February 2020

27 February 2020

The lull before the storms

Three days off the beginning of meteorological spring. Damp snow – the first of the winter – is pouring from the sky, adding more wetness to the spongy saturated ground. Much more rain is forecast.

At this point it would be ungracious and ungrateful not to point out that I am writing from the flood-free “heights” of East Anglia. Nightly our TV screens show towns and cities in the west and north of the country with flood water rising to the upper storeys of houses and shops. We see it so often, our hearts go out to those affected, we say “I can’t imagine how awful it must be,” and then – for those of us in dry dwellings – it becomes normalised, submerged beneath panicky reports of killer viruses coming ever closer, killer riots in Delhi, killer bombings in Idlib.

Nature has decided that spring is already here. The mean temperature in the UK this winter has been 5.2°C, around 1.5° warmer than average. One by one the primroses have appeared on the steep banks like stars in the summer dusk. The grass is growing, daffodils are blooming, I have even seen a cowslip. The birds are singing and the ducks are pairing off. These are sights to lift the spirits, but it is hard to maintain a rejoicing heart in perpetual deluge.

More so when the deluges have been borne in on storm-force winds. Storm Ciara first, then Dennis battered the British Isles, with gales every day in between, and then some. So many trees came down, and walking became perilous with flying branches and brambles whipping into my face. I was thankful that the house suffered no real damage, and that the chicken run and shed stayed upright, and the birds themselves unharmed and still laying, but…my poor greenhouse! It had stood, exposed to the predominant winds, for 15 years, with only the occasional pane broken. Ciara swooped in, shattered glass, and sent the whole structure into the neighbouring ditch. Do I give up and just buy my vegetables? It would be much cheaper in the long run.

Morning after morning staccato salvoes of rain hammer against the panes of my bedroom window, engendering a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness: another long drenching walk with a dog who is  undaunted by wind and weather. The wind does not howl or moan or whistle, or any of the words we associate with its power. Sometimes it sounds like heavy machinery, or an aircraft coming in to land, or an express steam train, the gusts whomping and shaking the house.

Often on walks I observe the miracle of small birds flying in this chaotic turbulence. A skylark weighs just 33-45g, a nothing in the power of the storm. And yet the male lark rises vertically from the open fields, and hovers seemingly effortlessly, singing, singing, singing.

Another is the beautiful kestrel, the windhover, and we see them regularly over road verges, ditches and field margins. They can, apparently, spot a beetle at 50m. They need several voles or other small mammals a day to survive, and so there they are riding the storm, absolutely still before they plummet down to get their prey. A kestrel flies into, and at the same speed as, the oncoming wind. It extends its wing tips and fans its tail feathers, and in high wind may not even flap the wings at all – just kiting and gliding.

The construction of the Grand Design in the field next door continues, despite the weather. The demolition of the old house is complete, and heavy machinery moved in to start digging the footings.

They dug deep down into yellow Suffolk clay, and the trenches promptly filled with water. But work goes on with an army of builders, and much noise of diggers and banging and shouting and the beep-beep-beep of reversing vehicles. The lane is full of parked vans and cars, and huge lorries ply to and fro bringing loads of hard core. Mud is everywhere.

I last wrote on 31 January, and despite all efforts and demonstrations and fervent prayer, we have left the European Union. For the moment, during the transition period, nothing concrete has changed – a phoney war – except there is the taste of defeat. On the day itself and for several after there was the affront of the triumphalism of the Brexiteers – the jubilant bunting which appeared locally, the flying of the Union Flag (to my glee, often hung upside down in ignorance).

And so, as February closes, Lent begins. To Mass last night, with its repeated insistent intimation of mortality “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the funereal black smudge of ash marking us so we cannot forget that with every passing Ash Wednesday that fate comes nearer. Turn, repent, turn again, before it is too late.

Is not Protestantism so much the poorer without this? The repeated rite, the ritual of imposition, the intoning of the sonorous Miserere:

Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence,
O wash me more and more from my guilt
And cleanse me from my sin.

 
My offences truly I know them;
My sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned:
What is evil in your sight I have done.

Those who read the Daily Office will know the psalm by heart, for every Friday morning comes the same reminder. Maybe Protestants with their “personal relationship with their Saviour” are in no need of such admonitions, for that relationship, they say, is sufficient to get them to heaven. I am happy for them.

Like the effects of Brexit, only time will tell, and no-one can know. Justification by faith or works is beyond the scope of this blog.

 

 

 

January 2020

31 January 2020

Let me find some positives in this sad month. There is the first glimmering of light in the sky when we go out now just before 6.30am.

The birds are beginning to sing – the robin, the repetitive great tit, the melodic blackbird, the raucous thrush and others, and in daylight I hear larks high over the open fields. There are snowdrops, aconites, and the first primroses – which witness to the enduring mildness of this winter.

I look for other signs of hope, and find few. One, which restores faith in humanity’s response to destruction and brutality, is the work of Help Refugees, among other aid agencies, in Calais and northern France. This work – demanding, strenuous, often dirty and thankless – is done in the main by dedicated and inspiring young people. I will return to this below.

In the dark early days of the month the paths across the field and through the woods were running with water or mired deep in mud from the continual heavy rain, and on rare dry mornings were silvered deceptively by a gibbous moon. Little has changed, save for the slow lengthening of the days. The rain and relentless grey go on.

Along the lane my neighbours’ house is being demolished, brick by brick, by two Polish labourers. This pulling apart and tearing down seems to accord with the mood of this month. These elderly neighbours, long dead now, were the subject of the first chapter of this monthly chronicle, in July 2017. They sold their home of 52 years and the six-acre field with it in September 2016 so that he, terminally ill, could move to a bungalow in a nearby small town. He died less than a month later, and she – hating her fenced-in view – followed him to the grave after nine months. He wanted to call the new bungalow “Galanthus”, to remind him of the clouds of January snowdrops at their old house…a few of these remain among the ruins.

And in its place, set back from the road in the field, a Grand Design is planned – a glass and timber palace. I am told there will be “privacy planting” to shield the owner from my gaze, and I am also told (by others) that the plans have had to be redrawn – somewhat smaller.

Change and decay in all around I see.

There was one dry week, and one morning of sparkling iron-hard frost, but, reader, I missed it, for I was away in the grim fortress that is Calais. My regular readers will recall that in January of each year recently I have been to help at the Auberge des Migrants, which is under the umbrella of Help Refugees. My parish and other friends and family have been generous in their support, and this year was no exception. I had a car full of donated goods and some €725 in cash for them.

I am so fortunate that I can afford to rent a small (AirBnB) studio in Calais, so I can shut a door on myself in the evenings. There is warmth and hot water, and the possibility of heating up a meal. It overlooks the beach and the Channel, and on a clear night I could see the lights along the Kent coast. Inevitably it sparked thoughts of our place in Europe; we are so close geographically and culturally, and yet we in England are so stubbornly insular.

Sunset over the Channel (a metaphor?)

The Auberge des Migrants, which gives short-term volunteers the chance to work either in the Refugee Community Kitchen or the wood yard, is a place of inspiration. It has the same feeling as a walking pilgrimage – of working to a common purpose, of hope for a better future, of adventure even. These are young people who give up weeks, months or even years to run the place. Out of an apparent hippy chaos it works like clockwork. Wise after three years, I opted for the wood yard, for there – because of sustained physical effort – one can keep warm. The kitchen, open on two sides to the cold, chains the volunteer to a chopping station standing for hours on a wet concrete floor, then soaks him or her to the skin at a washing-up station, only to freeze again, immobile. The woodyard is fun: splitting logs, breaking up pallets, making kindling, bagging wood.

