Fieldfares, partridges and a love in idleness

When you first arrive on your peg before the drive what are you thinking? What are you really thinking?

We can reflect with remorse or happiness on the past and worry or gaze at our hopes for the future. But how many times are we truly centered on the “here and now”? A brief window in the day, a space, a sandwich between events, where we are verbally, maybe even physically, detached from colleagues and friends, but remain within earshot, with the same expectations. You may be entering a church, waiting to be called to present on stage, a quiet moment of reflection where the heart thumps, with anticipation.

And here you are now in that current state walking to your peg, a solitary individual. It was all jokes and laughter a minute earlier, but if you miss the first bird of the drive, the joke is on you. There is a certain rhythm, a procedure, an agenda to follow. First, unglove your gun, then look through the barrels to check there are no obstructions, observe where everyone else is, including the beaters, check where your feet are grounded, have your cartridges to hand, and then stop. It’s up to you now. All about reacting to that first sound.

No one has shouted “Forward” or “Over” or even called my name. The soil is claggy around my boots and fresh raindrops glisten in the dyeing field violas. An unexpected purple, yellow, and whiter shade of cream, a summer relic still here, just here, and if I was not here no one would know, and even now it is my secret. Everyone else is looking up at the grey sky. I am gazing down at this delicate wild viola called a heartsease, a flower once used for love charms and called ‘Love in idleness’. I guess that works, I am sort of idle at this precise moment, in between, with a deep love of the prescient, and a sharp state of consciousness.

I see, I hear, I smell, but don’t talk – I love this feeling, so soon to be shattered, I am edgy. Scanning the hedgerow in front for the first whirr of a partridge, winging across the stubbles, my ears direct my gaze up high in the sky, a “” dropping from the clouds. Quickly a mass of wings and sounds pour onto the red haws in the scruffy hedge. Light grey underwings flashing in the low sun affirm what my ears knew before my eyes confirmed. Fieldfares fresh from Scandinavia or maybe Russia? I wait for the whirr of the gamebirds.

Looking back at my feet I see the squelched and compacted clay misshapen by my wellie prints and a crushed, soil-stained ‘Love in idleness’ The last flower in the field, its moment is gone before the guns start popping.

A few moments later respectfully, I pick up and cradle the limp body of a partridge also gone but saved the dishonour, the ignominy of a misplaced wellie boot.