Hat laying

We've been AWOL. Overcome by the sheer and unremitting amount of plaster dust in every crevice, we took off for a few days on the Atlantic coast, to Le Teich on the Bassin d'Arcachon. No, I'd never heard of it either, though I've wanted to get to know the Bassin for a long time. We stayed, courtesy of a Good Deal with lastminute.fr, in a fairly new residence de tourisme that just happened to be a couple of minutes walk from one of France's major bird reserves; unlike most of its concrete counterparts on the Med coast, this one had real character, being built in traditional Arcachon style - several 'villas' on stilts, wooden framed and faced with wood in different colours, each comprising four apartments and built in a circle around a pool. We felt at home from the moment we arrived. Life for a week was oh-so-simple: we walked, we cycled, we ate, we swam, we read, we chatted with people we met here and there. And there was no plaster dust.

The weather was kind - more than kind in fact: six days of sun and balmy temperatures up in the late twenties ensured that everyone spent the week in hastily-packed shorts and tee shirts. The bird reserve - Le Parc Ornithologique du Teich - was up with our old favourites of Cley Marshes, Titchwell and Minsmere (if I'm honest I could be pressed to say it even outclassed them). The landscape was stunningly photogenic, especially for a died-in-the-wool Light on Water fanatic like me; not unlike north Norfolk in many ways, though the quality of the light makes it into something quite other.

Early morning mist over Le Teich's bird reserve

The puzzle is to work out where the stick emerges from the water ...

Dusk over the Bassin d'Arcachon on Cap Ferret

We twiddled our way home on the back roads through Lot et Garonne and Gers, which got me to thinking about what it is that draws people to want to lay their hats in particular places. When we first decided to live in France, we put Gers on the 'possibles' list, because it's stuffed full of seriously attractive and substantial farmhouses, and because it has attractive rolling countryside, not unlike Tuscany, with villages perched on top of ridges and lots of mellow stone. But I just couldn't take to it; in fact two days into a week long house hunting trip I was in full blown 'get me out of here' mode. I haven't been back since, until now. This time it took just a couple of hours. We explored a bit of Armagnac country and a few bastide towns before staying overnight in Auch, which so should be a great place ... but - and I'm sorry if you live in Gers and love it, I really am - it just doesn't do it for me. Any of it. I can't feel its heart beating or its soul singing. I simply don't get it.

It's such a strange thing, this energy of place. Being basically a nomad at heart I've lived in (I just counted) 19 different places between leaving my parents' house and moving to Grillou, each one not just a different house but an altogether different location. Most of them I've enjoyed, to a greater or lesser degree; the odd few I've not; and a couple I've felt such a strong connection with that I miss them even now. One is Scarborough, the other - can you believe this? - Acton in west London. I suspect Ariège will be another, should I ever leave it. But why? What is it that makes a place call out to one person while repelling another?

It's clearly not just about natural beauty, as anyone who knows Acton will readily concede. I spent a year living in west Wales, which is as stunning a part of the British Isles as you could wish for - and yet much as I might have appreciated it, I never felt connected to it or welcomed by it. Nor is it just about people: some of the closest and most extraordinary personal connections I've known came when I was living in Norwich, but I'm not mad keen on Norwich either. And it's certainly about about tick lists of what makes a place right.

No, it's clearly something other, something bigger, something more mysterious. As Michael Polanyi wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we know more than we can tell.

The pale blue dot

In 1990, when Voyager 1 was around six and a half million kilometres from Earth, the astronomer Carl Sagan pesuaded NASA to point its camera back at us, and take this picture from the very edge of the Solar System:

This is what he had to say about it.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space] and, if you look at it, you see a dot.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

What's the point of all this? Well, today, April 22, is Earth Day, being celebrated for the 39th time; over 500 million people all over the world are marking it in some way. It's a great time to do something green - plant a tree perhaps, or start a compost heap, or replace an incandescent light bulb by an energy saving one. But don't let it be the only such day, because for that tiny pale blue dot, every day is Earth Day ...