I am drawn again to the site. An involuntary drive makes me want to look around? So I park my car in the place I always used to and walked in.
There is a JCB working close by. I walk on and notice new orange fencing up using what I call pig sticks (curly pigs tails on the tops of the metal stakes) and more excavations started. The Brook of Plenty is dried up, completely dry, I have never seen that before. I walk across and onto the tunnel of graffiti, I feel alienated as the work by writers I was familiar with has all gone, and the new stuff that’s up is not reaching me, I can’t read it and it’s the same as you might see anywhere!
A feeling of what I knew disappearing with change, and new uncertainty washes over me as ‘My Country Park’ – ‘My Mental Exercise Yard’ – My Late Companions Favourite Place’ – ‘My Retreat From Urban Bustle’ kind of melting before me, as development and progress march on. This was an oasis, a place with no time, a secret place of recuperation, a place of interesting things, I wish I looked harder while it was quiet and a sense of regret seeps in…..but
I see a butterfly I don’t recognise and remember seeing on Twitter there being a national butterfly count happening, asking for day-dreamers like me to count butterflies and send the tallies off to their central HQ. So I counted what I saw, and sent the data off when I got back.
I walked back in and walked past the original excavations the two ponds, they still had water in the bottom. I passed a tractor with a guy doing nothing in. It was lunch time. I think his job was grass cutting. I saw a Green Woodpecker and also noticed all the trenches that had been previously dug were filled in! I paced out the scars on the ground they were about 32 yards long. The same as when I measured the trenches. There were dozens and dozens of them all filled in. In fact that is what the JCB was doing, filling in new ones!
There were 29 butterflies of 6 different species. I had to look up on the internet and found out they were called Speckled Woods. I saw 12 browny orange ones called Gate Keepers. I liked those they felt right for this place.
