"I've spent most of my life under the cover of trees, and the rhythms of the woodland year have been a kind of metronome: that burst of brilliance and energy in the spring, the long, dense trance of summer, the sumptuous fading-away of the autumn, the clean, bare months of winter, the season of working and cutting back. I reckoned I could always lose myself in a wood, not just in its spaces, but in the layers of history bound up in its grain and forkings and clow cycles of light and shade. A wood's aura of history seems to go back not just beyond what generations of humans have done to it, but beyond civilisation altogether. The forest, the wildwood, is the nature we think we have, in both senses, 'grown out of', and in woods you have always the feel of 'going back'. They are places of long memory, and resilience"

- Richard Mabey, from Nature Cure: A Story of Depression and Healing.

"The long, dense trance of summer" - niiiiiiice

Mabey grew up in my hometown Berkhamsted. For most of his life he continued to live in the Chilterns (Nature Cure is about his decision to jolt himself out of depression by moving to the very different landscape of East Anglia). 

I wonder where he lived in Berko and whether he frequented what we called The Wood.

 (There are plenty of other woods around Berkhamsted but for us, this, being the nearest one, was just The Wood. A magical place, for boys running wild and free in the school holidays.  But lLooking on maps, the Wood is considered so insignificant, it doesn't even have a name - nor could I find any photo documentation up there. It seems to have the status of an oversize spinney, the kind of geographical feature that no one bothers to memorialize.) 

Although known as a naturalist - author of the best-selling guide to foraging Food For Free, during that early '70s cultural moment of interest in self-sufficiency, The Good Life etc -  Mabey actually wrote one of the earliest serious books about pop: part of that flurry of rock books that came out between 1968-70. 

Discovering this irritated me as I had imagined I was 

a/ the first rock critic to come from my town 

b/ the first rock critic to come from my school. 

The Pop Process is a curious book: a melange of sociology (Mabey had been involved in an earlier publication about class) and enthused pop reviewing (largely remixed from articles for places like New Society). There is a detailed account of a gig by a local band in Berkhamsted Town Hall.  

I am fascinated by these early documents of people trying in real time to make sense of what had happened from the mid-50s to the mid-60s.  Or not quite real-time, but very immediate recollection in the aftermath of the headlong rush of it all. 

Here are my attempts to move into the Mabey Zone.  Not bad as first attempts at Nature Writing.