There has been an influx of refugees/migrants in Calais recently. Now there are about 1000-1500 (it’s impossible to quantify exactly). This puts a strain on resources. Last year the bags of wood had to weigh 13kg, and two tonnes were distributed daily. Now the bags can weigh only 6kg, rationing wood, four bags per “fire.” The distribution van goes out twice a day, after the regular clearances by the Police aux Frontières and the CRS (riot police). We couldn’t have a morning tea break (desperately needed by Granny here) till at least 150 bags had been filled and stacked ready. At nearly 73 I found the toll on the ageing body to be great. I am always the oldest volunteer. I hope that there may be people among my readers or friends or fellow parishioners who will take the baton and run with it.

While in northern France I was invited to a reception at Arras City Hall (the famous Beffroi). Why? you ask…For some months now I have been negotiating, on behalf of an organisation for which I am communications officer (the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome) a partnership with an umbrella organisation in France which serves pilgrims on the French section (nearly 1000km) of the Via Francigena (the ancient pilgrim path between Canterbury and Rome). The reception was an event where the Great of Arras present medals to the Good of Arras – in this case a woman who devotes her time to arranging accommodation throughout the Pas de Calais and beyond for pilgrims on their way to Santiago and Rome.

This lady, looking disconcertingly like Una Stubbs as Mrs Hudson in the BBC “Sherlock,” had helped me on my way to Rome four years ago. And so I went, as PR for the Confraternity, and sat through 75 minutes of speeches. And then lunch with French colleagues. Many years living in France have taught me the correct social dance of Anglo-French intercourse.

I miss France so much. Crossing the Channel had always a frisson of excitement and adventure, however frequently I did it. Because I am not speaking my mother tongue I have a sensation of being a different person, someone who can express different sentiments, be…not myself. I used to whizz past Arras on my way south, towards the sun and the red tiled roofs and what was for some years home, but I must admit to loving the north of France. The day I was in Arras was cold and foggy, and I walked through the great squares with their Flemish gables, their echoing arcades, their cobblestones. I drove through flat fields, occasionally glimpsing canals, distant rows of poplars…all was grey. Jacques Brel’s voice translates so exactly the essence of the north.

And this nostalgia brings me neatly to the elephant in today’s blog. Today is the day so long fought against, so dreaded. Today is Brexit day, and the feeling of defeat swamps me. No, I do not see a new dawn, and an exciting liberated future. No, I do not see the positive. I am overwhelmed with grief, and I have wept today.

I will end with a quotation from a recent edition of the New York Times: ” [Britain has] … a new prime minister whose track record includes overtly racist statements, some of which would make even Donald Trump blush, a Brexit project linked to native nationalism and a desire to rid Britain of large numbers of immigrants, and an ever thickening loom of imperial nostalgia…” No wonder I weep.

 

December 2019

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing” – John Stuart Mill

My introductory paragraph, traditionally a report on the weather and observed trends in our climate, could this month be a repetition of November’s. The reader will forgive me, for in deeply rural Suffolk my daily existence is much ruled by what is going on out of doors.

And what has gone on out of doors, with very few exceptions, is heavy rain. And more rain, and unremitting dark skies; days of little light, and a universal cold damp dripping. And mud.

However, as we descended into the deep dark of December there was, as ever, the prospect of the midwinter festival – which is what Christmas has become – to cheer us. I don’t find that the commercial noise and bustle and kitsch glare distract me from a contemplation of the spiritual meaning of Christmas, and they do delay the slide into the depression that dark and damp bring.

In our villages competing light shows illuminate the night – whole properties, house and garden, given over to flashing snowmen, ho-hoing Santas, rooftop reindeer, dangling blue icicles. A transient rural East Anglian Vegas. I like the attitude depicted below (which is not, alas, from Suffolk):

In our farms the preparation for the food fest of Christmas takes a different turn. One regular early morning walk takes us near a farm which sells free-range geese and turkeys, and during the autumn months I hear every day the geese wake up with much raucous honking and screeching. A few weeks before Christmas suddenly a deathly silence falls. The geese are no more. Instead a powerful security light illuminates the dark fields. A gang of Romanian workers walks the miles to the farm to pluck and dress the poultry. Where will farms find labour next year?

On an early December Saturday, one of the rare dry days, I spent all day at the Guildhall with its spectacular view of the City of London skyline, in a meeting of trustees of the charity for which I am communications officer and editor, gathered to decide on our three-year strategy. It was unexpectedly productive and good-tempered…until a colleague, our previous chairman and a former Reuters chief correspondent, surprised us all by an outburst calling current concern over climate change “hysteria,” a myth to which we should give no credence, and a Marxist totalitarian conspiracy (according to a book he subsequently ordered me from Amazon in order to contradict me. My 15-year-old granddaughter took a look at it, and her pencilled-in marginalia demolished the illogical diatribe as only a teenager can).

It is more than disturbing to hear this sort of rant from a respected colleague, or indeed from anyone. Neither he nor I are scientists, but to my lay mind it seems the huge consensus of scientific opinion is that human beings are responsible for the changes we are witnessing in climate, and that the perhaps debatable fact that we have not yet reached a point of no return, does not mean that we never shall. Of course I understand that projections are not facts, but if there is the slightest chance that these projections show us the face of the future then I believe we must act now.

It requires drastic behaviour change, which – we all know – is a difficult process. A headline caught my eye this month: “Being obese creates long-haul flight’s worth of emissions.” A study, published in the journal Obesity, alleges that the extra food consumed by the world’s 600 million obese people has a carbon footprint on a par with the whole UK, and their increased metabolism means they breathe out extra CO2 equivalent to Sweden’s annual output. I know insufficient science to rebut this, and have not seen the relevant statistics, but none of us should be smug about what we do or don’t eat, and where we do or don’t travel, and by what means.

I do know that weather is not the same as climate, but it is certain that over time repeated patterns can be an indicator. Here, on what passes for high ground in Suffolk (50m), I am safe from floods, but nearby the entire flood plain of the Waveney is under water, one long lake from Diss to Beccles. One night at Syleham Mill I was forced to reverse the car down the dark lane by what looked like an endless sheet of water overflowing from the mill race, the river slapping and gurgling against the parapet of the bridge. Driving over the Common is like going along a causeway across a lagoon. On Boxing Day a daughter and I found our traditional walk via Minsmere Sluice deserted, and soon discovered why: vast tracts were under water. The dog, bounding ahead, disappeared in the depths, all but the top of her head and her nose swallowed up. Not wishing to turn back, we waded knee-deep through icy water, boots wet and squelching for the next five miles.

The Sluice in drier times

It is a favourite walk, which takes us from Eastbridge to the sea, then north past the RSPB  reserve to the Coastguards’ cottages and the National Trust, and back through heath and birch woods. These Minsmere Levels are the flood water catchment marshes that drain the area of land either side of the river Minsmere that runs  through the New Cut and out to the sea via the sluice. This tidal sluice collects water from three channels before discharging the flow into the sea, between Dunwich and Sizewell. The rains throughout the autumn have been too constant and too heavy for the drainage channels to cope.

My regular readers will know that I cannot allow December to pass without mentioning the political situation which has concerned me over the past four years in ways it never has before. Through Advent the readings which prepare us for Christmas are taken from Isaiah, from the beautiful prophetic poetry of Deutero-Isaiah foretelling an age of peace, of restoration when wrongs will be righted and justice will reign:

He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted…garlands instead of ashes, oil of gladness instead of mourners’ tears”.

