We’ve been back in England for just over a year now (after five years in Japan and four in Perth, Western Australia). There have been some ups and downs along the way, and I haven’t really posted much as I was waiting for my feelings to stabilize. It’s been quite a hard year emotionally, but also a good one in many ways.

Yesterday evening I was driving through the Cotswolds (along the Fosse Way, built by the Romans, no less) on my way back from the swimming pool, and it struck me again what an amazing landscape we have here (I’ll try to refrain from overwrought descriptions of hills, dry stone walls, fields of yellow rapeseed flowers, ancient church spires in the distance and clusters of honey-coloured limestone buildings in perfect harmony with a landscape that has been shaped by centuries of agriculture, all illuminated by gentle late-evening sunshine!).

Anyway, I started thinking about how we perceive what is around us, and what sometimes leads people to uproot themselves and their families and move away.

Having been back a year, we have now seen the seasons come full circle. I had been a bit apprehensive about the winter, but the hardest season for me was last summer, which was pretty dismal I have to say. Autumn here was quite cold but with lots of sunshine, and an amazing display of red leaves. Winter was the coldest in years, or so I’m told, but again it came with lots of sunshine, mist, beautiful crisp, cold days. Not much rain. There was a week or so when we were clearing snow most days. The spring flowers and blossom were stunning as the countryside came back to life after a hard winter.

As I was driving home yesterday, for some reason I began thinking about a famous Japanese poem, which is generally translated along the lines of

“The bell of the Gion Temple
Echoes the impermanence of all things…”

It’s inspired by Buddhism of course, but in Japan there seems to be quite a strong idea of how there is melancholy in true beauty, how things that flourish inevitably decline, and how this transience is what makes things valuable.

Rambling incoherently now, but I guess what I was feeling was how the lazy spring, evening in the countryside feels all the more sweet for having been through a harsh winter. How the greyness and the rain is what makes the countryside so lush and so beautiful when caught in sunlight. How the months with bare branches and ploughed fields make the landscape seem all the more green right now.

I think there is a tendency for the human mind (mine in particular, perhaps, or is it just the British mind?) to latch on to the negatives. In our minds eye, the UK becomes dominated by the greyness and the rain, just as the notion of Australia becomes white sandy beaches, turquoise ocean and constant sunshine.

Then begins the quest to exchange this permanently dull UK for the permanently bright Australia, with its never-ending summer.

But I think perhaps that what we can end up with is an artificial flower. It looks pretty on the surface, and lasts forever, but has no real value.

Does the quest for perfection lead to dullness? Is melancholy underrated and should it be embraced?

End of sermon.