Skylark lockdown

As we face the possibility of a second lockdown, of unknown proportions and duration, I recall the first.  We were self-isolating in deep country with a front-row seat on the Milky Way. Once a week I shouldered a backpack and walked to the village shop for basic provisions. The path crosses two fields, the further of which has always been a waterfall of skylark song, the notes cascading in droplets of joy on the winter cereals and the ears of passing, fearing man. 

On this day of sunshine and dread the larks were up there in numbers, the music flooding stereophonically from left and right. I squinted skyward, trying to spot them, using the dimly remembered advice from my father on the Long Mynd in about 1962: ‘Skylarks sound as if they have been up there forever. But they always come down after a  minute or so. You watch.’ And we kept our eyes on a vocalising speck till – ‘There it goes!’ – it dropped. I believed at the time that we made it drop by just standing there and looking. 

A lifetime later, in that Hampshire sky, I spotted a lark and waited for the world to turn in its familiar way. But the lark would not do my bidding. Not this time. Think of the lark as the idea I was waiting to have that would make sense of things. I waited for the lark to land so I could grasp the idea. But it would not land. And I realised the idea had been up there all along, singing in the blue.