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Reader, I have been taken to task, reprimanded, for my despondency. Could my next post, I was asked, please be written on a sunny day?

And to my detractor I reply: chance would be a fine thing! After months of grey and wet, the weather forecasters told us pressure was rising. My hopes rose at the same time. But no, East Anglia is now doomed to what is known as anticyclonic gloom – the poor visibility caused by broad, low and persistent sheets of strato-cumulus cloud. In other words, it scarcely gets light, and the sun shuns us, as he has all summer. For those of us sensitive to lack of sunlight it not only depresses, but provokes physical aches and pains.

Often, when we go out at night, the sky has cleared, and the stars and planets blaze from perfect skies: Jupiter and Saturn low in the south east; Altair high above; Arcturus, who has nearly finished his summer run, in the west. This clarity can, sometimes, just spill over into the first hour after sunrise, and some mornings have rejoiced the heart. But the promise is unfulfilled, and soon the cloud rolls in from the sea, and the cold north wind blows. On bank holiday Monday I lit a fire.

So I hope my readers will forgive me. I am not writing this on a sunny day.

Pity the poor farmers. High pressure usually brings dry weather, but sometimes the cloud comes low enough to produce a wetting drizzle. And that’s enough to stop harvest for the rest of the day. They have had a difficult time of it. Lack of sun meant the grain of the barley did not swell, then cloudbursts flattened the crop. The wheat is looking good – as is the price – so there is some compensation.

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Gradually, little by little, despite the setbacks, the fields are being cut, combines and balers working late into the night. All too often as soon as the bales are in, the field is mucked and ploughed, the shares thrusting deep into the ground, the earth violated before it has had a day’s rest. Not always, though; sometimes bales are stacked high, great monoliths that stand for a week or two like prehistoric stones round the field. The dog and I search out stubble fields. She gallops and gallops.

In recent years no-till or min(imal) till has become more popular with some farmers, but – generalising – the older ones tend to stick to the old ways. Min and no-till systems minimise soil disturbance and are claimed to sequester additional carbon over time, as organic matter increases and with it soil carbon levels. It can also lower the costs of machinery use in that less energy is required. There is less damage to soil structure, less risk of soil erosion, less environmental damage from nitrogen leaching and pesticide run-off from bare (ploughed) land, and environmental benefits such as increased soil fauna and habitats for birds.

What have I done with this cool drear month? Much work finishing a commission which I hope to reveal next month. I had my five minutes of fame interviewed by a local radio station when my parish won an environmental award. The days race past with work, painting, writing articles, parish and CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) stuff. Sometimes, on good days, I don’t notice that it is cold and grey.

I have, however, discovered a new weather saint: St Louis, whose feast is 25 August. He did not oblige this year.

Garden flowers have thrived, lasting longer without heat. Some crops too have done well, with record amounts of french beans and courgettes. But the fruit (tomatoes, figs) does not ripen, and everything lacks the sweetness that comes with sunlight. As do I.

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Mid-month I had my bath resurfaced, and it was done by a Mr Baison. The aptronym rather pleased me, and set me thinking about nominative determinism. Google came up with some good examples: Dr Pam Graves, an archaeologist; Christian Guy of the Centre for Social Justice; Sara Blizzard, a BBC weather presenter; Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform; and Tom Kitchin the chef. It provokes the question whether they veered towards their chosen profession because of their name (nominative determinism), or whether it was mere coincidence that the name fitted the job. Apparently Jung believed that Sigmund Freud (=joy) was an example, since Freud wrote – inter alia – on pleasure. I’m not sure I am convinced by that. I will just mention two gems I know of personally: a firm of solicitors locally called Hazzard and Pratt; and also I was at school with a girl called Gay Tipple, but since I have had no contact with her since then, I cannot say whether she became either lesbian or alcoholic.

Perhaps the comments box will be full of examples of aptronyms this month. I’d love to hear them.

I have said several times now that it is time to draw these chronicles to a conclusion. In future I will post only when I have something to say which is not gloomy. Maybe there might be a sunny day in September…

Do not be fooled by the azure sky. As I write, swathes of heavy rain race across the fields on a gale-force wind, veiling crops and trees, turning the colours of summer into a dull monochrome. It is the first named storm of the autumn. Yes, the autumn, for that is how it feels.

