Common or Garden in Suffolk

SEPTEMBER 2026

The conversation at the (millennial) hairdresser’s went like this:

Hairdresser: That’s a nice top.
Me: Thank you, it’s cashmere.
H: I don’t know that brand.
Me: No, cashmere is a type of wool; it’s very soft. I got this from a charity shop.
H: That’s nice.
Me: Unfortunately it had some holes in it, but I have darned them.
H: You’ve what?
Me: I darned them. You know – darning.
H: What’s darning?

So I explained as best I could to this youngish woman what darning is, and told her that ‘in my day’ when anything woollen (for example, a sock)  had a hole worn or torn in it, it was mended and not thrown away. This appeared to come as a surprise to her.

I don’t have many of these housewifery skills; I can’t sew or knit beyond the basics, and following a simple dressmaking or knitting pattern in school ‘domestic science’ lessons was beyond my visuo-spatially challenged 14-year-old self. The cookery taught then was also uninspiring: my pastry used to be grey-blue, stained with inky fingers. But I like making jam and marmalade, occupations which make the house smell of caramelised fruit, comforting, sweet, warm… in other words, home.

Blackberry and apple was the jam of my childhood, once sugar was no longer rationed, and – sugar aside – the ingredients were free and foraged. And so still it is that no last lingering warm days of summer pass by without ‘going blackberrying’. I used to take the children with me when they were small, and more were eaten than picked. My dog continues the tradition.

This year the berries have been small because of the drought, except along the side of the field next to my house, for their roots are in a ditch where moisture remains, and these are plump and juicy. You have to get the timing right, as after harvest when nesting birds have gone, farmers are quick to cut back hedges, and all too soon the sound of the flail cracking and massacring branches can be heard – and in a moment the harvest of berries is destroyed.

This year, to my dismay, the tractor and flail came right up to my boundary, attacking an innocent ash tree on my side of the ditch, and whose beautiful branches did not in any way impede agricultural activity.

I said blackberrying is best done on golden,warm, early autumnal days, with a gentle sun filtered through russet leaves. Following our record scorching arid summer, September has – in Suffolk – continued too dry. What little rain has fallen has scarcely wet the ground, and often when forecast has not come. It is too dry to dig, though you can turn a fork in the powdery soil. The fields are still iron hard and cracked. The plough sends up clods of concrete earth, followed by gulls squabbling for the non-existent worms. Tractors pulling cultivators race up and down, unhampered by mud, raising clouds of brown dust. It has been too warm, and some nights have nearly reached the bar of ‘tropical’ nights at 20C.

Despite the worry of what drought and heat do to agricultural and horticultural production, who could not rejoice in the now gentle warmth, the pleasant sun, the expectation of its embrace as one walks out in the morning, no fear of flinching in cold and rain? The regular reader will know my walks with the dog are taken at dawn, and the sunrises have been spectacular.

‘September warm, winter warm’, it is said. And – returning again to weather lore of saints and holy days – ‘No rain on Holy Cross, no rain for six weeks.’ Holy Cross (properly, the Exaltation of same) is 14 September. Once again, the old sayings, even in this time of evident climate change, seem to hold good. The horse pond on the Common is still dry; my water butts empty.

As soon as the field is cultivated the rats arrive. They live in the ditches both sides of my garden, and not only in the ditches. Rat holes everywhere; rats everywhere. One day I went up to the chicken run and there were about a dozen, of varying sizes, picnicking. I squawked; they scarpered.

Too many! Time to call Ratman. Ratman, brother of Waspman who had cleared a wasps’ nest from my roof earlier in the year, duly came. I gave him a tour of the many bait boxes placed strategically round the property, front and back. Ratman – clearly an honest man, and unlikely to get rich – told me I was doing everything and anything that he himself could do, and left, declining to charge me for the call-out. And so I continue the campaign alone. So far, the tally is only two dead, as far as I have found.

A single female rat can have around 40 to 84 babies per year under normal conditions, though under optimal environments this can reach up to 144 babies a year. The litter size is five to 12 pups on average, though some litters can have up to 18. They have five to seven litters annually. Gestation period: about three weeks (21 to 23 days).

No! Just no! My apologies to St Francis, whose feast we shall mark toward the beginning of October, but Brother Rat is not my friend.

About 30 years ago I started to write a novel which begins with an apparent suicide. A young protégé of the dead man sets out to try and find out the reasons for this out-of-character, unexpected and unexplained, act. Eventually he finds that his mentor and friend was hounded and persecuted by the Church hierarchy till he saw no option but to end his life. This discovery puts the younger man’s life in danger also, culminating in a fight (a bit Holmes-and-Moriarty-at-the-Reichenbach-Falls!) on the edge of a precipice. Did he really fight for his life against someone sent by the Church to silence him, or was it a psychomachia – an existential struggle in his mind, of his soul, between Good and Evil? Qui legit, intelligat…

Calling someone a rat is a potent metaphor which brands them as untrustworthy or an informer who betrays their group for personal safety or profit, or even just a desire for approbation. It seems incredible (though true) to say, that some of my recent blogs and FB posts have been read by so-called Facebook ‘friends’ and reported back to diocesan authorities, and used against me. I now look over my shoulder, metaphorically, to see who is watching. Who among ‘friends’ would do that? I feel hunted, unsafe; trust has gone.

Maybe, if the ‘friends’ read this, both I and they might take note of Pope Leo’s tweet today (5.10.26): “Our age needs men and women who have the courage to do good even when it comes at a cost. Draw close to those who are alone, support those who are weary, and seek out those who have drifted away. Have the courage to forgive, to begin again, and to engage in dialogue.”

My dawn walk for the Samaritans (a mere five kilometers, a nothing to the woman who walked to Rome, but whose knees betray her now) is four days away, on Friday. Let me end with what they say:

“Together, we make suicide prevention a priority. In every community, including yours. Every hour. Every day. Every life. Let’s prevent suicide today. ​Because tomorrow’s too late.”

August 2026

The regular reader will expect updates on meteorological events and trends, rhapsodies to the end of summer, news of dog, horses on the Common, a word or two on the solar (and also lunar) eclipses of the past month. They will follow.

The reader will also know that most of my walking through the Suffolk countryside, its lovely fields and paths, is done in the very early morning. It is, as they say, ‘the best part of the day’. It is a time of peace, before the rush and busyness, before much motor traffic; a time when wild life can be observed – levrets racing the length of a field and back, whole families of hares, deer in abundance, barn owls hunting. A time at one with nature, when blessings may be counted.

I am therefore starting with an appeal: on 9 October I’ll be walking at sunrise for the Samaritans. Not far – only five kilometers. But it’s close to my heart. Some of you will know that some five years after the traumatic death of my husband I was engaged to a man who took his own life. I am thus well acquainted with the dark hours before dawn. Please donate. Here’s a link to page https://dawnwalk.samaritans.org/fundraising/mary-kirk-fundraising2026.

Quite recently I have also experienced some more black times. I have hinted in recent posts of bullying and victimisation within the (Catholic) Church. This followed an actual physical common assault by a priest nearly three years ago. Both have left their mark, but I have been supported by my tigress lawyer daughter who has persisted with her formal complaint to the diocese.

Recovering from psychological, emotional and verbal abuse by priests is difficult. The thought that priests, who’ve been consecrated to God’s service, who stand in persona Christi, can use the imbalance of power within a parish context to treat their fellow human beings — equally children of God — so callously, certainly destroys trust in the Church, and with it possibly in a loving deity.

