Nice weather for a sofa safari

You don’t need to venture outdoors to enjoy nature, says the star of TV’S Great Escapes, you just need to find a good lookout

One of the problems with perpetual rain – and there are many – is moving around a waterlogged landscape. It’s not just the fact that one is constantly stepping over streams that were once paths, it’s that you have to do so wearing nine pounds of mud on each foot. This is good for the thighs, heaving one foot out of a squelching mire to take a staggering step, before repeating the process ad infinitum to get from a soaking A to a very moist B. There’s also the delight of slippery rocks and bits of wood. Vaulting a fence becomes something of a lottery, one that will either result in an athletic landing that draws admiring glances from passers-by, or a wild pin-wheeling of the arms followed by a face-plant in mud. There’s the everpresent exhilaration of knowing you’re one step away from the sort of fracture that makes paramedics pass out, a kind of lower-limb roulette that keeps you nicely focused during any walk.

For you readers, I like to provide at least one salient observation each week about the landscape that surrounds us down here in Dartmouth. The snag is that going outside nowadays seems to involve staring fixedly at my boot tips, breathing heavily, with the odd wild glance skywards as my feet skid beneath me. So if Mohammed cannot go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed – and this week I’ll be observing the great outdoors from the comfort of my home.

This is a splendid way to watch wildlife, involving as it does a cup of coffee, and being warm and dry. Every house has a place like this, where you can settle down and look at the outside world. In our case it’s a low-slung window that gives you the feeling you’re suspended over the valley as it runs towards the River Dart. It’s far and away the best seat in the house (I’m typing this sitting there now, with Reubs’ soft muzzle resting on my lap), and we all bicker over it. Abandon it and someone jumps in while it’s still warm. This even applies to oneyear-old Isla, who loves nothing more than pressing her face against the glass to watch the world go by (she’ll even lick the pane in excited moments).

My girlfriend Tam has hung two bird feeders on the fence outside, and as the steam curls from my mug on the floor beside me, all it takes is a turn of the head to watch blue tits and robins strut their stuff. The bird feeders are hol- lowed-out logs with holes in the bark, into which are stuffed lard balls moulded around seeds and nuts. It’s been a tough year for birds, with the wet weather affecting the insect population, so you have the added feel-good factor of knowing you’re providing a meal for them while they provide a spectacle for you. Every now and then the dark shadow of a buzzard swoops down the valley, while in the trees are crows, bright of eye and glossy of feather.

As I’m looking down on the paddock as well, I often see the less-glamorous local wildlife going about its business. We live in an old farmyard, so mice seem to feature strongly, scuttling from the hedge to the bins and back again. For some reason mice always give me the heebie-jeebies, so it’s nice to see them from my lofty perch. Tam was emptying one of the bins the other day and a mouse ran up her arm. ‘Oh look,’ she said calmly, ‘a mouse. How sweet.’ I would have been doing laps of the yard squealing like a piglet. A massive loss of manly credentials, but there we go.

And so the hours pass observing the yard, the paddock and the valley beyond. It’s a timeless scene that – perversely – is ever changing. Sitting here is also comfortable, doesn’t carry the threat of a compound fracture, and isn’t tiring. As the rain drums on the window pane, and the dark clouds scud over a blurred horizon, it seems to me that at such times the best way to report on the outside is unequivocally from the inside.