One of my clearest lockdown memories is of going for a lunchtime walk with Olaf Stapledon. It was somewhere near the start of things, I think, no cars on the roads and those government mandated exercise breaks still feeling weirdly illicit. There is a stretch of the South Downs behind my house which I am ashamed to say I had never visited until Covid. One morning I set out over the gentle grassy hump of its hill, over the buried spine of the thing, with the almost indescribable vastness of Stapledon's novel Star Maker playing in my headphones.
Star Maker is all about a journey through the cosmos - deep into space and out the other side, really. But that day its wild intergalactic journey actually served to root me more deeply in the landscape I was exploring. I remember the broken chalky earth where the badgers make their sets, the dew pond with its looping swallows, a lonely bench pointed at nothing where I sat in silence for a space of time that was maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. I was learning, all the time. Over the course of that morning ramble I learned afresh how to be in nature.
And this is exactly what Paradise Marsh teaches. It's a small game, but also a gigantic one: truly a Stapledonian trick of time and space. I load it up and explore a colourful endless wetlands, cycling through day and night, spring, summer, autumn and winter. There's an objective of sorts - I'm armed with a net as I plod around and I have a book of creatures to capture - but it's an objective I have not really focused on for the most part. Instead I wander. I watch and listen, I see the different shades of the sky as it moves from peach to strawberry yogurt to dark bubbling storm clouds. I enjoy the rain one moment and the snow the next. I enjoy the silence - my silence.