Fens

I suppose that the area immediately around the village where I grew up isn't really, properly Fens, but I always have a nostalgic feeling for 'home' that pictures it as a land of flat fields and wide open skies. Barely ten miles from my childhood home, the Fens proper start - travel further east, and the A47 take you through the old, ancient lands, full of stories and legends: the warrior rebel Hereward, the lights in the mist that lead travellers to their deaths, freshly-caught fish that speak prophesy. As we drove today across the border in Norfolk, through old villages that bred the dead-before-my-time members of my family, I could feel the sense of opportunity, prosperity and connectivity with everything that it bright and shiny and 'now' slipping away. No Mercs and BMWs here - scribbled illegible spray paint on the grey, pebble-dashed wall of a house; a dented and sagging vehicle in the driveway. Boys cycling aimlessly around a sparse patch of grass, dressed in identikit sub-urban synthetics and branded caps. Everywhere, the all-pervasive sense that this area in a once-rich arable heartland had become the cold end of the universe, where the light of material sucess shone wan.

And yet, and yet. To hear the local accent again made my heart glad, and the scenery filled me with joy - fields below road level, tall reeds along the banks. An area where 'new' rivers are born, parallel cuts in the black earth, and drainage ditches are named for their length, and where the sea keeps an uneasy truce with the land, borne of human ingenuity and time. I will always feel that a part of me is home when I come here, but that home is an old one.