CONFRONT YOUR MAKER
31 July 2006

A few minutes ago the sky was almost all blue but now the small fluffy white clouds are gathering together, linking arms, closing down on shrinking patches of blue. A lone crow flies from left to right across my field of vision. The phrase ‘field of vision’ is one I have never used before and I feel somewhat uncomfortable using it now. The crow has now left my field of vision and I hope that is the last time I ever use that phrase.

In the distance can be heard the low hum of early morning cars taking their drivers to a job somewhere. Also in the distance I can hear some rooks in a rookery. I’m lying on my back in a Norfolk field. It is 6.38. I’ve been lying here for almost 17 minutes listening and staring at the sky. I’m listening for and hoping to hear a skylark.

In May/June last year, when I was living near Norwich, I used to walk through this field at least three mornings a week. There were always skylarks climbing high into the sky, singing their unbroken and unchained melody. Then, as now, I would lie on my back, heavy dew notwithstanding, and look and listen.

I planned to return to this spot in June this year and do the same thing, but it didn’t happen. Although skylarks are known to sing through the year, May and June is when they do it most frequently.

I’m sure it was this concentrated bout of skylark-watching and -listening last year that prompted me to write the SCORE, TAKE. But lying on my back in a field staring up at the sky and waiting for a skylark to start rising is something I’ve done since boyhood.

I acknowledge that our love of the Skylark is almost clichéd. Every half-baked romantic has fallen under its spell and tried to express something about it. And that Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams, has been rammed down the nation’s collective throat, by the nation’s guardians of middle-brow values, ever since he wrote it back in the 1920s. But as I’m laying here in this Norfolk field and I can feel something scratching at the back of my neck and I’m wondering if it’s an insect that is going to take a bite of my flesh or if it’s just a bit of a twig, I start to evolve a theory. This is sort of it:

All of us who in the past few thousand years (or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years) have lain on our backs watching a skylark climb higher and higher into the sky until he is just a tiny little dot against the vast sky while he continues to sing his song without even stopping to take a breath have wanted to identify with him. This small brown nondescript bird takes on the universe without fear, rising above all the petty squabbles and trials of our daily lives to confront our Maker. And we all need to confront our Maker from time to time, however existential you think you are. Not by shaking your fist at the heavens but with song and the dering do to climb higher than any other living creature of comparable size.

So, back to the SCORE 8 TAKE that I was saying I wrote last year. Don’t bother waiting until you have 17 other people to take out and listen to these wee brown birds. Get out yourself as soon as a May or June is at hand and your busy life allows. I promise you – 17 minutes of lying on your back listening to this tiny speck hundreds of feet above you will be one of the musical highs of your year.

My 17 minutes are up. I retrieve the twig from the back of my collar, pull myself up and trudge back across the fields to where the Land Rover is parked and a busy day awaits.