On the evening of 12 December, as seconds counted down to 10pm and the release of the exit poll results, I knew that these would be the final moments of hope for a better future. The Conservative party won a huge majority – thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system – for sufficient of my compatriots voted to “get Brexit done’ (a meaningless but obviously effective slogan, which somehow persuaded people that their future would be rosier if we could get on and sever our ties with the EU). It cannot mean better. The days of the sovereign nation state are long gone; we cannot recapture them, if that is what is meant by “getting our country back.” It is incomprehensible to me that people cannot understand that unity – community – is better, more productive, safer than standing alone, grasping for illusory better deals, trying to shut our doors against all comers.

What voters seem to have forgotten is that historically the Tories are the party of “I’m all right Jack,” and that election promises of bonanza cash, which wooed and seduced and ultimately broke  the Labour “red wall” of the North and Midlands, will not materialise into prosperity, that workers’ rights will not be preserved, and broken post-Brexit Britain will mean more poverty, not less, for we shall be the poorer outside the EU. Poorer economically, politically, culturally, morally and spiritually.

Truth was the victim of this election, and already we see the consequences for democracy. Has the executive power grab which immediately followed really gone unnoticed in the pre-Christmas frenzy  – or do we not care? Look – really look – at what has disappeared from Johnson’s notorious Withdrawal Agreement “deal”, the metaphorical piece of paper (in fact 600+ pages) proudly waved after last-minute negotiations in October:

  • The clause giving MPs the right to approve an extension to the transition period.
  • The clause 31 requirement for parliamentary approval for negotiations on the future relationship. Under the old bill, the House of Commons would have had to approve the negotiating objectives of the government in the next phase of talks. The parliamentary approval process for any future relationship treaty subsequently negotiated with the EU has also gone.
  • The removal of clauses pledging alignment with the EU on workers’ rights. Legal protections for refugee children reunited with family members in the UK have been watered down. The bill removes, via clause 37, obligations in regard to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the EU with an obligation to make a statement within two months of passing the act.
  • The promise that the government’s position on negotiating the future relationship will be in line with the political declaration that accompanied the withdrawal agreement.

I am writing this on the 849th anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, St Thomas of Canterbury. He took on the executive power. He too lost.

Candle at the site of Becket’s assassination in Canterbury Cathedral

And so the old year fades with failure and the dismal decade dies, and with it much hope for our future. I am fortunate and privileged, and I am unlikely to go hungry, protected as I am by a pension and the ownership of my home, and I am blessed with the love of daughters and friends. But next in Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs comes a sense of connection. That is going, has disappeared with any voice or agency I might once have had in this country, any influence on our future. The Black Dog is coming ever closer.

(“Bad dog’, painting by Austin Clarke)

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November 2019

Australia burns in record springtime temperatures. Venice floods with the highest acqua alta since the disaster of 1966. More floods in Yorkshire and the east Midlands. We are told the planet’s future is at the tipping point.

Here: rain, rain, rain and more rain. Pitiless and relentless, day after day; low grey light. In the early morning the Gatling gun salvos against the window announce another drenching walk in the dark. Must I get up out of a warm bed and face it? The dog says yes! Ditches overflow; some roads are passable only with care. The mud turns liquid and no longer weighs my boots glutinously down. The paths are under water and the exuberant dog sends tsunamis over the top of my boots. As we walk there is no autumnal susurration and swish of drifted dead leaves, but  a soggy dispiriting squelch.

And then today the miracle of a sunrise seen. Colour returns to the landscape. Those few trees still in leaf – the oak and the field maple – which were a dull brown in the dark grey landscape turn suddenly to flame, russet, gold. The world is glorious once more; a million drops of water shine and dazzle. There is light.

After 18 dry months the Common is restored to its winter status as a waterland: we wade rather than walk over it. Where once the summer’s mares and foals grazed, ducks and geese now swim. It is hard to remember that this is how it should be.

The mud is not just a feature of fields and paths. In this deeply rural spot where I am writing the lanes are dangerous with slathers of liquid mud and huge gobbets of solid clay. Tractors and farm lorries and – above all- sugar beet harvesters and transporters spread it. A rickety hand-written “mud on road” sign scarcely does justice to the hazards of the muddy skating surface.

We live in the country, but maybe we accept it too readily as just part of life, nothing to be done, farmers rule. However, to leave mud on the road is illegal. The Highways Act 1980 makes it an offence to deposit mud and other things on the highway (S148). In addition, the act provides that if a person without lawful authority or excuse deposits anything whatsoever on a highway in consequence of which a user of the highway is injured or endangered, then he is guilty of an offence (S161).

Therefore, if a farmer or contractor deposits mud on the highway they run the risk of committing a criminal offence and may face prosecution and a fine. It is not very well known but in addition, if there is significant mud on a vehicle, such as a tractor, it may constitute the more serious offence of dangerous driving under the Road Traffic Act 1988. This is because S2A of that act states that the term “dangerous” can include anything attached to a vehicle (which can include mud).

But, a big but…the “Farmers Weekly” opines:  “However, I think it would have to be a significant amount of mud, and/or a serious accident and/or a repeat offender before the police would be likely to consider bringing this additional charge.” Indeed. Or any charge at all.

In common with so many other offences (I daily see drivers doing at least 50mph through villages, and many on hand-held mobile phones) it is not policed here. Nor is it likely that any of  Mr Johnson’s proposed 20,000 extra police will be seen along the lanes where I walk and – perforce – drive.

The main cause of the hazard is the harvesting of sugar beet. Despite the UK’s modest size, it is the eleventh largest producer of sugar beet worldwide, behind giants in the top ten such as Russia, the United States or China. This gives our nation the dubious honour of having the largest proportion of our land devoted to sugar beets of all countries, and much of this happens in East Anglia.

Sugar beets were not grown on a large scale in the United Kingdom until the mid-1920s, when 17 processing factories were built, following war-time shortages of imported cane sugar. Before World War I, with its far-flung empire, the United Kingdom simply imported the sugar from the cheapest market. However, the war had created a shortage in sugar, prompting the development of a domestic market. The first sugar beet processing factory was built at Lavenham in Suffolk in 1860, but failed after a few years without the government support its counterparts on the continent received. The Dutch built the first successful factory at Cantley in Norfolk in 1912.

Here in north Suffolk we know that any journey to Bury St Edmunds during the sugar beet campaign, which starts in September, will be a slow one, as trailers loaded with beet are pulled by tractors in snail-like processions along the A143 to the Silver Spoon factory. Why is it called a “campaign”? Apparently because it is a huge undertaking and requires coordination of farmer, contractor, haulier, and receiving station. “Campaign” of course comes from “campagne”, the French for countryside, and military campaigns used that vocabulary of “taking to the field”. In the harvesting and transporting of sugar beet a neat example of a word returning to its origins.

Another campaign preoccupies me, for as I write it is less than two weeks to the General Election. That anxiety felt for nearly three and a half years now rises in me, knotting my stomach and robbing sleep, for the Tories have a good lead in the polls…not that polls can be trusted. If they win they will, in their words, “get Brexit done”, whatever that means, and oh then we can kiss goodbye to their campaign promises of spend spend spend . Except that the costings suggest that for all those promises spending on public services will not go back to the level of a decade ago. And Brexit will not be “done;” it will only just be beginning and we ain’t seen nothing yet. The future is dark.