St Swithun has let us down this year: St. Swithun’s day if thou dost rain, For forty days it will remain. St. Swithun’s day if thou be fair, For forty days ’twill rain nae mare

It looked so promising after his feast day on 15 July: the sky was a deep blue, the breeze was gentle, the sun intense. The heat built and built. Some parts of the country received a rare amber warning for hot weather, though here on England’s eastern edge air from the sea tempers the heat. Summer had at last arrived after weeks of a grey dampness. But Swithun was teasing us. After ten days summer ended in the usual thunderstorm, and ever since it has been rain, rain, torrential rain every day.

So torrential that whole fields of crops were laid flat. The harvest, already late because of a cold and indifferent spring, had started with the barley and the oilseed rape during that brief snatch of summer, and for a few days the countryside hummed and roared with the sound of combines. The lane once again shook with heavy machinery moving at speed to the next field to be cut. But all is silent now, with only the sound of rain beating against the window pane.

My own harvest continues apace, and – despite this mediocre summer of 2021 – there is pleasure and gratification to be had in the picking, cutting prepping, freezing – and eating; the labours of spring and early summer translated into food.

So torrential was the rain that parts of London flooded. In Germany, Belgium, eastern France and the Netherlands a month or so of rain fell in a few hours. Many died. Last month parts of Canada and the US saw their hottest temperatures to date. China experienced devastating floods. Even damp and chilly Northern Ireland broke temperature records. Can anyone deny that this is more than just weather, and is now a pattern of change to the global climate?

Can the weather saints therefore no longer be relied on? There has always been so much truth in their lore. Mid-July so often sees a shift northwards of the jet stream, allowing high pressure to build and remain over the UK through till the end of August. In France St Médard on 8 June provides much the same service: S’il pleut le jour de Saint Médard, Il pleut quarante jours plus tard. This year it seemed Médard brought a heatwave in France, but heavy rain soon washed away this promise. Médard, a sixth-century bishop of Noyon, is often depicted with an eagle sheltering him from the rain, and thus he is venerated as the protector of those who work in the open air.

Swithun was a ninth-century bishop of Winchester. His connection with the weather, and particularly with the rain, may come from the legend that in his humility he asked to be buried outside his cathedral, where passers-by would step over his grave and raindrops would fall upon it. He is invoked in times of drought. He will not be busy this year.

Belgium has its own rainy saint, Saint Godelieve, of whom little is known other than that she was a holy woman in Flanders who was cruelly treated, and finally murdered, by her inhuman husband. Ever since her death in the eleventh century she has been venerated as a martyr in Belgium, and particularly in Ghent. The Germans ascribe a similar character to the day of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 19 July.

This is the fourth July about which I have written in this blog, and the reader will deduce that I have little new to say. No poetic rhapsodies this month about Suffolk being a sea of gold as the sun beats down from a sapphire sky. All that beats down is the rain. I have less to say, maybe, than usual, for I still feel a sense of being locked down with its restrictions and anxieties, and although “normal” life is slowly creeping back, the virus still rampages. Life is becoming more social, but my world still seems shrunken and turned in on itself. There is no carefree jumping on a train to London to see an exhibition or go to a meeting. Even the doubly-vaccinated are falling ill, some quite seriously.

Earlier in the month the world came to me, in the shape of my family – daughter, granddaughters, son-in-law, and the house filled with the chatter of young people, and the bustle of cooking and clearing meals. I have almost forgotten how to cook, how to be in company. My elderly – and indeed not so elderly – friends tell me I am not alone in this. I resolved to put fear of contagion away from me during the visit, and hid the lateral flow tests I had acquired, but we have lived with the virus so long now it is hard to forget.

They came; we ate, we drank, we walked by the sea, we went to a pub, we played the usual family games, and then they were gone. The dog, insatiable, pines for the games of ball. The cat misses the sudden tsunami of stroking and petting.

And so the year pursues it course. The weeks rush past at a dizzying speed. And with the storm raging outside come premonitory signs of the end of summer, a summer which has scarcely begun. Our early morning walks are silent now, with only the lark and the yellowhammer singing. The last brood of baby birds under the eaves has finished the insistent cheeping. The mornings when it is not raining are misty, cool.

Or there is early sun, too bright, swiftly followed by gathering shower clouds.

How do I feel, now the year is growing old, now that daylight begins to shrink, and we drift towards autumn? This should be the time of ease and relaxation in the summer sun, a time of sitting out late into the evening under the stars. There is a sense of being cheated of something, of something lost never to return. How do we know how many summers there are to come? How do we know what is waiting for us round the corner? At my age, changes will come, moves will have to be made, friends will die. Cruel Covid has deprived us of much; this eternal grey wetness has taken away our summer. Live in the moment. There is always something good there.

