Lost and found
THE air bites shrewdly,’ as the Bard would say, ‘it is very cold.’ So cold, in fact, that the roads are lethal with black ice, the puddles in the drive are frozen solid all day and the dogs pick their way across the frosty fields as if every step were torture. On the other hand, the sky is crystal clear and, providing one layers up to the point at which one can no longer move one’s arms, it is a joy to be outdoors.
Indeed, this week we made the four-hour round trip on foot to a ruined farm we normally only walk to in the summer. The final approach is along a narrow path between rocks and opens out into a natural, south-facing amphitheatre of about 10 acres suspended high above the Atlantic and backed by cliffs. It is a sheltered, secret spot. There is a singlestorey farmhouse with massive fireplaces at each gable end and half a dozen barns and byres— all roofless and windowless.
Although this could have been our 50th visit, we still explored each of the buildings, wondering at the workmanship and imagining the lives of the family who once inhabited them. This is where they must have cut their peat for the fire; this is where they must have drawn their water; this is where they must have baked their bread. According to the 1926 census, it was occupied by two elderly sisters. By the 1936 census, it was empty.
Afterwards, sitting with our backs against the house, the sun warming our faces, a flask of tea warming our insides, we silently contemplated a time and place where things were harder, but simpler, when people were selfreliant and closer to Nature. This remote, beautiful, abandoned farm is a monument to a better, happier, more spiritual world. A lost world.
I am afraid I think more than I should about lost things. Lost places, lost opportunities, lost possessions, lost ideas, lost memories (not everyone suffers from this; Themistocles, an Athenian general, but you knew that, complained: ‘I remember what I do not want to remember, but am unable to forget what I want to forget’), lost music (almost all that is left of Monteverdi’s lost opera L’arianna is the dramatic refrain: ‘Let me die! What do you think can comfort me in such harsh fate, in such great suffering? Let me die!’)—the list seems endless. It seems to be part of human nature to prize that which we have lost more than that which we have. Consider, for example, how we obsess over animals that are already extinct, yet do pathetically little to save those under threat.
Fingers, ears and toes felt under threat on the chilly homeward tramp (as Twain once remarked, if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we’d have frozen to death), for I lost feeling in all of them.
My father used to boast—in a voice that implied we should all go around naked apart from, say, a grass skirt, even in the depths of winter—that we are touched by the Gulf Stream on this coast. Ha! Anyway, the latest research suggests that, thanks to climate change, its effect is weakening and this weather is to be the new normal. Something else to be added to the list of our losses.
Back to the Bard. Thankfully, he believed it was a jolly good thing to dwell on loss: ‘The grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.’ We wouldn’t want that. Not on top of this bitter cold.
We obsess over extinct animals, yet do pathetically little to save those under threat