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I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was merely preparing to take my seat in front of the TV with beer in hand and loud opinions galore. But the game was still all I could concentrate on. 

I headed out after lunch to see how many of the grid squares that I’d visited I could link together in an afternoon. I would ride through as many as possible before I ran out of time, and then zoom home for kick-off. It would be interesting to take stock of all I’d seen so far. 

This kingdom of mine might cover only twenty kilometres squared, but it seemed at times to span a thousand worlds. From winter to sum- mer, welcoming smiles to grumpy shouts, and from last week’s jaded streets to this long grass, busy with butterflies, where I lay on my back, alone and undisturbed, and enjoyed the warm sun on my face. 

Down in the distance I could see the city’s gleaming towers, shim- mering in the midsummer haze. I lay still for a while, listening, hov- ering above myself in my mind’s eye, allowing myself to settle into the grid square and its vibe. I heard birdsong and the hum of a motorway. ‘The language of birds is very ancient,’ wrote Gilbert White in a letter. ‘Little is said, but much is meant and understood.’ 

Each week I arrived in my grid square with little idea what might capture my interest, but an increased certainty that something would. As with all good exploration, there were hints and hopes about what I’d find, but each square also surprised me. 

This meant that if I found a square underwhelming, with little to interest me, the responsibility was likely to be mine. Was how much I saw dependent on how much I looked? Some squares buoyed my mood, while others merely matched it. A boring square wasn’t its fault; it was my fault. I knew that as I struggled lethargically round today’s streets, but I also excused myself on the grounds of illness. 

I had sweated and shivered through the night, unable to sleep. In the morning, I went to make myself some toast, but we’d run out of bread. I dragged myself to the shed to do some work, but after an inef- fectual hour of pretending to write this book, I tried to salvage some- thing useful from the day by fetching my camera and cycling out to investigate a grid square.

I sheltered beneath a large field maple tree, reframing my atti- tude to rain. Parking the grumbles and persuading myself instead how gleaming clean all the trees looked. Appreciating the gun-barrel-gran- ite skies. Remembering that a day in the rain is better than a day in the office. That kind of thing. 

One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the Greek words petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). We tend to think that our sense of smell is something to be sniffed at compared with the animal world’s, but we are astonishing- ly adept at detecting geosmin, the chemical released by dead microbes that is responsible for the heady smells of petrichor and pools of water. We can smell geosmin at a level of five parts per trillion – that’s thou- sands of times more sensitive than sharks are to the scent of blood. We may be so sensitive to it because detecting water on the savannah where we evolved was a vital evolutionary advantage. 

I had a free morning and my latest grid square lay before me, begin- ning with the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy road that sliced the square in half. I rode fast and free, blasting away the day’s earlier frustrations of waiting on the phone for an hour to speak to my electricity provider. Free at last! (Me, not the electric- ity.) North of the road, wheat fields ripened in the heat. South of the road lay a 1940s housing estate. The noisy road was once an important Roman route, though it was already an ancient thoroughfare by the time they arrived. I can’t begin to imagine what the traffic here will look like in another 2,000 years. 

A row of houses had been built recently between the road and those wheat fields that had been forest back when the Romans carved through this land in the name of progress. The new-builds were extrav- agant expanses of glass and steel, with large gravel areas for parking multiple cars. Sparrows jostled noisily in pink rose bushes and pet- als fell among the squabbling. A placard in one garden campaigned 

Meadows 

against a ‘green belt grab’ that proposed to build 4,000 more homes around here. It summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build. This family was enjoying their new home but understandably didn’t want all the neighbouring fields to be built on as well. I don’t like the countryside being turned into towns, but I also want everyone to have a home. Answers on a postcard to your MP, please. 

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But the word ‘waterfall’ was not something I had expected to see annotated on my suburban lowland map, so I was excited to investigate. 

My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls. 

