Into the Wind

'It's a chilly old day out there today.

'We've got quite a strong, fresh, northerly,

'north-easterly wind blowing through some fairly heavy showers.

'Now, the showers, hopefully, will start to diminish.

'They will gradually start to become fewer and further between.

'Maybe one or two more heading through The Wash and down inland

'that way later on today,

'but we'll get some sunny spells between these showers,

'and the showers aren't lasting long.

'They're blowing through on that breeze quite quickly.

'The coastal waters forecast valid until midday,

'for The Wash. Wind force seven to eight,

'becoming force five to seven. Wind direction north-easterly,

'maximum gusts 62 knots, becoming 43 knots.

'Sea state, rough. Pressure 1,009 millibars and visibility excellent.'

BIRDSONG

It's a big flock of golden plovers.

Such a sad song.

These birds are really good at flying, but they're all tested here.

-They're all...?

-Tested, really tested.

Even the ones that have come from a long, long way away, even they...

It's really hard to stay in the air.

-Because of the wind?

-Yeah.

-There's hardly any wind.

-No, but it's still blasting.

Is that the mound over there that they're heading to?

It could be, yeah.

It's this weird barrow or tumulus right on the edge of the salt marsh.

'It's the highest place around and it's the place I imagine capturing

'that kind of pure Wash wind.'

'I've been bird-watching ever since I was six or seven.

'Starting in the back garden and widening my horizons as much as

'I possibly could. Going out first in kind of crappy places,

'reservoirs and sewage farms,

'but I've never been to as wild a place as this before I came here.'

Do you see anything out there?

Yes. It's absolutely wonderful, actually.

These knot are just making the most beautiful helixes and spurts.

Like fantastic clouds of dust.

Lit dust.

They're so close to the sea,

they look like they're, sort of, sea spray just launched into the air.

There must be 10,000 there.

Seething and pulsing in the storm of life.

Is this what you would have seen when you first came here?

I think actually this bank even wasn't here when I first came here.

I think I was on a further inland bank, so I'm now walking where,

when I came as a teenager,

there would have been marsh or even open mud.

I was about 13 or 14

and my dad had taken me here.

I had time off school. I was recovering from glandular fever

and this was my recuperation treat, was to come here.

So that was a sweet thing to do.

To give me time, yeah.

And I knew it was good, and I knew it was hard to get to. It was...

There's a fantastic flock of geese just going past now.

The opposite to those not

all dark and inky, like writing on the sky.

Serious by comparison, when there's not.

But it was a place, a great place to meet the sea, The Wash,

because it seemed to be a place where the sea was permanently

meeting the land and both were unresolved about

the status of each.

And I like that, even then. I liked that questionable shore.

It's a scary place here, in its own way. It's so...

..apparently empty and, yet, so extraordinarily powerful,

the sky.

But also the very flatness of the place.

And of course, this is a very man-made landscape.

This edge is a brokered edge,

an edge made by banks and reclamation of land.

AEROPLANE DRONE

Plus the United States Air Force and maybe the RAF constantly overhead.

The sea and the marsh here being a kind of non-place and, therefore,

the appropriate place for the dropping of bombs -

dummy bombs, practice bombs,

by planes and by pilots who maybe tomorrow will be in the Middle East,

dropping bombs.

'When I was young, it was birds,

'and so walking was just the means to meet the birds.

'But as I've got older,

'the birds, in some ways, have become more incidental.

There are all the famous quotations, you know, Kierkegaard and others.

"Do not lose your desire to walk. Above all, do not lose your desire

"to walk, I walk myself well, every day,

"into good health."

I believe all that.

Interestingly, the speed with which you're through a landscape,

not only changes what you see, but how you experience it.

There's a wonderful story about Matisse

going for a drive in a car,

and being horrified at how fast the car was moving,

and insisting in future that no car journey that he was part of should

travel at more than 5mph, because he couldn't see the trees properly.

I actually find that moving,

walking, particularly, the length of the stride

becomes part of the length of a line.

I know lots of poets

would say the same thing and I think it was said that

you can tell the difference between

Coleridge and Wordsworth. The way they walked is written straight

into the way they wrote their poems.

Coleridge used to run around the place,

up and down mountains and was always breaking off his walk to look

at things. And his line lengths replicate that,

whereas Wordsworth used to prefer to compose when walking on a level,

gravelled pathway, so his writing has an evenness.

But anyway, but writing,

and putting the world into words is definitely easier

and comes to you through the rhythm of a stride,

and that comes, again, best of all when you're on your own.

'Dusk on the winter solstice,

'the shortest day and longest night of the year.

'I was cold and alone on a track on the Somerset Levels.

'Looking towards the dying light in the west.

'Moving across the sky in front of me, like the breath of the earth,

'were thousands of birds.

'Starlings, arriving to roost.

'To put away their day, and so, too, on this day, the year.

'From the next dawn, the glorious creep towards Spring

'would be underway,

'more light, a future, repairs, song, nests and eggs.'

