In February of 2022 I was given a twenty-five per cent chance of surviving a major operation. It was the closest in my life I had come to death. After twelve hours of surgery there followed an induced coma, delirium and hallucinations…and a slow recovery. Within two weeks I came home, confined to bed all I could do was to lie on my back and be thankful that I was alive. Just the year before we had moved from central London and now we were in a rural setting, an exodus from city to country so common in our post-pandemic era. From the bedroom window I could see two Plane trees on the green opposite our house that were heavy with blossom. I thought of The Selfish Giant, Oscar Wilde’s book for children that I had read so many times to my own children, and how the blossom in the garden of the selfish giant had softened his heart to the trespassing children after a long, long winter. They gave me comfort. Through the open window I could also hear birdsong, different types of bird calls that I could not identify.
But there was also another sound that started in early morning and this sound was new to this place. Where we lived was not under a commercial flight path. In the part of London we had moved from you could see the passenger planes begin their descent into Heathrow to the west of London. During the time I had been in hospital, Russia had invaded Ukraine. Not far from where we lived are Lakenheath and Mildenhall, effectively two US Air Force bases and now military transport planes were flying in every day presumably bringing in armaments from the US and using these bases as staging posts for their onward journey.
As I recovered I started to venture outside and began to photograph what I saw in the sky. I bought a long lens and a new camera and would take drives into the countryside, to the many bird sanctuaries in Norfolk and surrounding counties. I also stood with the fighter aircraft spotters at Lakenheath’s viewing area and watched as the F-35’s came in to land from their training sorties.
My new appreciation of life, an acute awareness of existence and the beauty in the world was tempered by the sound of war. I realised that these two things, the birds flying overhead and the war machines also flying overhead in the same airspace were symbolic of our times. Environmental erasure with the decline in bird numbers, and yet still a beautiful presence in this most abundant of British counties. And then this other more ominous presence, again symbolic of a more fractious world that has seen conflict return to Europe and more recently in Gaza, on a scale not seen for nearly eighty years.