These are not my words, but they are my sentiments:

Do not go gentle into that good fight
The Truth should burn and guide us on our way
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

When the wise with their educated sight
Call for compassion in the Laws and say
Do not go gentle into that good fight.

Good men upon the Left must use their might
To make their deeds mount up and every day
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

Young people with a vision now alight
Must gird their loins and gain in strength so they
Do not go gentle into that good fight.

While women know misogyny by sight
And violence fills their life they need to say
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

So all of us who want to stop the blight
Curse, bless and shed those fierce tears I pray
Do not go gentle into that good fight.
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

Meteorological winter starts. The trees stark and skeletal stand out against the sky. The deep dark of winter is nearly on us. But even in the darkness I know that the sun will continue to rise, and occasionally gleam upon us. I know exactly where it rises in December, exactly where it rises at any point in the year. I could tell the date from the sunrise. This is a daily miracle which says we will survive.

 

October 2019

Five o’clock in the afternoon, and the darkness walls us in. Meteorologically it is autumn, but we have had the first frost, and the changing of the hour always signals the start of the slow slide into winter.

I have learned another new word: “Noachic”…you’ll see why in a moment. October has been supremely autumnal this year. I have written before that nature always seems to make up for times of drought, and we had been short of rain for a good 18 months. The first day of the month brought a positively Biblical downpour, but it soon soaked away as the water table was so low. But it was five days later that the rain became Noachic – or, as I might have said, diluvian. All that Sunday torrential rain fell; friends’ garages, gardens and outhouses were flooded, and the water in my flooded drive (something I had not seen since April of last year) was lapping at the front door.

Fortunately, the horses had been taken off the Common the day before the deluge, a week earlier than usual. Now the Common is vast, empty, barer and bigger now they are gone.

The rain has continued through the month, and gradually ditches and ponds began to fill, streams started to trickle then run faster. Our walks are slowed by mud. The extreme wet but warm conditions have brought out a flourish of funghi. The frost came near the end of the month. Order is re-established.

For me, it has been a month of more than usual gadding about (I am a lover of staying put – unless it’s off for adventure abroad). Meetings in London, meetings here, meetings there. On my way to one  I walked the dog along the beach at Sizewell. The great dome of the nuclear power station dominates, shining, sinister and alien. I should say power stations, by this tiny fishing village and its shingle shore. The old Sizewell A from the 1960s with its two magnox reactors is in the process of being decommissioned. My brother-in-law from New Zealand was part of the engineering team, and when he visited in 1986 we had to drive over so he could see it was still in order. A previous owner of my current house also worked on the construction, and was – allegedly – somewhat light-fingered. I’m told the police raided and removed all sorts of items taken from the site. Why would he want them? He built a ramshackle shed in the garden from materials he had pinched. It didn’t glow in the dark, however.

Sizewell B is a pressurised water reactor, and came on stream in 1995. A new twin reactor, Sizewell C, is planned…eliciting spirited resistance from villages on the route to the shore, fearing the passage of 600 lorries a day. It is certain the construction would affect the nature reserves of Minsmere and Dunwich. Stage 4 of the public consultation has now finished. How to weigh up the benefits of non-carbon-generated fuel with the destruction of these habitats?

When my children were small we would swim at Sizewell. The water was warmer there.

The same week saw me invited to an Ed Sheeran exhibition and then the theatre in Ipswich. I am not quite like the judge who supposedly asked “Who are the Beatles?”. I have heard of Ed Sheeran (two of his albums are in the list of the best-selling UK albums of all time) , but I was unaware that this Suffolk boy was such a creative talent from a tender age, and in visual arts as well as music. His drive to write and perform, and his courage (busking in London and Ireland at age 14) were impressive. But the reason I wanted to see the exhibition was the portrait – and oil sketches – of Sheeran by Northern Ireland artist Colin Davidson. They were powerful pieces of work done with great sensitivity.

On the day there was to be the great anti-Brexit march in London (at least a million on the streets) I was on my way to Santiago de Compostela. Driving to Stansted I was listening to the news and comments with my heart in my mouth, for the Commons were to sit on a Saturday (for the first time since the Falklands conflict in 1982) to debate Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill, and – had it passed – we’d have been on our way out of the European Union. And if it hadn’t…we’d have been out without a deal. I found myself emotional and tearful at the enormity of what was to happen that day, and I nearly, so nearly, drove on past Stansted towards London, because the most important thing seemed then to go and march, and shout at the deaf ears of the Government.

But I didn’t. I was sent reports and pictures of the demonstration in real time. “Epic,” my daughter said. But I am left wondering if it was all too British and polite and middle class and humorous to be taken seriously. When voices are not heard does change not sometimes call for more forceful methods? The peace processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and even women’s suffrage would not have come about without violence. I don’t know…turning the other cheek cannot be right in the face of injustice or oppression. Or governmental malpractice and lies.

But of course I went  on to Santiago, where I was treated like royalty. My host, who had commissioned the Pilgrim Diptych, was the most welcoming, courteous and generous of men, and I also had the honour of meeting the subject of a previous commission:

Arriving in Santiago was like coming home, so familiar is it as the endpoint of many Caminos. As I returned to my hotel the first evening after a stupendous dinner, the rain-washed streets glistened as I crossed the Praza do Obradoiro and walked under the arch where so many joyful pilgrims catch their first glimpse of journey’s end. It is a place that pulls the pilgrim back year after year, a place which we endure pain and hardship to reach. If a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life, with its joys and sorrows, ups and downs, encounters and losses, then arriving in Santiago is surely like being welcomed in heaven.

And I came home feeling healed and whole from having been treated with such respect and love.

While there, I managed a day’s walking, to remind myself of Galicia:

So…I write this on 31 October, the day so long dreaded when we would, in the words of our blustering prime minister of mendacity, leave the European Union “No ifs, no buts. Do or die.” If we did not, he said, he would rather die in a ditch. Neither has happened. I breathe a temporary sigh of relief that we remain – for now, tempered  by rising anxiety about the result of the election announced for 12 December. As with every twist and turn of this so polite civil war it is impossible to call what will happen.

I leave you, on this 31 October, with an apt image.

September 2019

I am distracted this month from writing about what I am sure many will consider to be my rural idyll, and dwelling on the beauties of falling leaves and the autumn landscape. We live in what the (apparently apocryphal) Chinese curse calls “interesting times.”

But this blog is about my Suffolk life, and has become a sort of record not only of the seasons, but of the changing weather patterns and the effects these have on life in deepest Suffolk.

Exactly on cue, autumn arrived with the equinox. We had had a golden month till then, with heat and sun, and increasing drought. The effects of two years with less than usual rainfall had made the land almost a desert – no ponds, dry streams, empty ditches, dust everywhere, all foliage tinder dry.  The grass on the Common long gone, and the mares and foals hungry. The year pursued its usual course, the plough changed gold to umber, seagulls in its wake. We went out on calm and tranquil mornings through the dew, and every day the darkness lingered longer, and rushed in earlier each evening.

Those lovely mornings – all the more poignant because they were the last of summer. One morning a buzzard was out teaching one of its young to hunt. The youngster swooped low over our heads to have a better look, its hunting cry not yet perfected to the menacing mew – more like a seagull whose voice is breaking. Another morning a large grey heron rises from an near-empty pond and flaps slowly away toward the rising sun.

But with the equinox came gales and rain rattling against the windows, the parched grass now growing rapidly green in the warmth of low pressure systems as they pile in from the Atlantic. A torch is necessary in the morning.

