George invites us to share the sound of nature around him. This is wonderful, thanks George.

So hi, this is George in Shropshire again! Second one this morning actually, but I thought – I thought I’d just do a nice, quiet recording of just wind – breeze, rather – and see what you can hear in the background – because that’s a Raven, croaking away.

(George is silent for a short while. A bird can be heard in the background.)

There’s a Crow and I can see a Buzzard hovering – oh, I don’t know – a couple of hundred metres away – it may call.

(George is silent again.)

I think the Raven’s just flown away. There’s an aeroplane going over in the distance, probably on another one of those trips down to – flights down to Spain, that’s happening at the moment. It’s about the only place people are flying to in Europe, Manchester to Malaga – or there abouts.

It’s good to stop and just listen when you get the opportunity. Just concentrate on what you can hear and forget everything else. It’s a bit like the Mindfulness exercises ….. the leaves rustling. There’s a tractor slowly – I think probably cutting a field that’s a bit overgrown, but it’s downwind so I can’t hear it at all and the helicopter that’s been buzzing me for the last half hour has finally gone away – hopefully run out of fuel, so he’s gone home.
And Lupin is lost in the reed bed that’s just over there. That’s the boggy part of my countryside, it’s – once upon a time, this was just unclaimed marsh and then it was enclosed, probably two hundred years ago, drained, but there are still patches of good old bog, where you get Snipe and Pheasants, Partridge, probably odds and ends – and other birds as well.

(Another short silence.)

Yeah, there’s really very little bird song now. It stopped about two weeks ago, after we’d had a really wet week and up ’til then, birds had been singing like mad – you know, the migrants that had nested and brought up their chicks – they were still singing until that dose of rain. Even the Thrushes have almost stopped singing now, they’ve all decided “We don’t need to mate any more, so we don’t need to sing, mark out our territiories, appeal to our mates.”

(George laughs)

Perhaps a metaphor for human life as well, when you get to a certain stage of your journey.
Anyway – yeah, hope you enjoyed that, just time to relax, shut your eyes, listen. The sound of breeze through trees with leaves on – bit like the sound of waves lapping up the shore. It’s one of those sort of archetypal sounds, patterns in life, shall never stop, it just goes on and on and on and we live through it and we die, but the wind continues, the trees continue and the sea certainly continues.

‘Til next time.