7 OCTOBER 2006, Page 42

Drive

Medley of horses by the motorway untethered; the field surplus to transport or agriculture. At this speed the horses look like Travellers’ horses beside a leftover wood where smoke rising sketches a caravan.

As we flash by our road draws its own wake, a joyful anarchy of second growth — beechy and larchy shoots, scrub, militant bindweed whose canker lilies, malign and beautiful, have everything to play and nothing to pay for.

Two magpies land for luck, a third joins them to squabble across the brains of a struck fox.

Unscrupulous nature reclaims the scar tissue of the M54; soon we shall see Wales take charge of the twilight, a swatch of sunset red filter the cloudburst over Wolverhampton as our windscreen wipers, moody with time delays, hypnotise a landscape of special pleading.

Grey Gowrie