We try to leave the place as we find it, this is what we’ve always done. This part of the river is so familiar to me now, the water, the way it shows different faces in different seasons. From the leaves on the surface in the autumn, to the high, green reeds and dragonflies in the spring. I see the beauty in each season and embrace each one knowing it will soon be over and the next will begin. There is very little that can take me from the trance of the water right now, the bliss I get from the cold. There is hardly anything that makes me stop and think, this is not beautiful.
Except now it’s winter, we can spot ugly marks in the landscape. It’s not the lack of leaves that is unattractive, or the cold. It’s the tiny glimpses of colour see that are startling and out of place. Shards of tin cans that shouldn’t be there, or the orange cloud of a shopping bag, like an unnatural jellyfish just under the surface. These are relics that we can’t ignore, that stand more obviously without the laughter and sunshine of the summer and spring, without the plants and the grasses that hide them. Sometimes we catch glimpses of plastic bottles and wrappers at the side of the bank. The sky is white and the water dull, I spy yet more manmade specks in the hedgerows, beer bottles and food containers. A disposable barbeque lurks hidden beneath the lower branches of a bush, ash spilling out of it onto the ground. My stomach drops at the sight of it all. It’s not something that you can easily ignore. I’m sure some of this damage is accidental, litter caught in the wind and swept away, or items innocently forgotten, but even though unintentional, the damage is the same.
