THE KINGFISHER
I’ve had fifty five years on this planet and only seen a kingfisher in the wild once, and it was a fleeting sighting at that. I was sat by a river, somewhere in north-west Wales, on a pleasant summer afternoon. No-one else around and no sounds except the river and the birds in the trees that overhung it, casting lustrous green shadows across the water. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came this blue streak, moving at a speed almost too fast to follow, flying straight along the course of the river. I knew it could only have been a kingfisher, and that was confirmed when about five minutes later it came back the other way, moving at the same speed and with the same unwavering sense of purpose. It was what I call a Hughesian moment, the kind of arresting interaction with the wild that Ted Hughes always regarded with a degree of importance, acknowledging that this was evidence of the universe trying to communicate something to us, had we only the sense to understand it.
Rik Rawling 