Colin Walker

We're home. It feels so good.

The van needs unpacking and sorting but that's for later. I went straight to the back garden and fed the birds, the proper birds, not just sparrows.

And now I'm sat in the garden, sun on my face, and I think the coal tits has just realised there's food as they're flitting around in the tree out back.

One of the local blackbirds is singing and my wife is harvesting the crop of radishes that seem to have flourished in the week we were away.

This is the life. Everything else can wait.

On my knees, meticulously, diligently pulling each weed and piece of wild grass by hand from where it grows between the gravel. Lost in the task, nothing else matters – briefly, nothing else exists. It is though, with the earth beneath my fingernails, I am reaffirming my connection to this place in the basest, most fundamental of ways.

Then, in my peripheral vision, I glimpse a bee meticulously, dutifully passing between each flower on the azalea. It is where it needs to be, as am I.