February 1998
Monday. Barbara and I walk up on the heath, to the Mumberry Hills, then to East Bridge, to eat at the Eel's Foot. Windy. The chocolate heather is grizzled by white patches and stems. Stepping off the path to look at the view down over to Middleton we find owl pellets on a bare place, the biggest thumb size. There are six or seven of them. They are pale grey, furry, packed and dry. Broken open, they reveal small bones, sharp as glass slivers, one of them a small triangle, almost toothed. Some owl that comes here often, then, on the ground. A short-eared maybe. Into the birch wood, up the slopes and down the dips we go. Pools are solid with small duckweed. Viridian moss shags fallen branches, which lie half submerged. I uncurl the dead leaf of a rush and an unidentifiable dark-brown spider drops out. I rip a blackened sheet of bark off a fallen birch and its underside is soft, smothered with webs. Among the bits adhering to it there is a small, rolled up carapace, with parallel grooves along it, and legs attached, but no head. There is a neat hole drilled through it, and it is papery and easy to blow away. A weevil. A fragment. The individual weevil, what is left of it. None of the infinite complexity is less individual than this. Nothing is less than particular. And, indeed, nothing is less than particular.

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