“Boundaries could become so soggy that they disintegrate altogether.”

It’s here on the south coast that I learned all sorts of countryside words. Coombe and barrows and heathland. Fingerpost, stile, kissing gate. Words that sound pleasant in a poem.

It’s my grandfather’s birthday. I doubt he’s ever had a pomegranate, so I’ll bring him one. I’ll read a little poetry aloud, so he doesn’t have to.

It absorbs the human, drags us into the amoral natural world, where we are complicit in everything we ordinarily find abject and abhorrent.