Keeping tags...

Carabus auronitens - a ground beetle.

Perhaps it’s an age thing, but most days I carry a series of lists in my head: jobs to do, people to call, articles to write... I juggle calendars too: appointments, holiday plans, who in the family is where and when… And because I live by the sea, awareness of the tides is a constant, not least for walking the whippet.

So, you’d think that when I’m away in the hills I might give up all this mental note taking. ‘Live in the moment,’ is what my wife Jane likes to advise me. She’s right of course, for one of the chief virtues of the outdoors is its ability to shift our focus from the stresses of the everyday.

But that doesn’t mean I stop making lists.

This summer, like many before, I’ve recorded all the wildlife I’ve encountered, from insects to birds and mammals. Unsurprisingly, the list gets longer the more time I spent in the Alps. In part, that’s because of the greater bio diversity here, but I sense it’s also something to do with a landscape that encourages us to look, and not just at the view.

It strikes me too, that my alpine lists are different from those I compile at home. And that’s because, at root, they are founded on place rather than a pressure to complete or comply. Indeed, the word I used in the paragraph above is their defining feature – they are a ‘record’ of lived experience rather than a tick list to be completed.

Looking at my logs for this year, I’ve a few firsts, many old favourites and number of uncertainties to check - largely beetles! Not that precise identification matters. For as I turn the pages of my journals I remember the moments of seeing, the flashes of colour, the shadows on the shifting grass…

Sometimes, with all our daily distractions, it’s easy to overlook what a magical world we live in.