I would rather live with its absence than shape myself to an abusive monolith run by men. But that absence, after a lifetime, is very much a new reality.

And another strangely altered reality was brought about this month by the solar eclipse of 12 August, least well seen here in the far east of the UK at 88 per cent. It was a clear fine dazzling evening and so the daylight remained, but somehow the light had been removed, sucked out. It felt otherworldly, mystic, awesome in the true meaning of that word. And yet, and yet…local social media was alive with “What eclipse? Did we miss it?”

We did indeed miss the lunar eclipse of the 28th, for by then summer had come to an abrupt end, cloud prevailed, and next day rain fell.

Once again I have to bow to the wisdom and accuracy of those Weather Saints of whom I write so often. After St Swithun’s day on 15 July passed by in arid heat that continued…pretty well for 40 days, the weather broke with heavy showers around St Bartholomew’s day (24 August), inverting the old saying  “St Bartlemy’s mantle wipes dry / All the tears that St Swithin can cry”.

Even The Guardian (no champion of the saints) felt that Bartholomew’s influence should be noted this year:

His day heralded the coming of cooler weather: “At St Bartholomew / There comes cold dew.”

Like St Swithin, his day also supposedly signals the weather ahead, as in the 1670 couplet: “If St Bartholomew’s Day be fair and clear / Then a prosperous autumn comes that year.”

This day was the occasion for great harvest fairs and celebrations, so that any riotous, chaotic scene was described as “like Bartholomew Fair”. Some of these celebrations may pre-date the saint’s arrival in England, with pagan rites surviving in disguised form.

The drought had become the overriding preoccupation of both garden and Common. Early in the month the horse pond on the Common ran dry. A water tank appeared, but there was no more grass, no nutrition especially for the lactating mares, and before the end of the month the horses were taken off, though their pastures new could scarcely be any greener.

The garden – oh the garden! I almost gave up struggling the length of the not inconsiderable vegetable plot with cans of water which in no way could provide the moisture needed for crops to survive, let alone grow, flourish and be fruitful. This year’s crops on farms as in the garden are pitifully small. The water company sends helpful hints such as “Have you considered a water butt?” My five butts have been empty since June.

Other effects of our roasting rainless summer have been more tragic. I reported last month on the wildfire that destroyed much of beautiful, purple heather-clad Dunwich Heath. I walked with a daughter recently from Minsmere Sluice up towards the Coastguards’ Cottages, which were just saved from the flames by the wind direction. Our way was barred, not just from the burnt area, but from the whole National Trust land. When shall we walk that way again?

But despite the difficulties and dangers of this scorching summer, the hottest on record, it has been glorious. To know that each day there would be no flinching from the cold or wet, that the sun would shine from a cerulean sky, that each dawn would be pure like those that broke on Eden before the Fall* has been an unbroken blessing. Our morning walks have been paradisiacal.
(*No, I am not a Creationist!).

Nonetheless, how quickly we forget the drought! How quickly grass springs up…If only other things were as rapidly put behind us. Do you know that Facebook can tell when there has been, as it puts it, “a romantic break up”? This puzzled me: I had never posted about a relationship (how could I advertise it?), there were no photos, but – aha! Meta tracks our WhatsApp messages, even though it cannot read them. And now Facebook showers me with relationship advice: how to ‘move on’, how to go ‘no contact’, how I am worth more than the attentions of avoidant narcissists.

Too right. Don’t take any crap, ever.

But please contribute https://dawnwalk.samaritans.org/fundraising/mary-kirk-fundraising2026.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 You might be forgiven for thinking that this photo portended the possibility of a brief shower at the very least. But you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not a drop. Wave of heat has succeeded wave of heat. A friend in Dublin writes to me of a “lovely” summer’s morning at 15°. I laugh. “Add on another 20 degrees for Suffolk!” I tell him.

Most of England and Wales is in the same predicament, but here in East Anglia we are acknowledged to be in the driest part of the country. Drought has been declared, and with it a hosepipe ban. Social media is alive with cries of “Why should we not use our hoses when there are so many leaks?” I rather think the anwer to that is contained within the question, but I can understand the grumbling. A leak outside a local Tesco’s could not be repaired (and still has not been) until scaffolding can be dismantled. Water gushes day and night…

I think I have not known such desiccation, such tinder dryness, even in that historically hot summer of ’76 when there were standpipes in the streets and we were enjoined to bath with a friend. The sere dead brown grass of my ‘lawn’ crackles under my feet. On the Common the mares, two with foals at foot, have no grass and precious little water. Each year the sun seems to burn with a more ferocious intensity, caused by the thinned ozone layer  which lets more harmful ultraviolet radiation reach the Earth’s surface. This year it is more fierce, and more fearsome, than ever. Back in 1976 few of us knew what was coming, or cared. Many still appear not to.

Close to home, as I write, the devastating fire on Dunwich Heath still burns. Even if it cannot be compared to the infernos we witness nightly on our televisions in France, Spain and elsewhere it demonstrates the fragility of nature in a heating planet. Nightingales, nightjars, Dartford Warblers, a myriad birds and animals inhabited the now charred landscape, where at this time the open heathland would be a vivid royal purple with heather. My lifetime will not see it restored.

It’s a sombre way to begin this month’s chronicle. Here’s a lighter note, though one which still rouses householders in this part of the county to righteous indignation. I reported last month that our rural backwater seemed to have escaped the chaos of changed refuse and recycling collections. Ha! No sooner had the blog been published when the bin rounds were reorganised. New crews were unfamiliar with our lanes – apparently – and for some weeks uncollected bins decorated our gateways. Occasionally what we used to call a ‘dustcart’ would appear on the wrong day, but it was hit and miss. The worst was what they call ‘food waste’. I don’t have food waste as any vegetable matter is composted for my garden, and anyway I was taught not to waste food. But I thought I should oblige, bagged some chicken and lamb bones, and put out the caddy. And there it remained through the torrid heat of July with the sun beating down upon it. I dared to open the lid at one point, and just before the smell hit me, saw the decomposed biodegradable bag sitting in a pool of stinking deliquescing matter.

I am pleased to report the caddy was collected – eventually. But not before the local news had featured the fiasco of THE BINS.

Another effect of this long, arid and blistering summer is an early harvest. Usually the race is on to cut crops and get them in before rain comes, with combines roaring across the countryside late into the night, and grain wagons rattling and bumping at speed up the lane. As I lie in bed I know whether the trailer is empty or full by the bang and clatter as it hits a slight dip in the road. But this year…why the hurry? A friend provides the answer: “The habit is ingrained.”

Click to see the combine devour our field

Driving down a narrow lane which is the old Roman road I stopped when a shimmer of blue caught my eye. Borage! which locally is pronounced ‘burridge’. Its seeds are pressed for oil, the richest natural plant source of GLA, used in dietary supplements, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, and it acts as a deep-rooting break crop that leaves a friable seedbed and helps suppress weeds like blackgrass before winter wheat is drilled. Bees love it. It rippled like water in the breeze, a small lake of blue among a golden landscape.

