Location: Village Green, Woodcote, Oxfordshire, UK
Date: 7th June 2020
Time: 8:59 – 09:14
Weather: Sunny, light cloud with a gentle breeze
Temperature: 13oC
Average Sound Level: 43.7dBSPL (LAeq)
The stillness of a Sunday morning finds me capturing myself breathing.
A handful of cyclists converge in the car park to begin their descent, silent, spare the clattering prelude of pedals and chains. A red kite bursts out of the background, drawing my attention, it’s wings clipping the leaves above my head. It banks and circles, rising quickly as we make eye contact. A car horn, the cooing of a pigeon straining to be acknowledged, the intermittent buzzing of a hedge strimmer, crows, blackbirds, tits and psithurism. For a while the silence of familiarity offers a space to hear my thoughts; powerlessness, fake news, black lives, ignorance, inaction, meaning. Lost in circles of possibility, probability and conjecture, I drop the words and return to listening, as only listening seems to make any sense.