Time Song: Searching for Doggerland

"Yes. Under the North Sea, between East Anglia and the Netherlands, lies Doggerland. It wasn’t there for long. It appeared when the ice of the last Ice Age retreated, and it was a paradise for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Then meltwater engulfed it. But trawlers regularly haul bits of Doggerland to the surface. They get mammoth tusks and rhinoceros horns. I have here on my desk a hyena coprolite which came from Doggerland. I was in Norfolk over the weekend, and my children and I found a large lump of Mesolithic peat lying on the beach. It was full of still glistening birch bark. Julia Blackburn, who lives near the Suffolk coast, went in search of Doggerland. Why? Well, partly, I think, because, like Doggerland, her dead husband is both near and invisible – and this book is an elegy for him. He was recently engulfed, but is still present somewhere out there. And also this: There’s comfort for mortals in knowing that both time-past and time-future is vast, and we’re not. It sometimes helps to see how big time is. If you think hard enough about Doggerland, you can laugh at the posturings of governments, or the potential of disease, or whatever it is that’s worrying you. “She mixes her late husband’s ashes into yogurt and eats him” Blackburn’s method, as with all her books, is both elusive and allusive. It’s a series of impressionistic dots, which, with the perspective of distance and time, resolve into a picture. It’s tremendously clever writing. As readers we preen ourselves at the end of the book, thinking that we’ve assembled the picture ourselves. Of course, it’s her artistry that’s done it, but the fact that we think it’s our work is the mark of a very good writer indeed – just as a really smart barrister convinces the judge that the barrister’s own argument is actually the judge’s own. Blackburn is wistful but never for a moment self-pitying. She’s splendid company. She potters around prehistoric bone collections in East Anglian kitchens and garages. She misses nothing. She understands how time works, and how we are lumps of clay spinning on the wheel, moulded by the landscape, and how the landscape reaches even in through the double glazing of those East Anglian centrally-heated houses to shape us. There’s one striking point in the book when she describes how she mixes some of her late husband’s ashes into yogurt and eats him. I think that a writer who eats her own husband should be taken very seriously when she talks to us about fields and birds and tractors and the other things which are the usual fare of nature writers. I think, when we meditate on it, it gives us a perspective that we don’t normally have: which is that to be alive at all as a human being is to live on the edge of a precipice. We have always done so as a species. We always do as individuals. We’re only ever a moment away from eternity. Julia Blackburn gently reminds us of that – and cushions the blow by reminding us that time is vast and we’re very tiny and that accordingly our own mortality perhaps isn’t the crushing catastrophe that it seems to us individually to be. I think we’re looking for sensual confirmation of our connectedness with the non-human world, which at some level we all intuit. Once we feel that connectedness, we are comforted, because we realise that we’re not alone. Aloneness is the main source of our angst, isn’t it? We feel we’re locked up in our own houses, in our own heads, condemned to commune only with our own thoughts. Good nature writing can remind us that we have endless defining relationships, and not just with other humans (although human relationships are far and away the most important relationships) but also with an almost infinite number of other non-human animals. That makes us feel less vertiginously isolated."