Good karma

No radio, no telly, no internet. No mobile-phone signal. The stone cottage I’m staying in for the summer lies at the bottom of a steep, curved valley, well beyond reach of the 21st century. The day I moved in, a slender young deer in the next field watched me trundle my possessions down the path in a wheelbarrow. It stood motionless and stared with absorbed interest, as if a human being was a rare and extraordinary sighting.

I’ve been here a week. Unless I climb the path to the car and drive across a boulder-strewn waste to the nearest village, I live in a world in which the only noises are gentle ones supplied by nature. All I can hear now, for example, is the rain softly battering the young leaves, this same bird singing this same song, and the gurgle of a stream, which is the water supply. In the visitors’ book, someone has written that their grandfather lived in this quiet and remote place until 1916, then volunteered for France and took part in the battle of the Somme. Of all the myriad aspects of that ghastly business, it must have been the noise he found hardest to come to terms with. These days people pay good money, I know, to go on silent retreats supervised by whey-faced Buddhists: retreats with titles like ‘Rediscovering mindfulness in daily living’. I have once or twice tried tiptoeing about the cottage and surrounding woods in a mindful sort of way, carefully listening to the discourse going on in my own mind, but to be honest ITV1 would be more intellectually stimulating.