In the thick of it

Wading through mud and rueing February for its fickle nature, with frost one day and rain the next, John Lewis-Stempel takes a moment to admire the heron’s ability to keep clean in the mire

- John Lewis-Stempel

MUD, mud, inglorious mud. Nothing quite like it for boiling the blood. After the back-to-back days of rain came the inevitable consequence: mud. Mud around the hayracks, mud at the entrance to the chicken arks. Mud on the yard, mud on my clothes—even banging a fencing staple into a post spat mud into my eye. Mud on the verge: a long crenellated rut of it, where the left-rear wheel of the tractor perpetually overlaps the corner of the lane.

Mud. It infiltrates everything. A labrador, having evaded the ‘quarantine’ of the scullery, went to sleep on the dining-room floor, leaving a belly impression like a fossil imprint.

Mud. Eventually, it infiltrates the mind: the pervasiveness of it, the formlessness of it; the liver-ish stink of it, the repeated need to clear it up, the way it weighs down boots, causing us to walk leaden, in the manner of a deep-sea diver.