And so I look out over the stubble field once again, bleached by the sun, and white under the full moon and the summer stars, with Arcturus blazing high in the western sky. The mornings are heaven – cool, misty, golden when the dog and I go out at 5.30am, but by the time we are walking back we feel the heat of the day bear down on our backs. High summer melts into a dusty late summer. The stressed trees begin to shed their leaves. The birds fall silent. Some fields have already been broken up by the cultivator (no plough could get into the concrete earth), and autumn does not seem so far away, and then the cycle will begin once more.

My own crops have suffered from heat and lack of water: main crop potatoes are skin set and have been dug early; the leeks for the winter thin and wispy. But such is the lot of the gardener. This photo was taken early in the month, but four weeks on it is a waste land, a parched desert.

Good things happen. Early in the month one half of the family came to visit, having gathered in Cambridge for the graduation of the older granddaughter, after four years gone in a flash of time. As a child at primary school she declared her intention of going to Cambridge and getting a first. Job done. I feel pride, though I had no hand in the achievement. After too short, but sweet, a time they were back to Northern Ireland, leaving boxes of cooking utensils here to be stored for her future use.

Another funeral this month. This time the subject was 99. Some 16 years ago she commissioned me to paint her portrait. I was gratified it was displayed at the church.

What else? Very little… life continues: the garden, the house, friends, the dog, walking, painting, pétanque, and enough work to keep the wolf from the door and supplement the meagre pension.

But oh yes! It’s not every day that an independent investigator upholds a complaint against an institution which has both caused and dismissed an individual’s pain, and recommends a formal reprimand, requiring apologies in person from those concerned. It’s a sad reflection that this should cause surprise. That meeting has not yet happened but the recommendation has been accepted, so watch this space!

21 September 2026: On rereading the review report, I have corrected the paragraph above. The review upheld my complaint, recommended a formal reprimand, and recommended apologies in person, and the Diocese accepted those recommendations; that account stands. But the words “victimisation” and “misogyny” were mine, not the reviewer’s. What the review found about gender was that my “personal feelings may have been overlooked partly because of gender,” that the earlier report “reads like a report written by a man, for a man, and for delivery to a male audience,” and that “greater attention should be given to how female parishioners are supported and protected.” The reviewer also recommended that, “where appropriate, the Diocese consider involving a woman in the preparation of similar reports in the future.” Those findings and that recommendation were about how my complaint was handled; the review made no finding of misogyny about the priest I complained of. I should not have presented my own words as the reviewer’s, and I withdraw them as a description of her findings. It remains my own view that my complaint was handled in a way it would not have been had I been a man; the reviewer’s words are set out above, and readers may judge for themselves. I also referred to two individuals by their offices, which could have led to their identification, and I have removed those references. I apologise for both errors.

 

You might be forgiven for thinking that only two topics were of interest to the inhabitants of Suffolk in June – the heatwave and the new system of refuse collection. Late June heat dominated the national news, while nearer to home the collection – or not – of rubbish, recycling, and food waste bins caused some prolonged overheating on social media.

But more than half the month brought rain , wind and low temperatures. Several times I felt moved to put the heating on, using precious oil purchased at sky-high prices (thanks, Trump, for your pointless but costly war). Returning along flooded roads from a pétanque match played in a deluge on a water-logged terrain, my hands were too cold to grip the steering wheel, and a hot bath did little to warm me.

Only a matter of days later how grateful would we have been for a cooling drop or two! Roads melted, trains and planes were cancelled, schools were closed as most of England failed to get to grips , as we so often do, with unwonted temperatures. I was about to boast (if it were really a title to aspire to) that Suffolk broke the record for June heat on the 26th reaching 37.3◦C, but this was pipped at the post rather late in the day by our northern rivals Norfolk at 37.7.

The elderly and dogs are vulnerable, so my girl and I were out in the relative cool of 5am, often earlier. Sometimes we head for the coast, to Dunwich, once one of the country’s busiest ports before it was lost to the encroaching waves. We watch the sun’s first golden path across the now peaceful sea, its sibilant sighing on the shingle shore inducing a soporific torpor….If only I could reproduce that in the sweltering sauna of my bedroom!

These extremes – the cold rain and the searing heat – have helped me through the now prolonged season of hay fever. It is now accepted that climate change has extended and intensified the effects of this condition. For me the enemy is grass seed pollen. When I was a child the season lasted three or so weeks towards the end of June – always at exam time, and I like to blame the first-generation antihistamines, which induced sleep and brain fog, for my indifferent O Levels. Now though the grass starts seeding early in May, and it continues till early July. Rain dampens down the pollen, and fierce heat matures the grasses quicker, so the combined effects, plus industrial quantities of high-dose second generation antihistamines, have helped me through. At its worst it means eyes itching and swollen grotesquely, sweating, shaking, sneezing, accompanied by an inflammatory surge of pain through the joints and muscles. Did I hear someone say ‘Don’t live in the country’?

At the beginning of June Suffolk instituted a new system of triaging and collecting refuse. This means rubbish is now sorted into a ‘container’ bin, a paper and cardboard bin, a general waste bin and a caddy for food waste. I also have a ‘garden’ bin as my neighbour has forbidden bonfires (because – I confess with shame  – many years ago I set fire to a stubble field, farmed by her father. It was an accident…a rogue gust of wind into an incompletely cleared field. This has not been forgotten).

The various district councils regularly sent out information about the forthcoming change, delivered helpful graphics, clear calendars and timetables to each household, (duplicated online), advertised their new app which notifies us the preceding day of which bin to put out, and – here at least – ensured the new bins arrived in good time. But for the past four weeks social media, local press and every supermarket queue has buzzed with complaints, plus requests from the those challenged by change of “Does anyone know what bin it is this week?” “I haven’t had my food caddy yet.” “There were maggots in my caddy in this heat.” One housewife, enraged by what she thought was the non-collection of food waste (“Wrong lorry, love”) pursued the truck down the road in her car, demanding to know the reason for their perceived inefficiency.

From where I am (that is in the middle of nowhere) all has gone smoothly. Everything is collected on time by charming and helpful young men who toil through the heat. They take the time to stop and make much of my dog, who races to the gate to greet them. “You’re a good boy,” they say to her, proffering not one, but two biscuits. Often, if I should be out, a Bonio is left on the empty bin. They make the annual leap in Council Tax worth it. Almost.

But people love to complain, and local social media (NextDoor and local pages on Facebook) give them a stage and a megaphone. The complainers can be pretty potty-mouthed at times, ready to make others feel small, even threatened. But generally I find those two platforms helpful ( I deleted my X account because…Elon Musk). On FB I keep up with many ‘friends’ acquired in the course of long pilgrimage walks through Europe. NextDoor is useful when seeking recommendations for plumbers, garden machinery repair etc; people ask for lifts or car sharing; wanting help identifying plants or insects. Both sites are a good market place for second-hand goods and tools. Generally I am for it. Maybe those who decry it, and say it is purely for backbiters – or photographic boasting about holidays and fine dining, do not understand what it is to live alone, with friends far scattered though the world.

And they miss gems, such as this one, as well…

Through the year the dog and I walk, and as I walk I think. Is this prayer? Maybe. I think a great deal about love – human, divine, animal. I think about my dog, the faithful companion of my days. Can dogs love? They are often said to embody unconditional love, and certainly my lovely girl knows me through and through. The slightest movement, gesture, sigh, raised eyebrow…she can interpret them. Without (I hope) blasphemy her knowledge of me after nine and a half years is like that in the wonderful Psalm 139 (138 if you’re Catholic):

[She] knows my sitting down and my rising up; [she] understands my thought afar off. She comprehends my path and my lying down, And [is] acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, But [she] knows it altogether.