It is a sort of oblivion that I'm seeking, by being on my own

out in a place like this.

A kind of dissolve

into a landscape.

I think that's, ultimately, for me

what looking at birds does and what being in open space does.

'It takes the bigness of self and dissolves it.'

As a radio producer I spend a lot of my time recording people in places

like this, for radio programmes, and the wind is an enemy at that point.

It's what radio producers call wild track.

It's the thing that you want a bit of, in order to prove to people that

you've been out here like it is now, gusting.

But you don't want so much.

I've always, as a bird person as well, wanted to pay more attention

to the wild track. Wild track is the thing.

Ultimately, for me, it's not the people, he said, misanthropically!

The problem, of course, is that it's really, really hard to record,

because in some ways it doesn't exist as a sound.

What we hear as, and what we think of as the wind, is the sound that

the wind is making, as it rubs over the surface of the world,

whether that's these marsh grasses here,

or the sea further out or the trees behind us.

So I've got some fantasy about trying to record pure wind,

wind as wind might sound in its own ear.

And I kind of imagine myself listening in my retirement

to my wind tapes,

where all the people have stopped talking,

all the people I've been recording for years and years have stopped,

and now it's just the turn

of the really big voices

to have their say.

What are you hearing?

I can hear this incredible...

GEESE CACKLE

..rubbery brent goose noise.

A flock of brent geese just flew

down into the salt marshes in front of us,

about 300 or so, and they're talking to one another.

Rubbery conversation.

And as well as that I can hear the wind, of course,

and the wind is suitably supporting, it is always the supporting note,

is the note that runs...

..beneath everything.

I love looking up the sky.

It's a, sort of, transport to childhood, somehow.

I don't quite know why.

This is what the surface of the Earth sees.

The wind is visible, the way the clouds are moving.

The first time the wind really most obviously came to call on me

was when, as a young teenager, I used to have a newspaper round.

I lived in Bristol and my newspaper round took me across

the Clifton Suspension Bridge,

which is a fantastic spanning of the Avon Gorge.

A natural wind tunnel and funnel, and creator of its own wind.

And one day, I was taking my bag of newspapers

across the bridge, to deliver them on the other side -

the afternoon Bristol evening paper -

and there was one other person on the bridge ahead of me.

And as I gathered towards him,

in a windy day, not unlike today, actually,

November-ish and cold and already getting dark

at three o'clock in the afternoon,

this man, he was a man,

looked behind him once, caught my eye briefly,

and then, in an amazingly elegant and, kind of, continuous piece

of movement, vaulted over the side of the bridge.

Into the wind, as it seemed.

Into the air, which, of course, didn't hold him up.

Momentarily, he seemed to, sort of, stall in the air,

like I knew birds would when they were mastering the wind,

but because he wasn't a bird, he didn't stop,

and down he went. And I didn't follow him down.

I dropped my bicycle which I was riding,

I dropped my bag of newspapers and ran back to the tollbooth

on the side of the bridge.

I ran back, I think, because I thought, if I got back quick enough,

someone might be able to catch him somehow at the bottom,

which obviously didn't happen.

But that was a wind story to me,

because it proved to me, in some ways, that the air,

as pushed through that gorge, was a place simply that

we couldn't go, that wasn't ours for entering or mastering in any way.

And yet the birds were rising and falling in that wind.

It's their place, not ours.

So now, here I am,

in this extraordinary open stage,

this cockpit of weather

at the bottom of The Wash,

with about five or six weather systems,

different winds, different clouds, beetling overhead.

With my...

..equivalent of a pilgrim's staff or dowser's rod.

Come to capture some wind, if I can.

It looks pretty scary up ahead.

Fantastic storm light now.

But the mound is here, floodlit.

It's like a long barrow,

you expect some ancient king to be interred in there.

Actually, I think it's a failed modern attempt at creating

a freshwater reservoir.

If we can just get to there,

then we can...secure our wind.

It suddenly feels all severe.

You feel like you're under the level of everything around you,

off the bank, on the mud.

Footprints and goose feet and wildfowl feet.

Weird marsh grass.

Curlews and skylarks and tiny little meadow pipit noises.

Always moving from the fresh to the salt.

WIND SOUND INTENISFIES

It's pure wind.

I feel like I'm nearer to the wind

than I've been before.

Just right into it.

You feel it coming straight at you,

from who knows where, out to the north.

Like it hasn't stopped for anything yet.

I'm probably the first thing this wind has hit

for about 1,000 miles.

And it's telling me so.

HE CHUCKLES

I can hear it as wind, it's really good.

I don't hear the sea and I don't hear the grass.

There's not much grass, anyway, and the mud is quiet.

It's, kind of, bird wind.

When you're in it and it's blowing you around,

but it's not actually sounding

like anything other than itself, which is what you are, as well.

I sometimes think, if the dead go anywhere, they go

into the wind.

That's where everything that was is kept in motion,

blowing and going.

All the birds and all the people.

WIND RUMBLES

WIND WHISTLES