And this turbulence and invading darkness match our political weather. The storms grow increasingly violent. The calm knowledge of a democratic parliamentary system that works and with which I grew up, and which carried on more or less efficiently in the background of our lives, has gone. There have been lies, deceit, sharp practice at the highest level. There has been drama, and  language which incites to hatred and violence. Trust has gone, and with that comes an anxiety so deep that it pervades every waking moment, and robs me of sleep. No-one knows what will happen, what the outcome will be or can be. But as things stand much of what I hold dear will be wrenched away in a month’s time on 31 October.

I will return to this later. The reader must forgive me if therefore my rhapsodic paeans of praise to autumn fields and skies are in short supply this month.

The path to Wingfield

One sunny day early in the month the dog and I walked a path to Wingfield, a small – and as the overworked cliché would have it – sleepy village a few miles away.

I went into the church to look at the magnificent late medieval tombs, and met an enthusiastic vicar waiting for a bride and groom to come and rehearse their wedding. Seeing the dog whistle round my neck, he invited both of us in to explore at our leisure. He took me into the vestry (I’m sure that could be the first line of a bawdy song…), and then suggested I climb the vertical ladder up to the vestry loft where there is a spyhole overlooking the altar.

This tiny village was not always so sleepy. It not only witnessed but took an important part in another period of extreme turbulence in our history. It was home to one of the great families whose power and influence changed the course of that history – the de la Poles, earls and dukes of Suffolk.

Forgive me if I recount their story. It seems somehow relevant to today with its aggrandisement, treason, plotting and civil war.

Their story begins with a merchant from Hull marrying the daughter of a local East Anglian landowner. The de Wingfields were of Norman origin, and Sir John was a fighting man of distinction who served the Black Prince and had favour at court. When Sir John died his widow had the present large church built. Their only daughter Katherine married Michael de la Pole, from Hull, who had been ennobled for his services to the Crown and had become Earl of Suffolk. Their son, also Michael, had married a daughter of the Earl of Stafford (also a Katherine), but died at the Siege of Harfleur (of “Once more unto the breach” fame). And their son was killed at Agincourt immediately after.

Michael’s brother William inherited, and served the king so well he was made Duke of Suffolk, and married Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey “Canterbury Tales” Chaucer. He was later impeached for treason for plotting with Henry VI’s queen Margaret of Anjou, and beheaded as he tried to cross the Channel. His body was thrown into the sea, but was later washed up on shore, and was brought back to Wingfield for burial. John, William and Alice’s son, was eight when he inherited.

Wingfield Castle gatehouse

Now England was in the throes of the Wars of the Roses, and John the second duke was a Yorkist, and such was his favour at court that he married Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of the kingmaker Earl of Warwick and sister to the future kings Edward IV and Richard III. Their son fought for Richard at Bosworth Field, but Henry Tudor, the victor, was foolishly lenient because the family was so powerful, and the de la Poles retained their titles and estates. Elizabeth Plantagenet however, plotted with her sister in Burgundy to restore York to the throne, and John de la Pole joined in uprisings against Henry VII, and was killed at East Stoke in 1487, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses.

His brother Edmund inherited the earldom, but was not duke. He and his brothers Richard and William also plotted with Burgundy against Henry Tudor. As sons of Elizabeth Plantagenet there was a good and legitimate claim to the throne. William died in the Tower; Edmund was executed in 1513 by Henry VIII, but Richard remained abroad in the service of François 1er, and was a continuing thorn in the flesh to the Tudor dynasty, but died at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.

None of these brothers had children, and so ended the story and power of one of the greatest families in the land.

The author, her daughters and three other children on the drawbridge to Wingfield Castle [?]1983
The name lives on. Opposite the church with the noble tombs of the Wingfields and de la Poles is the de la Pole Arms, and the lane which leads down from Weybread crossroads towards Wingfield was originally called de la Pole lane. As  with most old names this became corrupted by use, and today is known as Dale Road, but when I first came to Suffolk it was called both Dally Po, and another  version of de la Pole pronounced as “Daily Poo.”

So, little changes in human nature and the desire to control the course of history: hubris, privilege, deceit, the seizing of power, warring factions, and a monumental battle for the soul of the nation.

Our country is divided. A friend of mine, who voted Leave, when pressed for his reasons, actually said “You can’t trust the Germans. Look at the War.” And here I get to my point: for me – and for many – statements of such idiocy (neither side is exempt from idiocy, of course) destroy relationships, drive wedges, create breaches and wounds which will not heal.

And I have to ask this question of my faith. Is it a faith that really dictates that force should never be used? It is a faith of contradictions: on one hand the injunctions to turn the other cheek, on the other the Jesus who drove merchants from the temple with knotted ropes and overturned their stalls. On one hand we have “Peace I give you, my peace I leave you”, and on the other “I came not to bring peace but the sword.”

When voices are not heard, when agency is denied, when liars and privileged bullies rule and deceive, what is left? I know that I would shed my blood if we could remain in, and enjoy the freedoms, values, and rights of,  being part of the cultural, spiritual and economic community which is Europe.

When I come to write the October chapter…what will have happened?

August 2019

Late summer

Late indeed! The pattern of July has repeated: a poor month for weather, with rain, tempests of wind which rattled through at 90kph, storms and grey…but rounded off with a heatwave, when temperature records for an August bank holiday were broken.

Last year day of heat succeeded day of heat, and in these past few days we have recaptured that certainty, that unchanging sense of eternity when the hot wind blows from past to the future. But it doesn’t endure, of course.

We go out very early, the dog and I, for she does not cope with heat.

The red sun is scarcely above the horizon now. The mornings are misty, mysterious, in their promise of heat. We walk and walk until the mist recedes leaving the shimmering day, already hot.

Yes, we walk and walk. In August comes a review copy of “In praise of walking”

by the neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara, professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College, Dublin. He tells us what we already know: that walking is good for our posture and muscles, helps us repair and protect organs, slows or reverses brain ageing, promotes creative thinking, improves our mood, and reduces stress levels, and that walking together is a social glue. No surprise there then. I believe it aids spirituality. For me the daily 10km is when I pray, when I give time and thought to those who need prayer, to those who are dear, and when I reflect on my life. It is also a time when I write within my head, and the origin of much of this chronicle.

All this while the dog races before me in a frenzy, for now the fields are clear there are dozens of hares, muntjac, roe deer that must not go unchased. She rarely catches anything. She can match a hare for speed, but loses it as it zig-zags and turns. One morning a large hare shot out of an uncut field straight into my legs. I don’t know who was the more astounded.

And for once the sky was clear mid-month, and I stood outside at night enjoying the celestial fireworks of the Perseid meteor shower, while the dog sniffed the scents of the summer night.

Harvest is all but done, safely gathered in, and the surrounding sea of gold ebbs away to be swallowed by the advancing browns and umbers of ploughland.

Individual farms have their methods of stacking straw, but soon these too will disappear from the fields, and the year of production begins all over again.

And in a minor key my own harvest too…potatoes, a glut of courgettes, tomatoes, beetroot, chard, lettuce. The beans are done; leeks, cavolo nero, broccoli still to come. The rosy eating apples tumbled down in the storms and are fed to the chickens. My fig trees are alive with the rustling of birds keen to get to the luscious fruit as soon as it softens.