But does she love, as we human beings understand the word? Her primary concern is her stomach, there is no doubt of that (she is half Labrador), but if I am distressed, crying, upset, she comes immediately to my side and leans in to me in a way I can only describe as empathic. And she has that strange canine sixth sense – she knows when I am on my way home (so those who look after her in my absence tell me). Her devotion is unconditional; her forgiveness and tolerance infinite.

Breathe on me breath of Dog…

But we can see that animals are capable of tenderness and care, if not of love. It is instinctive. Since early spring two pigeons on my fence sit, billing and cooing. Two horses on the Common groom each other. The herd moves in whenever anyone comes close to the foal born two weeks ago. And my dog is followed adoringly by the elderly dog of a friend, who (the dog) trots devotedly after her. Perhaps this is an anthropomorphism too far…

More death this month. The elderly Benedictine who was priest of the local Catholic parish, where once I worshipped, and was also a former Abbot of Downside has died. Tributes pour in to the “life of devotion and service”. But it brings up a question to which I have no answer. This man was named and shamed in the IICSA report on child sexual abuse in the Church (and particularly among the English Benedictine Congregation) as having turned a blind eye to the disturbing abuse within the monastic community.

Do the flaws of the past and the sins that are made public overshadow and destroy the legacy of the “lifetime of devotion”? Of course, sexual abuse is always utterly wrong, repellent, and often criminal,  but – unlike other transgressions by those in the public eye – it elicits such an extreme response that not only is the name of the abuser blackened but so also is his entire professional career invalidated (along with the reputation of the institutions and individuals closely connected with the abuser). Those who are able to hold that there are both bad and good within the same person can often be vilified by association. Visiting a paedophile in prison can mean being ostracised by friends. There are people who cannot bear to look on any work by Eric Gill because  he abused his daughters. And we forget that the vile Jimmy Savile raised millions for charity.

It is hard, sometimes impossible, and demands a high degree of moral maturity to hold the good with the bad at the same time. Monks and priests who abuse, yet maintain a “brilliant” public ministry, Jack Dominian, Jean Vanier…can we forgive these “wounded healers”?

It is a sombre question on which to end this midsummer chronicle. We must decide for ourselves.

In the meantime, I have ripe tomatoes (in June!), courgettes, broad beans, french beans, chard, onions, summer broccoli, cavolo nero, lettuce, beetroot, potatoes. Happy days!

 

 

From the freshness of a Suffolk spring we were skyrocketed into mid-August. Or so it felt, as the mercury mounted to the mid-30s at the month’s end. Oh, the glory of those mornings when the world was made new in purity and beauty, each dawning day an Eden.

Another month, another funeral. He was younger than me, as happens with increasing frequency. This brings the intimations of one’s own mortality sharply into consciousness and focus.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

I become a connoisseur of these closing ceremonies, which are sometimes sombre, sometimes defiantly cheerful, and this was perhaps the most splendid of them all. The enormous minster-size church in north Essex, originally built with the wealth of wool, must have welcomed the best part of 300 souls on this occasion. The great and the good were there; the City of London was there (the deceased was ‘Chief Commoner’ for a double tenure in the early 2020s); Fleet Street was there; business colleagues and acquaintances were there; and I was there sitting with the current chair and treasurer of the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome.

That is how I knew Brian Mooney, then chair of the Confraternity. He invited me to speak at their 2017 AGM about my walking pilgrimage from Canterbury to Rome the previous year. As chance would have it, he also appealed at the event for a volunteer with editorial experience to replace the great Alison Raju, and the rest is – as they say – history.

The magnificence of the funeral (the coffin was carried out to the Triumphal March from Aïda), which I think would have greatly pleased the deceased, was not without some justification. The man was a celebrated sportsman, sailor, skier, mountaineer, and – for me, above all – pilgrim walker; author of some 16 books; one of the youngest Reuters bureau chiefs, famed for his award-winning coverage of Communist Poland in the early 1980s, which was the centrepiece of a career that took him to more than 50 countries.

Mooney was charming and irascible and lacking in diplomacy, a denier of man-made climate change, and he described himself as (and was)  a contrarian. But he was kind to me. And so I went to mourn him. I sat  there in awe, and made vague promises to myself that I should henceforth not care what people think of me, for it is said I am true to my name and…quite contrary.

Let us return to country matters…

Readers acquainted with this chronicle will be accustomed to my obsession with the weather. I am, after all, a gardener, and gardeners are wise to listen to weather lore. In these days of undeniably changing climate patterns it can be comforting when the traditional weather calendar holds good.

And this calendar is so often bound up with the Church’s year, as I have written before.  The saints have their times and seasons, their feasts and their memorials, by which we mark the weather. We speak of St Luke’s Little Summer – a period of calm, dry, and unseasonably warm weather that often occurs around his feast day on 18 October, and it seems that in fact mid-October in the UK is frequently dominated by high pressure systems, which clear the skies and can bring pleasant mild weather. And of course around the feast of St Swithun on 15 July a pattern often settles in for a month or so: ‘St Swithun’s day if thou dost rain, for forty days it will remain’.

This May the ‘Ice Saints’ struck again, bringing bitterly cold nights with sharp frosts, bang on cue on 11, 12 and 13 May. St Mamertus, St Pancras, and St Servatius are associated with historical cold snaps that can endanger any tender plants put out too early by impatient gardeners in a precipitate rush to “get ahead”. All my seedlings had long outgrown their pots and needed the space of the garden, but I held off. Had I not I’d have lost the lot.

It does to pay attention to the saints.

No sooner had the Ice Saints loosened their frosty grip when the heat soared, and the country sweltered in the 30ºs, breaking twice over the 1944 record for the hottest days in May.  No need this year to heed “Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’. Whether we take that as being May the (hawthorn) tree, or May the month, winter clothing and bedding have long since been packed away.

I am glad to see the last of hawthorn blossom with its smell of death, infamous, pungent and sickly-sweet. The odour is caused by trimethylamine—the same chemical compound released by decaying animal tissue. But now we have the heavenly scent of honeysuckle and dogroses.

As a result of the heatwave the garden races ahead. The first baby broad beans have been eaten; the French beans are in flower; good-sized tomatoes have formed on their vines; the first early potatoes already dug.

And the spring drought continues.  The lush green of spring is already seer and burnt brown in places. If it does not rain soon, and plentifully, the horses, newly turned out onto the Common, will find grass scarce and that the old horse pond, already low in level, cannot supply sufficient water. We wait, we wait for rain, but it passes us by.

Cratfield Dog Show came and went, for once in good weather. It draws a big crowd, both of ‘proper’ pedigree show dogs, and entrants to the ‘fun’ classes. My own girl relinquished the crown she had worn for a year as Best Cratfield Dog and Reserve Best in Show, but there is now a trophy engraved with her name, and we contented ourselves this year with a couple of rosettes.

The show gives ample opportunity to ruminate on the undeniable fact that some dogs do indeed take after their owners. Science apparently backs this up: dogs actively take on, or mirror, their owners’ personality traits. I know that when gloom overtakes me my dog seems down and low, too. One Dr Iris Schoberl, of the University of Vienna, has declared (from a rather small study) that both owners and dogs influenced each other’s coping mechanisms, with the human partner being more influential than the dog.

