I missed my flight.

On the way, I kept thinking, I’ve forgotten something. The last thing I did, take something to read. I took — I didn’t want to, but couldn’t help myself — John Clare, selected poems. I needed a someone from the asylum.

On the page, boys ramble. Out of the window the last slope of the Downs, smokey in early blue morning. A black deer. Heedless, no-one looks.

I opened my phone, there’s the boarding pass, there’s the vaccine exemption reference, the entry permit for the Isle of Man. In one or other pocket the passport, the Covid certificate. My wife found my watch and I look at it unthinking. The Gatwick Express smooths along accompanied by its multi-lingual announcements.

‘Is this the right queue?’ No-one knows. In the lift I can’t breathe. Some-one sees and lets me through. Bustling, another queue. ‘The gate’s closed. You’ve missed your flight.’ Blank. Like a night between lightening bolts.

I slump, a child without an adult, slumped on his red suitcase in the hollow of the airport. Someone comes. She leads me back through the crowd to hear it repeated. ‘You’ve missed your flight.’ Then she shrugs, she’s done her best.

‘Is this the way out?’ ‘’Wha?’ The luggage man in the yellow jacket seems never to have heard that question. ‘Out of the airport’.

Outside, the controlled ordering of traffic in undisturbed grey: bus parks, car parks, roundabouts with tame greenery. Signs and warnings and instructions are multi-colour. Wire fence, perspex and metal keep you from harm. Across a road — they all go round, not straight — there’s a finger-post. I get there. One finger points towards a muddy path into some trees. It’s name-tagged: Sussex Border Path. I rest against it. I wrap my arm around it.

‘Are you all right?’ A woman, a lone pedestrian behind me, from where the trimmed grass edges into the mud. ’No’. Then, softer. ‘I’ve missed my flight.’ ’So have I’ she says. We converse: she was going to Greece, a holiday, me to a family wedding. She’ll try again tomorrow; for me, I say that’ll be too late. ‘That path doesn’t go anywhere’ she says, as we part.

I head along it, under a canopy still green from the summer, the branches freely pleaching, pulling my suitcase on its glib wheels in my town brogues and wedding-smart overcoat.

Cherry, elder, ash, hornbeam, maple. Are those willow-herb? (Thinking of Edward Thomas now). No, the pinks of Himalayan Balsam welcome me, pinking the culvert which guards the woods from the road. White clusters of snowberries peep. Some trees are leafless, dead. Some cherry stumps cut and piled. I taste a haw: bready and slight. Rose hips I see. I suck on a sloe then spit out the stone and skin.

I stop to hear a robin. A young man, wearing black shorts, strides by. He’s carrying his suitcase. ‘Are you going to the Holiday Inn, too?’ But he hardly lingers to hear my answer: ‘No’. I reach a metal footbridge over a brown stream, sheltered by willow and ash and then into the carpark of a Travelodge hotel.

The man, with a few others, stands outside the lobby. On the lawn protecting the drive is a proud eucalyptus from where a magpie chatters hoarsely. From a poplar a fellow magpie clacks back. I join in. No-one hears.

On the way back, I follow the runnels along the muddy path made by the wheels of my case.

With thanks to Tara Gould ‘Nature Journaling for Wellbeing’ at The Book Makers, Brighton