I dug out a pair of shorts to welcome in June. My legs shone ala- baster white, brighter than the day’s glorious sun. The lightness I felt inside made me aware of how sluggish I had been throughout the dark half of the year. Today, though, I was alert and enthusiastic. Even bet- ter, a chalk stream kissed the corner of today’s grid square. So I began there, with the banks shaded by overhanging willow trees and lined with pink foxgloves, and with the clear water burbling. Trout nosed into the current beneath an arched brick bridge with an inscription saying it had been rebuilt in 1773. While the fish were free to swim, a ‘Private Property’ sign chained across the river prohibited curious explorers from enjoying the stream. 

I found an elevated spot where I could peep through the fence and look down on the new town being built across this blank grid square. Yet my map has never been blank. Even our brief history here stretches back hundreds of thousands of years to the Neanderthal hand axes dis- covered nearby, tools once used to butcher animals and make clothes. I’ve heard that sort of fact so often that it didn’t particularly astonish me. But learning that the axes were made by Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of archaic human, rather than by Homo sapiens, remind- ed me how rare it is for there to be just a single species within a genus (known as a monotypic genus). This is a dubious, lonely honour that we share with the dugong, narwhal, platypus, and not much else. 

There used to be nine species of human. That we alone remain is testament to our aggressive, expansionist success, wiping out many species on our march to dominance, from dodos and all of Australia’s megafauna, to the recent ivory-billed woodpecker and splendid poison 

Swifts 

frog (the first two examples when I asked Google which species have gone extinct recently). We are uniquely dangerous. 

But our success over the other Homo species was also down to our superior skills of communication and community. Yes, we wreck everything, but we are also well suited to fixing problems, if only we choose to do so. We need now to tell the stories that will ignite every- body to care about the perilous state of nature and the impact its col- lapse is having on people across the world. And then we need our local, national and international communities to work together to turn that around. Will we choose to balance our remorseless progress with con- cern and empathy? 

You should sit in nature for twenty minutes every day, they say, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. I sat for a while on the bench on a small, triangular village green because I thought I was too busy to be doing this today. It was a cold and blustery morn- ing, so I was wearing a hat and gloves again and hunkering down into my collar. I’d hung all the washing on the line before heading out, but now it looked like it was going to pour with rain. I was also in a bit of a grump because this square looked dull on the map. But a few min- utes of stillness helped to settle me into a calmer mood and slowed my impatient mind. 

A sign on the green said the village was supporting No Mow May, which explained why the grass was peppered with wildflowers. In Britain we revere short, stripy lawns. But the charity Plantlife urges us to enjoy the beauty and the wildlife benefits that come from allowing lawns, greens and verges to run a little wild for a month. After No Mow May, up to 200 species can be found flowering on lawns, including 

Buttercups 

such rarities as meadow saxifrage, knotted clover and eyebright, as well as an abundance of daisy, white clover and selfheal. The longer you leave a lawn unmown, the wider the range of plants, while cutting the grass every four weeks generates the greatest quantity of wildflowers and nectar. 

My childhood bedroom overlooked a village green, and I have been fond of those open spaces ever since. My brother and I used to hang out there with our friends. It was our amphitheatre, the scene of day- long rugby matches, and a cricket pitch with the twin hazards of hor- rific bounce after cows had been herded across the wicket, and the risk of a lost ball if an exuberant shot sent it flying into the garden of the grumpy man who lived in the cottage in the centre of the green. 

Given that it was early May, it was apt that the pub on today’s charming village green was called The Green Man. Appearing in vari- ous guises over time – usually a green head sprouting leaves and foliage – the Green Man used to be a central figure in May Day celebrations. 

Green Man 

His origins are murky, but he has been carved in churches and build- ings for a thousand years as a symbol of spring’s rebirth. The Romans had similar figures, as seen, for example, in Nero’s Golden House pal- ace. Bacchus, god of wine, nature and harvest, was often portrayed as a leaf-crowned lord, so he might be the ancestor of our Green Man. 

The Gaelic festival of Beltane was a forerunner of today’s numerous worldwide celebrations of May Day. It was a community celebration of summer’s return. The origin of the word Beltane is ‘bright fire’ and, as always, bonfires played an important role in the rituals. Revellers danced around purifying flames to welcome the lighter half of the year after the long winter. When farmers led their animals out to spring pastures, they made sure to drive them between two fires to bring good luck.