To Withersdale Church mid-month for the launch of a booklet detailing its history and architecture. I acted as midwife during its lengthy gestation (somewhat longer than that of the African elephant…), for I was roped in – gratis – to assist with the editing, layout and formatting of its numerous iterations. And so it was finally christened in the church with fizz and canapés and a goodly crowd who came to hear the author speak. The midwife’s labour found no mention in the booklet (though a case of wine was ample repayment), so I shall have to find some other claim to fame before I die.

Who knows but this may come from an unexpected source…I gather from the minutes of some august committee of the Roman Catholic Diocese of East Anglia that this blog is read! I hope they enjoy it.

At a time of huge international  and domestic trepidation, during a war – two wars – not of our making, while bombs rain  down on schoolchildren, we are all fearing the effects on our individual purses as well as on the economy of our country and the world. But my own domestic economy (in the sense of oikonomia, the management of my household) also suffered a trauma last week.

My six hens, valiant layers, disappeared all in one night into the maw of Renard the Fox. He possibly had the assistance of Renarda as well, because it’s quite some task to carry or drag six birds back to wherever their earth is. It’s hard to describe the shock of going up the garden to feed them in their run, and discovering…silence, absence, nothing but a few feathers blowing sadly in the breeze. In the chicken shed signs of the mayhem there must have been with six panicking birds trying in vain to escape.

It’s not that I was fond of them. These were not pets; they were vicious little dinosaurs, biting the hand that fed them, administering sharp pecks if food was not instantly forthcoming , and sometimes if it was. A little stale bread could provoke a feeding frenzy as aggressive and competitive as any shoal of piranhas. They were, however, my responsibility, part of my domestic order, and I had allowed them to become vulnerable and ultimately prey. They contributed to a truly sustainable system: eggs were sold at the gate; chicken feed was bought; their straw bedding impregnated with droppings fertilised my vegetable garden and enriched the soil, thus maximising production.

I thought they were secure. Over the years I, and latterly with help, had made the shed and the run into a galline fortress. After previous fox incidents, years back when I allowed my hens to range free, I vowed never to let them loose again, so they lived in a large run, content to scratch around in farmyard straw, fed greens, chickweed and fat hen to make the egg yolks a deep orange.

So how? A small area of rotting wood at the base of the shed had been spotted by the cunning one, and quietly enlarged that night into a hole wide enough to insinuate himself and extract the birds. They probably died of shock before the jaws clamped down.

I mourn their disappearance, and my own carelessness. In the immediate aftermath of their loss I  determined “Never again. I’m done with chickens.” But my daughter, who knows more of international threats than one might wish, reminded me of the need for food security, so maybe…when the shed is once more secure…I’ll get a couple of  young birds.

When I first started keeping hens, 20 or so years ago, I foolishly gave them names which

anthropomorphised them: Bertha the big Buff Orpington, perpetually broody; Sister Dominica, black and white and bossy; Prudence, shy and of beautiful iridescent plumage. The next bunch were rescue ex-battery chickens, which arrived timid and featherless. What a difference two or three months of freedom made to them. Thereafter, always bog basic brown layers; no more of this middle-class-I-live-in-the-country sentimentality.

 

I write this at the end of a dazzling month. Not a warm one, but with a sun radiant and burning from a sapphire sky, while we shiver in a fierce north-easterly gale which abates sufficiently at night to leave the ground sparkling and white with late frost. For high pressure dominates, and the East Anglian spring drought has driven the eternal wet of winter out of our minds. The earth is dry and deeply cracked; dust blows off the fields; the garden with its new seedbeds is to be watered constantly.

And in this month a great tide of green has swept over the land and engulfed us. Trees trembled with incipient green; woods were pregnant with green; buds were bursting with green; grass drowns us with green; wild garlic is scented with green; seedlings are shy with green; the emerald of young wheat is rippling with green.

A thousand thousand shades and tints of green which no palette could ever capture. And between the green of land and the blue of sky are interjected gashes of the acid yellow of rape. The bridal blossom of the blackthorn has gone, but everywhere wild apple and plum and hawthorn are in flower. On the Common the magenta of the orchids vies with golden expanses of buttercups.

This exuberance of nature, the beauty of this spring, is in counterpoint to what is happening on the world stage. War in Ukraine grinds on. We look on helpless at the mess of the Middle East, where missiles rain down, plunged into conflict by madmen with seemingly little thought of the future. The whole world will suffer for it in the long term, and – as for the energy crisis – we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We grumble about the cost of petrol and heating oil, but the full effect has yet to hit us.

In a minor way I have become a ‘prepper’. Now we are being told to keep a supply of bottled water, tinned food, a torch and wind-up radio, and many countries have issued leaflets with official advice on how to cope with no electricity. Ever since we feared the consequences of the ‘No-Deal Brexit’ at the end of the last decade I have kept a box of basic food stuffs. This then morphed into a ‘Lockdown Box’ during the pandemic (and another one of those may come our way all too soon). Now it has become a ‘What-If-The National -Grid- Goes-Down’ Box.

One measure that I take for food security, which also springs from other environmental principles, and which at the same time gives me pleasure, is growing my own vegetables, and spring sees the most intense efforts in the garden. In April my windowsills and greenhouse accommodate pots, trays, modules of seedlings and plantlets, which now cry out to be transferred outside. But I dare not: there are still frosts and the wind is Siberian.

Of maybe more immediate concern than potential cyber attacks on our national infrastructure here are the roads. On the bright side, imminent local council elections have at least seen a huge effort at filling in the deep and jagged holes in the road which cause expensive damage to a car if you hit one at speed. Locally we contend with the seven-month closure of a vital ‘B’ road linking outlying villages to the nearby market town. Seven months! Offical diversions will take you a circuitous 20 miles, so those who know use the tiny one-track lanes. This necessitates much bad-tempered to-ing and fro-ing and giving way and backing round blind corners – ceding not to those who have the right of way according to the Highway Code (oh no indeed) but to those who have larger, heavier, superior – and so often shiny – vehicles.

Before the current dry spell, the verges of these tiny lanes were churned to deep mud by the wheels of those attempting to squeeze past. Those having the misfortune to live along these ways often take somewhat  idiosyncratic measures to prevent this…

And so we continue. Tomorrow is May Day. Another month has passed.

 

 

 

“New month, new weather,” they say, and so it turned out to be. After the interminable dark, cold and wet suddenly spring appeared. Maybe a little hesitantly, but there has been sun, blue sky, even warmth.

And with it my spirits rise, as steep and sudden an ascent as the spike in the price of oil. But if I dwell on matters geopolitical I shall talk myself out of the joy that comes with increasing light, and days without rain. Now the sound of tractors is heard once again, for the land is just firm enough now to get on with top-dressing and mucking. Standing water on the roads has dried sufficiently to reveal the extent and depth of the potholes, those witnesses to our fracturing infrastructure, and costly causes of damage to our vehicles. Suffolk was recently rated one of the worst in England for road maintenance and potholes receiving a “red” rating in a January 2026 Department for Transport (DfT) report. Often in our little lanes, with their heavy traffic of tractors and transporters, there seems more hole than road.

Early spring has a beauty which snatches at my heartstrings more insistently than the later lushness of April or May. It took only a few days for the first leafbuds to appear in the hedges, for the blackthorn to blossom, and for the sweeping grace of the weeping willow to green. All other trees are still skeletal, stark against the sky – the oaks gnarly and solid, the ash buds deep sooty black:
More black than ash-buds in the front of March, wrote Tennyson.

