“I peel the flax into strands and weave them into a short length of cord, which I then use to lash together a framework for the butterflied trout, a technique I learned on a course Mike and I went on before one of our Norway trips. I gather some wood and get a fire going, and I cook the fish. As banal as all that sounds, I am loving every minute of this. So I am going to repeat myself. Every second is infused with this heart-swelling awareness of my surroundings. Not only am I in this place of exceptional beauty, of tranquillity, of unsullied nature at its best, I am also cooking (over a fire I started from scratch) a fish that I caught in this river less than an hour ago, a fish that I then gutted, cleaned, butterflied and tethered to a tool of foraged wood that I bound together with cord I made from leaves that were, until not long ago, happily growing beside this river. I needed to reiterate that. It’s the most natural thing in the world, man as hunter-gatherer, living off the land. But it’s nearly all stuff that most of us have forgotten about, stuff that has been regrettably replaced with technology and noise and materialism.”