Barn Wood is full of wood anemones, a patchy blanket of expectant white faces pointed towards any break in the tree canopy. The woods are open, light and in the absence of any recent rain the threading paths have compacted and it feels airy and spring-ish. On the hill where the monument to Elizabeth Somerset stands is a box of Coronas and three smashed bottles among random tufts of daffodils that make me think that despite being wild, daffodils always look like they've been planted. Perhaps to remember a particularly rowdy night on that hill, drinking through a case of imported Mexican beer. Or to memorialise where a bee once landed; where children once threw frisbee, where someone silently celebrated making it to the top of the hill without stopping half way for breath. On the way down, my dog stops short at the sudden sight of a man coming up over the brow. He has a long beard, tied in a beard-bun at the bottom. As a lesser-bearded specimen I am a bit envious. His dog trails behind, mouth full of ectoplasm-coloured ball. Stepping slowly down the steep, tussocked slope I feel the colder morning in my knees. Overcast skies and a fresh wind are the last remnants of winter and they already seem to presage the next, which in truth feels like it will come quickly. The dog is already at the bottom of the hill and my creaky knees are a bodily record of time quickly passing. I can see the pond where the coots and moorhen swim, the reedbed where the snipe nervously plops about. The motorway, the church spire, the playing fields of Collegiate, IKEA, the high-rises of Bristol, and in the misty distance which is so suggestive in my mind of both the Past and the Future, the hills of Dundry, and beyond that?