 

Now there are constellations of primroses on the banks of ditches, alongside the paths we walk. In a wood I come across an expanse of violets. If you get down on your knees and put your nose close  the scent is delicate but unmistakeable, redolent of the scent bottles on grown-up dressing tables when I was young.
“O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets, / Stealing and giving odour!” (Twelth Night)

Fortunately I walk early, and am unlikely to be surprised in this inelegant pose.

As we approach the Equinox daylight races in; every morning giving us one, two even three more minutes’ earlier sunrise: no longer any need for a torch as the dog and I go out at six, nor for her glow-in-the-dark collar.

The eastern sky shows a misty golden glow heralding a day filled with light, yet in the west a full moon hangs low just above the trees. The volume of the birdsong increases, the larks invisible high above singing insistently, while across the fields I cannot count the number of brown hares I see running. The dog sees them too and stands alert, quivering, longing… but she is obedient and turns back when I whistle.

It is a time of year that suits Suffolk. We live in a kind landscape here close to the Waveney Valley. It is a peaceful river, rising in a fenny patch west of Diss, and flowing gently for nearly 60 miles, separating us from Norfolk, until it meets the River Yare in Breydon Water and so goes on to the sea. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names 2003 tells us the earliest attestation of the name is from 1275, Wahenhe, from *wagen + ea, meaning the river by a quagmire. Yes, that sounds about right this year…

Along its course were many mills – Scole, Syleham, Needham, Mendham, Ellingham, and others lost to time. Alfred Munnings was born at Mendham Mill in 1878, and in his earlier days before he became a society painter recorded the life and working of a busy mill at the turn of the century, relying on horses and horse-drawn carts.

Not long after Munnings left Suffolk, another painter arrived, not far away, in Wenhaston. This was Harry Becker whose paintings and drawings, many done swiftly with a few lines or brushstrokes en plein air, record the now lost activities of pre-mechanised agriculture.

Mendham shows us the loveliest of the Waveney. Tranquil marshes and meadows that could have come from an Old Master Dutch landscapist.

After you cross the river into Suffolk at Mendham the land rises steeply (steeply for Suffolk, that is) taking you up into a maze of tiny villages – the Saints country – where you could almost think yourself back in the days of Becker and Munnings. When we first ventured into the Saints, half a century ago, we drove round and round, the old finger posts deceptively promising a way out,  but leading us back circuitously whence we had come. And not surprisingly were we ‘foreigners’ confused by these names: the South Elmhams (pronounced ‘Ellum’) –  St Cross, St James, St Peter, St Margaret, All Saints, St Michael and St Nicholas; all these cheek by jowl with the Ilketshalls – St Margaret, St Laurence, St Andrew, St John.

Driving home through the Saints one fine soft morning recently, I stopped to watch a buzzard seen off by two rooks, like two Spitfires harrying and hounding a Heinkel.

More reason to be grateful for fine weather…a dry Wednesday and Sunday mean pétanque is not cancelled. Since last summer pétanque has become a passion. Thirty years ago in the south of France where I lived I learned to play, somewhat less than competently. There each village had its boulodrome, or at least a terrain on the place, and provided scenes and sounds of the Midi which now seem clichéd. It was a game to be taken seriously.

And no less so now in Suffolk – in a neighbouring small town with its two terrains on the community playing field. I saw an advertisement on local social media calling for new members, so decided to give it a go. The blush of youth has long since left these players, and  the talk when they meet is of arthritic joints and the afflictions of age, but they play in deadly earnest. I was made very welcome, but no quarter was given to the newbie. Points are fought fiercely with measuring tape and – if need be – calipers.

I love that. Fun has been in short supply in the past couple of years, but pétanque restores me, takes a hundred percent of my concentration, and – for a happy hour or so – banishes all cares.

It provides, too, a welcome break and relaxation from work; for, dear reader, even as I approach my eightieth year I need must work to keep the proverbial wolf from the door, to keep the dog in the style to which she is accustomed, and  – in our current geopolitical chaos – to buy heating oil and petrol

Rarely these days does a portrait or other art commission come my way (though I am working on one currently), so I do what I have done on and off for some 45 years: editing and proofreading. It has its moments, but mainly I wade through the tedium of hyperprolix wannabe authors (I fear there is little chance of discovering the next Booker sensation) and the complexities of legal and commercial matter (which pays better).

Another month. March came in like a lamb. Will it roar out like a lion?

February fill the dyke, be it black or be it white; but if it be white, it’s the better to like’.

Maybe in our changing world it is a comfort when the seasons run true to type, but that can be of little consolation to those threatened by the current 200 or so active flood warnings in the UK, or to those residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl whose homes are to be demolished by the local council  because flooding can no longer be prevented, or – on a smaller and personal scale – to me and the dog as we slip and splash  through mud and flood every day.

The Common is under water, true wetland once more, and a little beck which was dry and empty only a few months ago has spilled its banks and formed a lake through the woodland where it used to meander. Where the banks narrow it is a brown gurgling spate of a river now.

Click for video

February fill dyke…Five years ago it was of the white sort, when east Suffolk had such a dose of snow drifting to huge banks and dunes that roads and paths were impassable for days. Now, under the endless sullen and unrelentingly sunless skies it is indeed hard to like.

But gradually and discernibly the light is returning, the dark of the year receding. On the rare days when the cloud breaks the light is of a different quality from a month back; it casts the landscape in the pastel shades of very early spring. On one such day, as the dog and I crossed a field, a flock of fieldfares took off from the ground where they had been feeding. The sunlight caught the pale underside of their wings – a hundred flashes of light – and they were gone.

Out in the first glimmers of dawn I see the barn owl hunting on the Common if it is not raining. He – or she – glides low on noiseless wings, but those same soft feathers which allow for silent searches are not waterproof, and prolonged periods of rain can see the bird starve.

The birds have, since early January, sensed that the year has turned. Birdsong as day breaks has increased. First and faithful in the new year is the song thrush, loud and raucous, then the insistent two notes of the great tit in counterpoint. In the background comes the chatter of little birds – wren, robin, dunnock. Birdsong, for avians, is of course existential: it’s about territory and reproduction. We impose our anthropomorphic interpretations on it – for us it is joy, hope, the glories of a spring to come.

I mentioned in my January piece how the great Quarter Days of the English calendar are closely bound still with the seasons of agricultural life, and that their commemoration is now all but lost , especially in urban life. Perhaps strangely, the Cross-Quarter days which – falling as they do at mid-points between the solstices and the equinoxes  – celebrate the changes of the seasons, are perhaps better known as they have Celtic significance, and/or have been taken over by popular culture.

Candlemas, or Imbolc, celebrates the beginning of spring and the return of light. Mayday (Beltane) marks the beginning of summer and the ‘light half’ of the year. Then comes Lammas (‘Loaf Mass’) on 1 August, at  harvest time pointing towards autumn. This was a festival in the liturgical calendar to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest, with a loaf of bread being brought to the church for this purpose. Finally Samhain, the period of All Hallows (31 October), now Hallowe’en with its transantlantic culture of dressing up as ghoulies and ghosties, and the commemoration of All Saints and All Souls on 1 and 2 November, signalling the start of the dark of the year.

