Today I learned about the passing of Richard Adams, the author of the novel Watership Down, a book to which I owe so much.
We had the cartoon adaptation from 1978 on VHS and I watched it repeatedly throughout my childhood, at least a few times a week for several years and then a couple of times a year through my teen years and into adulthood. Nothing else has ever been able to move me in the way that this story has, and I don’t think anything ever will. The scene of Hazel’s death always leaves my face a sopping mess.
I was reading Adam’s obituary on the BBC website and discovered that, interestingly, one of his earliest memories was of a local man pushing a handcart full of dead rabbits down the street.
Rest well good sir, tonight I, along with many others will light a candle in your honour.
Bright eyes, burning like fire
Bright eyes, how can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes
Is it a kind of a shadow
Reaching into the night
Wandering over the hills unseen
Or is it a dream?
Celebrating the strange and the shadowy, the damned and unseen 
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