Farmers complain; it’s what they do. Now it is those who raise livestock who think they are being unfairly targeted in our fashionable scramble to reduce the environmental impact of the consumption of meat and dairy. I no longer buy meat unless it is for someone else. The arguments rage back and forth, and each is sure of the solidity of the moral high ground beneath their feet. There is so much more each of us could do in living more simply and sustainably, and no doubt all of us throw stones from our glasshouses (unheated glasshouses, I trust). One of the targets of my self-righteous projectiles is the huge, gas-guzzling 4x 4s which proclaim “I have moved to the countryside” (why ‘side’, please?), and whose owners have rarely if ever any cause to drive off-road. But I am as guilty as anyone: I drive; I have flown this year. If I could afford trains I would, and if there were any buses here I would use them. Our last (weekly) bus was axed ten years back.

Now I must admit that, hypocritically, I have to take a plane in October to Santiago de Compostela. Great excitement! I have been invited there for a weekend to see the hanging of my Camino pilgrimage diptych, to a gathering of what might be called Camino luminaries. The day before the August bank holiday I sent photos of the finished paintings to the commission-er, who approved them (more than approved, he says) – and joy! paid immediately – and the panels will be dispatched by courier in a week or so. I am permitted to display them here (rather a dark photo. The original is lighter and brighter). The reader familiar with walking pilgrimage in general, and the Camino in particular, will swiftly discern all the symbols.

One waits years, trudging through a desert of self-doubt, and then validation comes all at once. Over the August bank holiday weekend I then sold five paintings. No doubt another few years of desert will follow.

The regular reader will have discerned long ago that I am a pessimist (I prefer to say realist). Recent research in the States suggests that optimists, and those who think positively live on an average 11-15% longer than pessimists. Hmmm…Amazing that I have lived this long, then. I can only say with Mona Lott from ITMA “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.”

I have recently resumed the post of communications officer for our parish, and had the task of sending to local and church media a minor excitement. In the exceptional gales mid-month a stone finial cross on the roof of St Edmund’s Roman Catholic church blew down and crashed onto the sacristy roof, before bouncing to the ground and narrowly missing some of the famed Victorian stained glass. In the sacristy at the time, and directly underneath was the parish priest. Naturally I billed the story as a “miraculous” escape. But I was tempted rather to head it “God strikes St Edmund’s”, for the reader will recall that a year ago I wrote of the IICSA report on the scandal of child sexual abuse at Downside and Ampleforth abbeys. That same parish priest was named (if not shamed) as one of the abbots on whose watch these crimes were allowed to happen unreported to the lay authorities.

Every day for more than three years now I have said to myself, “Things can’t get any worse.” I don’t mean my own situation, for I am greatly blessed in my life. No, this is the continuing long slow suicide of the United Kingdom, and my own feeling of a visceral wound of being separated from part of my culture and history. Ever since the result of the “advisory” referendum in which 52% of those who voted – reduced by years of “austerity” and victims of a mendacious campaign which played upon the fear of the Other – stated their desire to leave the European Union and “take back control”, our once great nation and revered democracy has been tearing itself apart in a mix of farce and tragedy. But it has got worse, relentlessly every day. And now our parliamentary democracy itself is in jeopardy: we have a prime minister elected by 0.13% of the population, with a majority of one in the House of Commons, who has prorogued Parliament, leaving MPs opposed to the destructive No Deal likely to be foist upon us by monomaniac Brexiteers a matter of a few days before the 31 October deadline to stop it.

I wake after little sleep, day after day, with a sense of dread at the impending national suicide. I echo Conan Doyle in the final Holmes story “His last bow.” There is an east wind coming…unless we can stop it. Why are we not taking to the streets, stopping traffic, occupying the Palace of Westminster, manning the barricades?

There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.”

My readers expect more lyricism from these monthly reports. I apologise for the tone of this one. But to end with a smile, I bring you another example from orthographically-challenged Suffolk.

 

 

July 2019

High summer

A heatwave! We have had a heatwave, which came suddenly and fiercely after a gloomy, dark month.  As is usual in a British summer it has been short-lived, but it has been intense, ending in spectacular storms and lightning displays and crashes which shook the house – and the inevitable power cuts. And rain, a great deal of rain…and back to chilly grey and dark skies.

In a heatwave time seems to slow, expand, hang in the hot air. The heat was a furnace, consuming all energy and purpose, turning projects and plans to the ashes of inertia. The dog pants in the shade. My studio was too hot in the afternoons for painting. As I drove home one late afternoon the temperature was above 35C.

When I lived in France this was normal in summer. I was writing books during those years, and worked at night when it was cooler, my sweat pouring onto the keyboard. Every hour or so I would go and swim in the dark to lower my body temperature. The water was warm and silky, and bats swooped to drink from the pool.

There are bats here too, emerging from my attic on summer nights through a tiny gap in the bricks to flit over my head as the dog and I go out at dusk. These are pipistrelles (pipistrellus pipistrellus), the smallest and most common of bats in this country. They weigh a few grams and would fit into a matchbox. Despite their ubiquity they are protected. Some years ago I was having work done to the soffit and fascia of the front of my house. The workmen found a dead bat. Tools were downed; urgent phone calls were made; work stopped. Natural England sent experts, and batwoman spent a morning climbing and crawling round the attic. Fortunately it was just too early in the year for the bats to have left the nursery, and work was permitted to continue, with the proviso that the gap in the brickwork must be left.

I – in common with many a churchwarden of a country church – could wish they were not protected. I don’t want them in my attic, or in the bedrooms where they occasionally intrude. I have cleaned churches on many occasions, and in summer the mess and smell are  horrible. Take a newspaper to spread on your pew if you want to sit down in church! Sometimes during concerts in rural churches the resonance and vibration of the music can disorient the resident bats to such a degree that they fly out of their roosts to dive-bomb the audience.

The difficulties of interfacing – living – with wildlife in the country are legion. Yet again a fox got my chickens – six of them, leaving just four poor traumatised birds. Six! The hens had been shut in their run for two months while I considered it unsafe, for hungry vixens with cubs are bold hunters. I had just liberated them a few days before. That day I had finished an important piece of work, and gave myself up to the pleasures of gardening, and then rewarded myself by going indoors to watch Federer play Nadal. And the cunning of the foxes was such that in those couple of hours the six chickens were taken.  Renard must have been watching all the time, waiting for a chance, maybe teaching the growing cubs to hunt. I will not allow my flock to range again. These birds were under my care, part of my household, my responsibility – my economy, in the true sense of the word. It hurts.

In the heat the dog and I walk even earlier, out well before six, though the heat is building by our return after seven. Even in more normal conditions she finds the summer too warm, and we seek shade for the second walk of the day. In the absence of woodland, this is often to be found in green lanes, the ancient byways and paths connecting villages and settlements. There is one a stone’s throw from my house: Tongs Lane. At its northern end it is a continuation of a Roman road, but then winds and wiggles, and does not quite join up with the road as it drives straight as an arrow’s flight due south east towards Heveningham and Peasenhall, a line which would take it to the sea at Aldeburgh. The origin of the name Tongs is not certain. In other regions it is taken to mean a “tongue” of ground between two rivers; or it could be there was someone in Saxon times whose name became corrupted to Tong. Near it there is Spong Lane, but a spong in Suffolk is a narrow strip of land.

These smaller Roman roads appear and disappear as they criss-cross the land, but their broken line and direction can usually be traced with a ruler on a map. I always thought the lost sections were because in post-Roman Britain farms and villages grew up and the road was diverted to take these in. But I now believe it is that the ghosts of these roads survive on the more marginal clay upland soils, and not in the more fertile valleys, where continuity of arable husbandry has ploughed away all trace of them.

