Blissful BC courtesy of David Attenborough and the BBC

Nature's Great Event last night, viewed from the Ealing living room, was the salmon run in BC.   Bears, wolves, eagles, orcas and the salmon themselves paraded before me on the tv.  How rare and exotic they looked after an afternoon on the Central Line. And how exquisitely beautiful was, as always, British Columbia. So green, so blue, so many trees, so many mountains, so much water.

I've had a suspicion for years that if BC were in the USA where they are so much more inclined to self-promotion, the place would be a mob scene. But it's those reserved, self-deprecating Canadians who won the Majestic Landscape lottery. And they have, on the whole, spent it in quiet sensible ways.  (Yes, yes I know ...clearcutting, Sea to Sky Olympic massacre but Greenpeace was born in Vancouver.. and vast swathes of BC remain untouched and inaccessible)

London  life feels so small-minded and banal when confronted with the drama of grizzlies descending snow-wrapped mountains to wait on the shores of sparkling rivers for the arrival of the fish from thousand of miles out in the Pacific. Fish who are compelled to return to the exact place of their birth to spawn and die. On the way, BC's spectacular wildlife  - wolves, orcas, eagles and grizzlies will kill  many of them but the salmon persist, growing pink and uglier as they do. And when they die and rot and their carcasses are devoured and scattered by scavengers, their remains sink back into those lush green forests, feeding them the precious nitrogen that gives us the great cedars, sitka spruce and western hemlock that make up these glorious forests. Round and round goes the green and blue cycle.

On my first summer in Vancouver,  I was astounded to see  whole wild salmon on sale in the Safeway for about $3. The run had been spectacular that year and we, the blundering bipeds were also getting our pickings right behind the grizzlies and eagles.

When I come out of that Safeway, if I look down the hill on which it stands, I can see mountains and forest and ocean. How lucky I am that for just a few months each year, I get to live alongside such grandeur, such ongoing spectacle.