Chip Tolson

There were dry days and a steady breeze, earlier this week and it was time to light a bonfire. Over months hedges have been cut back, clumps of brambles have been cut out and branches have been lopped off trees or blown down in winter storms; these have all been gathered into piles for burning. The job has to be tackled with care as after only a few weeks small mammals, birds or insects have found refuge in the piles. So the fire is lit under a new pile.

Withth luck, and there is always a period before it is certain, the fire will taked and as it builds the old piles are moved across giving the chance for any resident livestock to make their escape.

There is a strange connection between the writing process and a successful day with a bonfinire. I have an obvious hesitation in mentioning ‘burning’ and ‘books’ in the same sentence, but bear with me, there is a parallel. There is a period, sometimes a long period, when ideas, plot and sub plots are accumulated before a story can be built. Then when the time and concept is right the whole comes together in a successful outcome – be it a cleared field or a book launched.

Yesterday Clare and I walked at Wimbleball, to the dam and back in the welcome sunshine. Just one other car in the car park, but it left and we felt we had the place to ourselves. The lake is full after all the last few months rain and spilling over the dam in full flow.

But we were not alone; as we gazed over the dam on the lakeside a rowing eight appeared, then another and another until there were eight eights, by the look of them a university rowing club down for the weekend, three crews were women and five were men. With their coxs that was seventy-two souls, add in the coaches (is that the correct term?) and helmsmen in their power boats, it must have been some eighty people on the water.

Practising, racing heats even, the five crews and three crews covered the water at good speed. For a while we saw a strange white marker keeping pace with them until we realized it was a drone, no doubt with a camera, filming their sport, from the side, from above and ahead as it swooped around.

We were far from being alone – oh, and there was an intrepid cyclist on a mountain bike, covered in mud, who had completed the nine mile perimeter circuit of the lake and a bunch of runners going over the dam and down the the River Hadeo outflow. It is great to see this expanse of inland water in use. More than sixty years ago I spent my summer holidays on Hill Farm, its land now submerged deep under this water; happy memories.