So let us give praise to the Nothing Much. To the scruffy bits, the hairy bits, the forgotten corners, the overlooked little chunks and the places we really must do something about some day.
And having given praise, let us keep them just as they are. I was riding past just such a spot the other day, horse and I moving easily together in great content.
To our left, a classic Norfolk flood-plain meadow, a grazing marsh currently at rest. Nothing much, especially to those of us who see such things often enough. A big bull swan was monopolising the pathway. A skein of geese passed overhead.
The yowl of a buzzard was answered cheerily from a quarter-mile off. All nice enough, though not exactly hold-the-front-page excitement.
And that's rather the point. I rode back along a narrow lane to home. Tut-tut, the hedge-flail has not been busy here for many seasons. Certainly not since we moved in. It was seriously untidy.
As I dismounted I could hear the air full of sparrows' voices. You can say what you like, I told them menacingly. Because talk's cheep.Tidiness is a curse.
Having nothing to do with it. Messiness is life. Sure, you tidy the house every now and then, wishing it would stay like that -- but you know it won't. Not while people are actually living there.
A permanently tidy kitchen is one that no one ever cooks in; a tidy desk is one where no work is done.
Untidiness is life. You can mow your lawn till it's like a bowling green: not a weed, not a singly untidy inch… and it's the next best thing to concreting it over.
Life is not tidy. The time to be tidy is when you're dead. When you prepare a Christmas feast, the kitchen takes a battering: it's the feast – it's life – that matters.
The washing and the tidying-up are secondary.
We had a big old willow that did what big old willows do and came crashing down. Tidy it up? No: we left it lying there. Half of it's still sprouting, half it's busy rotting, but then the processes of rot and decay are also the processes of life; ask the beetles and the fungi if you don't believe me. The tree is, gradually and its own time, returning to the economy of the soil.
The principle of untidiness operates on a small scale and on a big scale. Earlier this year I visited several scruffy spots not a million miles from where I live on the edge of the Broads: three places I never knew about, all of them covering a generous acreage. They're called County Wildlife Sites.
All lovely, all slightly scruffy round the edges, all full of life, and all of them – well, Nothing Much. They certainly weren't superstar sites that bring in thousands of visitors.
We have plenty of star attractions for seekers of the wild in Norfolk: Cley, Hickling, Titchwell, Snettisham, Blakeney Point… but they wouldn't be what they are without all the lesser names, the lesser places, the places of Nothing Much.
It's like the credits after a film: first the stars, then the lesser actors, then the supporting cast… and they're followed by bewildering numbers of everybody else: best boy, key grip, gaffer, boom operator, hair-dresser to Ms Roberts, animal trainer, costume designer... These are the Nothing Much names that makes it possible to revel in the Big Picture.
Without them there would be no stars and no production. In the same way, every one of these Nothing Much places plays its part in bringing us the mighty epic of Norfolk Wild.
The designation of County Wildlife Sites gives them a small status. I visited these three with Helen Baczkowska of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust: some of them well-loved, some nicely managed and all of them playing a small but meaningful part in the Big Picture.
We can all do something to soften the hard edges of 21st century life, and supporting the Trust is a pretty hefty start.
Those who own or manage land can remember that scruffiness is life-affirming: it's not compulsory to beat every habitat into lifelessness -- and that's as true of gardens as it is of 50-acre meadows, so spare a corner for nettles and brambles.
And now, as we move towards the shortest day, let the sun shine – having no alternative – on the Nothing Much.
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