I'm sitting down to enjoy my holiday. So said Withnail, in that film filled with quotations you can hurl like javelins, Withnail and I. There are two ways of enjoying the wild: one is a good walk, the other is what my mother used to call “a good sit”. This usually involved a comfy chair, a fabulous view - the Grand Canal in its best pearly light for preference - and a pokey little glassful.

Well, it was too early for the glass, and the wooden benches are not the last word in comfort, but I had the right light yesterday. The pearly light of Venice comes from coastal lagoons; you also find the lagoons and the light on the Suffolk coast. And as the sky was hurling raindrops like javelins, it seemed the moment for a good sit.

Island Mere Hide at the RSPB's Minsmere nature reserve could do with an Italian waiter bringing you delicious things to drink, but if you can take that lack in your stride, it is the perfect place for a good sit. One of the greatest views in the world, especially if you can avert your eyes from Sizewell nuclear power station, you can sit and wonder on the eternal mystery of lots and lots.

Lovely weather for ducks. Lots and lots of species, lots and lots of individuals: a vision of plenty on a day of hardship.

Since you ask, there were mallard, teal, shoveller, wigeon, gadwall, pintail, pochard, a couple of tufties and to add a mild touch of exoticism, a pair of goldeneye: the drake a handsome beast positively glowing in the hallucinogenic Sizewell light. So many species, each with its own different way of earning its living: and so many individuals, most of them mooching about in the rain wondering when it would stop.

Winter is a time for holding on, for surviving, for gritting your beak and muddling through. The business end of the year is the early spring and breeding, and then the late summer and the rearing. After that, it's all about employing whatever strategy you can to reach another breeding season. The year is beginning to turn, though it didn't feel like it yesterday: not much longer before it all starts. A wigeon's whistle cut through the drumming of the rain on the hide: the goldeneye once again disappeared beneath the gunmetal wavelets.

He's so wet you could shoot snipe off him. So Templer says of Widmerpool in Anthony Powell. And once you saw one snipe, you saw many: it was like looking for stars at twilight. Lovely weather for snipe: dumpy little things with long legs, poking long rubbery beaks into the mud, often with a ratatat sewing machine action, uncaring of the rain.

These are lurkers and skulkers, birds you don't often see unless you startle one in a Widmerpool-wet field, and send it towering up in front of you. But when humans are hidden away, they will step forward, so many you could hardly believe there was room for them all.

And then, just to show it was Minsmere, a marsh harrier got up to do a sodden circuit. This species was once down to a single pair in this country, one that nested about a hundred yards from where I was watching. Yesterday's harrier returned to her roosting tree and perched with her wings extended, making herself into a heraldic form.

By this time it was twice as cold and the wind was driving in through the narrow windows. Time to return car-wards and get soaked. A vile day.

God, it was good to be out in it.

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