candle sound
those faraway stars that rise and give themselves airs
         A star here and a star there
the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
that candle sound too far away to read by'

More about Four Fields to come I'm sure because I haven't even mentioned the fact that when Tim talks about 'my friend Kathleen' and I ferret around in Sightlines until I find Kathleen Jamie talking about 'my friend Tim' that I start to make connections and understand here are two writers who share friendship, and common writing ground; who both see and relate the detail that it is so easy to miss, ploughing furrows (sorry) that I treasure and I know many of you do too.

If you have read Four Fields please do share your thoughts.

I have Tim Dee's other book The Running Sky here and unread too. It was one of my Dad's favourites so I will be reading that soon too.

And I wonder if you too can identify with that feeling of sky and the way it connects you with the out of sight but never out of mind...

And when you've done that please do scroll down for  the chance of a gift...