Where the minor Roman roads remain in this way on the claylands they are often associated with other ancient features, particularly clay commons and parish boundaries. The curving arcs formed by the boundaries of these commons extend over the same general area of clayland spanned by the Roman road, and – like it – they too tend to fade away on the better soils and valley gravels. This is certainly true in the immediate area where I live, with the four clay-dominated “greens” which make up my village (Bell Green, North Green, Swan Green, and Silverleys Green), Hussey Green, and “my” own common of which I so often write – Chippenhall Green. All of them within site of the Roman road.

When I first moved to my present house, and discovered Tongs Lane, I imagined Roman legionaries marching along it. I dug deep into my six-decade-old school Latin to converse with them. Today I have cheated and consulted the Classicists of my family to bring a correct version of my opening line: “Cum hic habitabas, erant plures silvae et agri rariores.” Did they reply? Rarely, for their on-road march velocity was in the range 2.85 to 3.0mph or 4.59kph to 4.83kph, and carrying up to 40kg. Sometimes, in the shadows of the lane, the dog stops and stares, utterly still. What is it she sees? The shade of a soldier? A merchant coming from the coast with goods from the Mediterranean?

Another favourite bridleway of ours, if we’re driving home from Bungay, is in the Saints country (see February 2019), and leads from the village of Ilketshall St Margaret almost due north to Bungay. It is called Shoedevil Lane.

I cannot find the likely origin of the name. There is an online reference to some expert leading a walk along it, and opining on the origin, but his theories, frustratingly, get no mention. It is a glorious walk high over farmland and descending to the Waveney Valley. Tongs, Spong, Shoedevil, Deadman’s …lost history which speaks of our ancestors’ lives, preoccupations and fears.

On a rainy Saturday early in the month I apprehensively took some entries to the Flower and Produce Show in a nearby village. I learned to “dress” my onions for showing as all the old Suffolk “boys” do, and was rewarded with a first for these, and first for my (pre-fox) eggs, and my roses (stiff competition there), and a second for lettuce. Less glorious were my unplaced cheese scones, marmalade, and (crushingly) a landscape painting of the Waveney Valley at Syleham. I imagine the schadenfreude of members of the local art group, also competing.

I don’t mind too much, for I have had painting commissions recently, so some must like my work. One I found difficult in the extreme, for I do not usually work solely from photos. An online acqaintance, who lives in Spain and who has previously commissioned from me, asked me to do a picture of a miniature Bichon Frisé, belonging to a friend whose 50th birthday he was going to attend in London. I have to admit that when I first saw the photos I thought the animal was a fluffy toy. It was completed by the deadline, but with a struggle. I relate more to larger dogs.

But then a magnificent challenge: a commission to paint a diptych, two panels 80 x 100cm, to symbolise pilgrimage. This will hang in Santiago de Compostela (if approved). It is exhilarating, exciting, to allow my imagination full rein while at the same time drawing on my own experience and faith and cultural background. Despite the suffocation of the studio in this weather I race over there, eager and immediately absorbed. And happy. The commissioner is someone well known in the world of European pilgrimage in the 21st century. I am honoured indeed, and hope I will justify the confidence shown in me. Inside me self-doubt and self-belief are at war. Watch this space.

Last month I showed some pictures of the beauty of June flowers in my garden. Here are some to demonstrate that nature in the wild can rival horticulture.

For the third consecutive month I chronicle a farmer’s further attempts to keep the unauthorised away from his fishing lake:

Imperceptibly over the month silence has come to accompany our morning walks. The jubilance of spring and early summer birdsong is no more. There may be a yellowhammer (little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeeese), the cawing of a rook, or the cooing of a pigeon ( a better onomatopoeia – roucoulement – in French), or the menacing mew of a hunting buzzard, but generally there is silence. Silent too is my house now family have departed; the young people with their mix of chirpiness and grumpiness missed by both dog and me.

Harvest was well under way when interrupted by the storms and downpours. The roar of combines and the thunder of huge hurtling tractors along the lane goes on long into the night. But now the dog, long constrained by standing crops and paths choked with weed, can bound free over golden stubble. She leaps the heaped rows of straw, just as she jumps the waves at the beach. To watch her is to find oneself smiling at the sheer joie de vivre. But maybe that is an anthropomorphism too far.

And so the year sinks inexorably towards the beginning of its end. Next month will see the first small tinges of autumn, a hint of the sadness to come in the dark months. But not yet.

(Online meme courtesy of Geoff King)

June 2019

A month or so ago, in the parched early spring, I wrote that in the face of drought (or its opposite) we used to say that Nature would always compensate, and wondered if, in these days of shifting weather patterns, it would still be so.

It is.

June has been wet, gloomy, cold, grey. A heatwave oppresses most of mainland Europe with record temperatures (45C in southern France) and the weather map there is red hot; but not here, certainly not here in East Anglia, where the thermometer reads 16C. Sixteen! It was warmer in February. Oh, this is your good old traditional British summer of rain-swept sea fronts, cancelled barbecues and washed-out fetes. This is your Brexit Blue Passport summer. This is a getting-our-country-back summer. It calls to mind the famous (and probably apocryphal) headline “Fog in Channel – Continent cut off”. We stand alone, bravely shivering in thick jumpers, against the invasion of European heat.

The rain. Dust turned to mud, the garden was bashed and battered by heavy downpours, the flowers bowed their beautiful heads with the weight of water, and the shoulder-high grasses as we pushed through them on our walks deposited cold showers down collars and boots. But the rare fine days gave us the beauties of early summer, when the green is still fresh and flowers at their peak. On a walk we discovered pyramidal orchids.

For a week or two the area at the front of my house produces a tolerable imitation of a cottage garden:

But now the summer solstice is past; the setting sun starts its slow drift southward; the year is half over. In that sentence are sown the seeds of depression. But we must live in the present, and finer weather is forecast. On clear evenings in the pallor of the eternal midsummer dusk Jupiter blazes bright in the southern sky. There are blessings, and I must remember to count them.

There is one infallible antidote to despondency, and that is to engage in a game of ball with the young dog. She commits to this totally, absolutely, insatiably, with a dog’s complete lack of self-consciousness, only her rear end and wagging tail visible as she searches for the ball in a bush. Her athleticism and balletic leaps and twists to catch a high throw make me gasp. We play on what may be called the front “lawn”, but which is in reality a hotch-potch of clover, dandelion and moss, pock-marked by bitch pee and pitted by her enthusiastic skidding to stop the ball. She is my joy.

In the mornings she and I cross the Common before the world is awake. When I started this chronicle I wrote (see the side bar to the left) that the Common is a magical other world, an enchanted domain. In Celtic myth and later derivative literature the entrance to the Other World is usually signalled by the presence of a white animal (taken up by Lewis Carroll with his white rabbit). In medieval romance the denizens of the Other World are often malevolent beings, imprisoning and preventing escape. Here on the Common there is a white mule who takes on both roles: she is always there as we emerge into her territory, into this parallel dimension, and she is vigilant to any trespass on her realm, and she guards the mares and foals with an intimidating viciousness, seeing off all comers. I am not nervous around horses – some of my best friends have been horses – but this mule is something else. The dog and I make prudent detours.

The Other World…as a student I fell in love with the 12th-century Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Little is known about Chrétien, but it is virtually certain he worked at the court of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Aliénor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine, at whose own court in Poitiers the ideal of courtly love was first penned by Andreas Capellanus – Andrew the Chaplain – in his De Amore (de arte honeste amandi). Chrétien’s education was wide, and he drew together threads from Celtic, Latin, Norman, and Christian legend, Biblical sources, and courtly love and wove them into a thrilling colourful tapestry of knightly quests, love and adultery, imprisonment and liberation, magic and mysticism.

