It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. ‘When it hurts,’ wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, ‘we return to the banks of certain rivers,’ and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy.I first came to the Ouse one June evening a decade back. I was with a boyfriend long since relinquished, and we drove from Brighton, leaving my car in the field at Barcombe Mills and walking north against the current as the last few fishermen swung their lures in hope of pike or bass. The thickening air was full of the scent of meadowsweet and if I looked closely I could make out a scurf of petals drifting idly along the bank. The river ran brimful at the edge of an open field, and as the sun dropped its smell became more noticeable: that cold green reek by which wild water betrays its presence.
