25 March 2024


 I decided to follow the river back to its source. It has always been present where any easy, local walk will take me, a borderland to all that is homely. It’s not that I had not visited the source before, I had been taken as a child and we gathered round the infant river, a local landmark, a place to pause. But that’s how the river always appeared to me, in segmented parts, like those toy snakes everyone owned in the 1980s, but dismantled. A disjointed slithering beast, not a whole thing – not alive.

 Some local artist followed the river water on foot, in wellies, trailing their way through the stream so that the roads and railways and other obstacles meant nothing. The truest following, tracing the flow of the water perfectly. Yet, I welcome the searching, and the option of finding myself lost. The dead ends jolt, they turn you backwards and make you start seeking again, and they make you miss whole portions of the river route, but sometimes these are the parts best left alone. Little wildernesses, where even the birdsong seems hushed.

 The river flows through the park where, as teenagers, we would drink, and more. For the “more”, it was an ancient oracle, a symmetrical butterfly of watery wings, a teller of the old secrets. Later, it served as the moat to a building where the course of my youthful marriage can be traced – from functioning to ending, but never flourishing. As my children grew, we followed part of the river for the first time, and found fairy realms across stepping stones. The Great Bird Wars issued from its banks – and swords from hazel trees. I found a job in River Searching, but for a different, larger river, to which my river served as a tributary. I had grown out of her.

 I found her again by accident, many years later. I had traipsed through the whole of Birmingham, looking – but there she was all along. Waiting. So, from her banks, downstream, I decided to follow her back to her source.



Photographs by Jen Dixon
25 March 2024