Chrétien’s repeated theme of the liberation of captives from the realm from which no-one returns –
Des l’ore qu’il est antrez
N’ancors n’en est nus retornez
Les estranges prisons retienent

– can be read on many levels, but one must be an allegory of the Harrowing of Hell, the descensus ad inferos, when Christ descended to free those who had died before his salvific sacrifice, and who were waiting to be redeemed and freed. It is part of the Apostles’ Creed, but not the Nicene, and was known in the Middle Ages from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, itself possibly based on a third-century text. The knight in Chrétien’s works is therefore, despite flaws and courtly misconduct (Lancelot does after all sleep with his boss’s wife) a redemptive Christ-figure, one who will “open the blind eyes, bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house” (King James Bible).
The knight not only frees those who had long lain in captivity but the whole land comes alive and fertile again. Pagan and Christian in one heady mix.

But we have travelled too far from the Common.

There is little to report from this dripping and cold June. No-deal-Brexit anxiety raises my stress levels and anxiety in what seems the most highly undemocratic election of our next Prime Minister: 160,000 (members of the Tory Party) out of a population of some 66 million – a mere 0.26% – may choose, and it seems their choice is already made – an amoral mendacious buffoon, scarcely a respected statesman on the world stage.  It is perhaps the complete powerlessness to affect anything, to change anything, to have a voice, the lack of agency, that makes it so unbearable. We sink lower into the mire each month, but hey! blue passports.

Last month I showed a photo of a notice put up by a local farmer (to keep people away from his fishing lake, I think). I fought myself, and won, and left it to some other, unknown, pedant to set him straight:

The reader will have observed the paucity of content this month. Barely even a rant. I started this blog two years ago in July 2017. Is it perhaps time to stop?

May 2019

Just past 4.30 on a morning late in May. The sun rises red as I drive east. The dog and I are going in search of nightingales, so we head for Westleton Heath and Dunwich Forest.

I have a thing about nightingales. The house where I lived in France was in a valley nestled between the Pyrenees and the Corbières. The nightingales arrived in great numbers, punctually, in the third week of April, and the males engaged in a great deal of top-volume macho singing until the end of June. They sang day and night. I would lie in bed sleepless, the rising scent of an Albertine rose perfuming my room, listening to the weird counterpoint of nightingales and the frogs which inhabited the stream at the bottom of my garden. I will never forget one long walk under a full moon in the warmth of a Mediterranean spring when I was accompanied by a chorus so full, so liquid and melodic that I thought heaven could not be more beautiful.

Unsurprising, therefore, that these songbirds have themselves been sung by poets from Homer to Eliot via Keats. Shakespeare knew them well, knew when they sang and when later in summer they ceased:
“Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days” (Sonnet 102)

These birds, so shy, so invisible, so glorious of voice, have accompanied my two greatest European walks which were done in spring. The first from Vézelay in Burgundy diagonally through France and along the whole of northern Spain to Santiago, and the other through France and northern Italy, heading for Rome. Strangely, the nightingales seemed to shun Switzerland as I passed through. Too expensive, probably.

And so in this country I have sought nightingales, hoping to recapture the rapture of that song. I have been constantly disappointed for, although nightingales come to Suffolk, they have eluded me unless – as I suspect – those that visit us here sing with an English accent which I have as yet failed to discern.

Westleton and Dunwich are known for them, and so we went in search that very early morning. There is something secret and special about walking at that time, alone in the world, alone with the creatures that inhabit the dawn, no people, no sound of distant traffic. From the Heath we turned north parallel to the coast: to our right the sea a shining silver strip, and the distant sibilance of waves on a shingle shore. Through the Forest, and back to the heathland, and there! did I catch the song of a nightingale? I cannot tell. If I did, it was without the descending swooning whistle which precedes the trill, which in my experience characterises the nightingales of France, Spain and Italy.

And so we came back – home by 8am, the day already old.

The nightingale is not the only bird whose song is rare these days. Until the early days of this month I had not heard a cuckoo in this country for a decade. But then, one afternoon early in the month, dodging icy hailstorms, I heard one. She didn’t stop – three snatches heading north, and gone. But a real cuckoo! the harbinger of spring, the subject of the race to write to the editor of The Times, a sound of my childhood.

Spring. After a wonderful warm Easter it was once more a case of “Different month, different weather.” The early May bank holiday was true to British bank holiday form, and was grim and wet. And then…the Ice Saints did their worst. St Mamertus on the 11th, Pancras on the 12th, and Servatius on the 13th, traditionally blamed for a cold snap mid-month,  sent us sharp frosts. Records show that in the past century mid-May can suffer from quite intense cold, the worst example being a temperature of -9.4C in Norfolk in 1941!

But a frost in May gives mornings of jewelled splendour, when every blade of grass, every flower, every tree shines with diamonds of ice and dew.

And we have had rain. Probably not enough to make up the severe shortfall of more than a year now, but real rain nevertheless. It has been dramatic: thundery downpours from a dark and scowling sky – the acidic yellow gash of a rape field under deep indigo, a giant Rothko pastiche:

Such rain as we have had has produced a palette of green traditionally described as lush. Who can number the shades of green? Far more than fifty. From the fading yellowy green of the declining rape flowers to the bluey viridian of young wheat; from the golden-green feathers of barley ears in the early light through emerald, sap, Hooker’s, cadmium, cobalt, phtalo. Impossible to describe, impossible to name. And the green of the fields is edged with lace – Queen Anne’s Lace, or cow parsley, with its distinctive smell of late spring.

Shall we have a good summer? This time last year it was already hot. Last year indeed the old rhyme held true:
Oak before ash
We shall have a splash.
Ash before oak
We shall have a soak.

My memory says that the oak used always to be the last to leaf here, but again this year it was in full leaf while the ash still stood skeletal against the sky. Is it another sign of the forward shift of the seasons?

As I wrote last month, there seems little doubt of this. The elderflower is in full flower. This should happen a month later. Munnings painted a backdrop of elder in his “Sunny June”, and only a couple of decades ago I was making elderflower wine at the end of June.

One certain sign that spring and summer come well ahead, as I discussed last month, of when they used to arrive is the cursed advent of hay fever. As a child I prayed for rain, because the sneezing, the sweating and the itching eyes used to coincide exactly with exam season at the end of June. This year, as last, the first symptoms attacked in the third week of May.

What news this month? Little on the domestic scene, but nationally and internationally my head is full and swirling about with politics…local elections, European elections, election of a new leader of the Conservative party, and thus prime minister. God help us.

My antidote to what is now known as “Brexit anxiety” (yes! People go to their GP with it…must be true, I heard it on the “Today” programme…) is my young dog, whose joie de vivre and enthusiasm for all activities know no bounds. We have started beginners’ agility classes:

I wrote in April of those traits of mine which are also characteristic of Asperger’s syndrome. At our reading group I dared to venture that I identified with the eponymous heroine of “Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine,” with her pedantry, her social awkwardness, the trauma of her earlier life, her resorting to alcohol to drown her loneliness. One member of the group – a large lady – sniffed and said, “I just wanted to tell her to pull herself together.” Well, there we are.

And on the subject of pedantry, I end this month’s offering with the struggle I have with myself nearly every morning when I pass this sign. Shall I manage to resist?