We have just passed Candlemas, on 2 February (also the feast of St Brigid). It falls exactly 40 days after Christmas, and in some denominations the Christmas season stretches till then. It celebrates the presentation of Christ in the Temple, and can get entangled with the feast of St Blaise the next day because of the association with candles and blessings. In Christian tradition a priest or deacon places two crossed candles upon each parishioner’s throat and prays, “Through the intercession of St Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness.”

St Blaise, bishop and martyr, was born in Sebaste, which was the capital of Armenia Minor and is today called Sivas, located in Turkey. In one legend attached to him he restored to health a pig belonging to a poor widow (it’s always widows in these stories…), who then brought him bread and a candle when he was later in prison. In a more commonly known tale Blaise touched the throat of a boy choking on a fishbone, thus dislodging it and saving the boy’s life.

Blaise thus became patron saint of those suffering with throat ailments (and wool-combers and wild animals, for good measure). Speaking as both a widow, and one who once had a fishbone most painfully lodged in the throat, I like these legends of the saints: we need all the help we can get.

Maybe we all know a living saint, uncanonised yet recognised as a selfless force for good in their community. I am fortunate to count one as a friend, without whom I doubt I should have survived the losses and travails of my life. And last week I attended the funeral of another, Margaret, who worked tirelessly in our small village bringing people together, supporting the elderly, and raising money for the parish church and other charities.

On a cold monochrome Monday the village turned out in great numbers to see her buried in the muddy dripping churchyard. It was brief – few words were necessary – but moving beyond measure. The assembled mourners then decamped down to the neighbouring village and the new, slick, airport terminal of a Baptist chapel with its technology, its smart car park and café, where food was provided for those attending. The conference-centre-like chapel was powerfully hot, as the Baptists’ sacrificial and biblical tithing permits them to pay for the heating which neither Church of England nor Catholics can. This same warmth, in the early afternoon, caused me to succumb to sleep during the lengthy ‘message’ and songs. But I wanted to be there to honour and respect her goodness, and the reality of her witness.

The Christian creed tell us that for her it is a new beginning, a pain-free and better life. For us here below we cling with faith to the belief that – one day – the sun will come out, the rain will stop, spring will come. In the meantime there are shy signs of hope.

… I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.

From “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Plath

Writing on the Feast of the Epiphany 2026, as an icy dusk falls over a snowy landscape.

How many people, I wonder, if challenged would know that the sixth day of January is the Epiphany. And if they had heard of it, what would it mean today other than the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when decorations, lights and baubles should be taken down? That diminishing section of society who keep the feast salute the radiant brightness of a star, the dawning light of a new creation, a redeemed world. Hard to keep hold of that sometimes.

A friend of mine and I recently debated the increasing secularisation of society, a world in which the “True meaning of Easter” (I quote from one advertisement) “is Creme Eggs”. This loss of Christian practice, and consequently of religious literacy started  with the rational thinking of the Enlightenment and also with the coming of industrialisation which meant an exodus from country to urban living. And with that movement of population came a separation from the effects of the changing seasons, of living out of doors; a divorce from a life that knew the calendar of the saints, whom to ask for rain or dry; no longer a life that gave thanks for the harvest. Rural, farming communities kept hold of the traditional annual practices, marked by the feasts and fasts of the Church, for longer. What tenant farmer did not know the Quarter Days when rent was due: Lady Day (the Annunciation, 25 March), Midsummer Day (St John the Baptist on 24 June), Michaelmas (29 September), and – of course – Christmas?

One of the reasons, back in the summer of 2017, that I started what then became a monthly chronicle of life in this profoundly rural and agricultural part of Suffolk, was precisely to record an almost-lost link with the land, the country, its traditions, and the passing seasons. The practices I witnessed as a child in rural Hertfordshire in the Forties and Fifties were on their way out, to be taken over by the industrialisation and wholesale mechanisation of farming in the Sixties. They were just visible on some farms when I came to Suffolk in the Seventies. Now they are seen only in consciously museum-type recreations.

I stopped writing  three or four years back as I had nothing new to say; each season, each month had been examined, recorded, the effects of changing climate noted, and some features of life here – and in the wider, geopolitical world – described. There was feedback that I was becoming progressively gloomy. One commentator begged me to write “only on sunny days, please.”

The world, nationally and internationally, has not since in any way provided more reason for optimism or cheerfulness. Indeed many observers, including the head of MI6, are saying (largely to deaf ears) that we find ourselves in a liminal and perilous space between peace and war.

I am taking up my ‘pen’ once more, partly because I pay for this digital space, for the web hosting that keeps the chronicle visible. Maybe it is hubris – who cares, after all, for the ramblings of an elderly widow in Suffolk? But there may be one day some value still to be perceived in an account of the passing months, the nuances of each season’s advent and decline, and maybe – who knows – of peace while it still lasts.

Snow came a few days ago, provoking such childish excitement – despite the challenges in an area served by tiny lanes  which are flanked by deep ditches and afford passage to only one car at a time. I love it: we had skies of deep cerulean, crystals coruscating and scintillating, crunching and creaking under my boots, the shadows deep and blue. It somehow compensates for the onset of January, a dreary and sober month which lasts for approximately nine weeks. Snow prolonged the holiday mood of that time between Christmas and New Year, a time when no demands are made upon me, a time of unwonted laziness and indulgence, but also of a close and holy darkness as the world sleeps.

It purifies and beautifies the dullest of landscapes. And it is peaceful:
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake
(Robert Frost)

The traditional holly and ivy, the decorations, the baubles, the tinsel have been taken down, revealing a deep layer of dust. The exterior lights will have to wait till we are free of snow and ice. I will  miss this annual festival of light, which each year seems to introduce more and better light displays: the flashing Santas, the blue icicles, the luminous reindeer racing over the roofs, the sparkling life size deer and fawns grazing on lawns, the multi-coloured fairylights, the illuminated ‘Santa please stop here’, and everywhere twinkling and pulsating. I find no difficulty in celebrating this midwinter feast at the same time as welcoming the nativity of Our Lord.

Click here for a full display from a neighbouring village

I started this chronicle in July 2017 with a Suffolk funeral, a humble event by all meanings of the word. The deceased, and the husband she followed to the grave, and those who came to mourn were ‘of the soil’, people whose lives were rooted in the earth of Suffolk, whose living had never taken them far from their villages of origin.

I was prompted into a comparison of that original posting with another funeral late last year in 2025. Although it, too, took place in a little country church – this time just over the border in Norfolk – it was an entirely different affair. The deceased was what may properly be called a dowager. The family are ‘gentry’ and own the estate which makes up most of the land round the small village, and her son had long since taken over its management, and that of the farm. His son too farms there, and he in turn has two sons who will doubtless carry it on (pace our Government’s plans on inheritance tax).

I had been asked to take the names at her husband’s funeral a few years back, and was asked again. This was no small task as approximately 250 mourners were counted by me at one churchyard gate, and by my opposite number at the other. I filled four A4 sheets on my clipboard. Le tout Norfolk came. The names, often double- or even triple-barrelled, were rarely spelled as they were pronounced, and their bearers were often representing many others. My pen stalled; queues formed…Most were kind and courteous, with the manners I associate with real gentry (gentilshommes), but a few appeared somewhat shocked, and baulked at being questioned by a woman with a clipboard and cropped and purple hair…”My dear, did you see? She had purple hair!”  Noses were looked down.

Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly: I dye some strands of my hair purple. I rather like it. But, you ask, why do it? Well, because I can…and no doubt because there is a soupçon of attention-seeking in there somewhere. However, I prefer the kinder  assessment of a daughter – it is a spirit of youth and defiance. Youth – ha! I am 15 months away from eighty.

Since I last wrote this blog life has been…interesting. I had intended to start writing again in 2024, but almost the whole of that year was spent coming to terms with an assault (not sexual) on Christmas Eve of 2023 and its aftermath. It’s not something to dwell on now, but the perpetrator was my parish priest, a man who had anger issues and was clearly having some sort of breakdown. I wasn’t injured, but the shock of it perdured. The consequences were worse: those who did not know of the man’s problems blamed me. A lurid and largely inaccurate account appeared in both local and national tabloids, for which I too was wrongly held responsible. Our little chapel was closed for lack of a priest (he had been suspended), and many blamed me for the break-up of our church community. I ceased to sleep.

And yet in all this mental mayhem tectonic plates shifted, and a relationship whose potential existence had remained underground for some years erupted. Our media occasionally report with some wonderment that Elsie and Bert in their 90s have wed, and we look on with an amused but non-comprehending eye and maybe a slight distaste. But even as we sigh an indulgent “Aaahh” we ask “Why? What’s the point at their age?” The young find it impossible to countenance geriatric passion.  But here I must fall silent.

I said above that readers of this chronicle have complained of my gloom and pessimism.

Now, despite despair and fear engendered by still unending war in Ukraine, Putin’s designs on eastern Europe, Trump’s disquieting imperial activities, the rise and rise of the far Right here and elsewhere, despite the continuing self-inflicted wound  of Brexist, despite the increasingly destructive extremes of weather, now – despite all of that and more – my days are full of light.

And  and not a little joy –  in the form of my lovely dog, the companion of my days – no longer the “young dog” of earlier posts – who grows in wisdom and grace and finds favour in my sight.

There are reasons to be cheerful…

 

The dog and I are just back from our end-of-month chore of delivering village magazines to the outlying farms and houses as far as the village boundary. The dog, like a milkman’s horse, knows the round by heart, turns off the road without being told, and sits quietly while the month’s issue is deposited in the correct receptacle.

It is not really an onerous task. The walk back, having shed our burden, is a scant 2.5km, but the delivery round itself is far longer, for we are up and down paths, drives, farm tracks, and round the back of houses. The instructions are various: the magazine to be placed in the box where clothes pegs are kept, to be put on the ledge on the right-hand side inside the lobby, in a (former) litter tray inside a chest, in an old drainpipe attached to a gate with string. Don’t forget which places must have two copies… The newer houses (farm bungalows mainly, or barn conversions or extensions) of course have letterboxes, some at the base of the door requiring me to get down on all fours; some where you have to push against a draught excluder with all your might; some which want to take your hand off as they snap shut.

Most of the dwellings attest to the agricultural past – and present – of the area. We go to many farms, mostly 16th or 17th century in origin, one with a smart Georgian frontage tacked on. The smart ones have been taken over by those who have moved to the country (the obligatory 4x4s shiny in the drive), the ramshackle ones still working operations; and there are farm cottages, some thatched; farm bungalows; converted barns (holiday lets).

One particularly lovely building, grade II listed and dating from the 16th century, has stood empty now for more than three years. A mix of sadness and anger wells up as we trudge up to the door. A couple from London, she a poet and librettist, lived there. They were not married, and he died suddenly in 2019, intestate. His adult children turned her out, and the place is still not sold. But of course, we never know the full story. I saw the son once when I was delivering a couple of years back, and he told me to keep putting the magazine through the door each month. Why? For the unhappy ghosts?

There are many thatched roofs locally, their ridges ornately patterned from the thatcher’s own portfolio with long straw, whether or not the rest of the thatch is Norfolk reed (more durable) or also in long straw. Master thatchers will often grow their own straw to ensure continuity of quality, and it is reaped and treated by hand. An expensive business! Long straw thatch in the region has the most diverse visual feature detail characteristics, which are predominately characterised by the gable ends, and I gather one would know pretty much where you were in East Anglia by the gable ends. How do you tell if a thatch is reed or long straw? See below…

On the way back we passed an orchard with daffodils in flower. They trumpeted “Spring is coming! Spring is coming!” as we walked by. There are snowdrops and aconites in gardens, and I have seen a crocus. The heart lifts a little from the mud and mire.

Yes, spring no longer seems an impossibility. The deep dark of the year is done with. At the end of January, a month which goes on for about nine weeks, there is a shift, a marked change in the quality of light. I don’t mean because the days are sensibly longer (seven hours 48 minutes of daylight on 1 January, and nine hours on the 31st), but because the landscape is now seen through the pastel screen of early spring.

There are other signs: there is a definite, if limited, chorus of birds in the early morning. The monotonous two-note song of the Great Tit has started up, and once more larks are singing high above the flat fields. The leaves of primroses are visible, and their shy pale flowers will not be long in appearing.

And good riddance to January with its lengthy gloom. The only relief (for those of us afflicted by dark and drear days) came during another week of intense cold, when once again the fields were concrete-hard, and the ice on the pools on the Common withstood my weight. Then there were magical frozen mornings when there was a hoar frost and every tree, leaf and blade of grass was coated in powdery sugar icing, the tracery of the trees producing intricate fan-vaulting against the sky. These I entirely failed to capture in photography, and have borrowed this picture by a local environmental group.

It was some compensation for the long days of rain, which has turned the Common into a water land of shining pools.  Even now, though, the ponds and ditches have not filled after last year’s drought, and more is needed. Maybe February fill-dyke will oblige. I am conflicted: it is a real necessity…but those morning walks, slipping and sliding through the mud and wet and darkness.

• 

• 

To live in the country is to be fully sensitised to the creeping change, the barely discernible shift, of the advancing year, alert to every mood of the weather. To be both a countryperson and a Catholic is to have one’s year marked out and timetabled not only by the seasons and their proper occupations, but also by the Church, its rhythm of feasts and fasts, of saints and of ‘ordinary’ time. Both these calendars ruled the lives of our ancestors, and we are losing something precious, in the perma-lit concrete of our cities, and the increasing ignorance of a world punctuated by saints and holy days. The year-round hot cross buns, the advertisements which tells us that chocolate eggs are the “true” meaning of Easter…I would hope it were possible to celebrate the growing diversity of our country without losing sight of the richness of our western European heritage, the culture of a Christian past. I was shocked recently when a friend, a life-long churchgoer from the more Protestant end of the C of E continuum, did not understand a reference to St Sebastian, full of arrows.

And here I must pay tribute to an online friend of a hagiographical bent, who has created a social media page devoted to ‘the Feast of Insignificant Saints’, which treats us daily to a (usually) obscure saint – an unpronounceable Celt, or some martyred Roman virgin. There is much to be learned. On the day I write this, for example, we commemorate Metranus, an Egyptian martyr in Alexandria, sometimes called Metras, who was killed in the year 250 during the reign of Emperor Trajanus Decius. Who knew?

I had not intended to continue this chronicle, having taken it up again, with any regularity, but it seems to have sprung unbidden this month. One note, which will demonstrate that, despite the occasional week of frost, our climate is incontrovertibly changing. On 4 January, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, a butterfly…It ain’t right.