Dunwich beach at 5.30 on a morning just short of the summer solstice, the sun up over this most easterly point for more than an hour.  A premonition of the day’s heat hangs in the air, and beneath the still sea the lost city sleeps in peace. A grey seal shuffles down the shingle to the water’s edge. The dog stops, taken aback – what kind of creature is this?

Two weeks, dear reader, we had two weeks of summer, the sky a bright bowl of light, each day warmer than the one before. Two weeks, a thunderstorm, and back to drear dark days and rain. A friend posted these temperatures taken in southern England on the days of the winter and the summer solstice.

During that precious interlude of heat and light nature at last sprang into life, and colour flooded our world, wild flowers vying with cultivated garden blooms in beauty and vibrancy.

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Our cold spring has created one of the most intense hay fever seasons I can remember, with grasses seeding all at once. Anecdotally I hear – and agree – that this scourge (for the non-sufferer I need to say this is not just a few sniffles; it means wanting to claw your eyes out; it means sweating and shaking; sometimes even a real fever) has become far worse and more debilitating in the past decade or so – another effect of changing climate. At its worst, for me, antihistamines don’t begin to touch it. NHS guidance says “Avoid pollens.” The dog says “I need long walks through the fields every day.”

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And this explains why sometimes we get up with the dawn, and go to the coast for an hour or so away from chest-high seeding grasses. The dog cavorts in the shallows. On our way back along the beach towards 7am we see brave souls swimming in a North Sea whose June temperature barely reaches “bracing”.

Midsummer, and the solstice is past, and we begin that slow drift towards shorter days. I never see the feast of St John the Baptist on midsummer day, a traditional quarter day, celebrated here. All over Europe St John’s Eve is marked by the Fires of St John, Christianity having taken over the pagan rituals of the longest day, the warding off of evil by the fires which also serve as a holocaust to guarantee the harvest.

Few places can honour the tradition of St John’s Fire more than Catalonia, where La Flama del Canigó (the Flame of Canigou, the sacred mountain of the Catalans) is bound inextricably with both the culture and identity of this region. I know; I lived there.

On 22 June a group of young people take material for the great fire and carry the sacred flame, which has burned all year in the Casa Pairal in Perpignan, to climb the 2784m peak, where they light the fire and spend the night. Then they run the flame down the mountain, signalling the lighting of fires in every town and village on the night of the 23rd. There are fireworks, there is food, there is music, there is wine. When sufficient of the last has been imbibed the young, the lithe and the limber jump the fire. In my tiny village the then mayor, aged in his 80s, was known to demonstrate – if not his virility – then his enduring agility in leaping the flames, to the consternation and strong disapproval of his wife.

Even after circumstances had brought me back to England I spent many summers in French Catalonia, some of which were to take care of the house of a friend unavoidably absent at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The house had an unrivalled view of Canigou, and the fire on the peak was visible on that magical night. I have climbed Canigou three or four times with friends, not the “easy” way from the north, but via the dreaded “Chimney” from the south. I am not good with heights and steep drops, but – looking back – these were the best of times.

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Which brings me to the matter of hiraeth. I suppose advancing years must engender this longing for what has been, a wistfulness for what is lost and can be no more. I wrote recently of my desire for one more long walking pilgrimage and the adventure and freedom of the ancient paths. And now, writing of Canigou, nostalgia for a place I called home for a while. More than that: my learning, culture, and language have been focused on France since my mid-teens. A cruel combination of Covid, Brexit and increasing age mean that this attachment is severed. My fluency has gone, and I can only dream of what was, and quote Villon: Où sont les neiges d’Antan? Or – more aptly in Catalan – on són les neus del Canigó?

Hiraeth lends a warm sunset glow to times and places of the past. If we examine these with a more honest eye we know that these too were not free from trouble or pain. But maybe we see that they offered us a future which too is now past.

Some who read this will be prompt to offer me a preachy “Count your blessings.” They can spare their breath, for I am well aware how very lucky, and blessed, I am here in Suffolk in midsummer, in my little house, with my garden, chickens, cat – and a mad young(ish) dog.

“New month, new weather.” At the end of Siberian – though dazzling – April, with its drought, its hard frosts and its icy winds, the longing for something warmer and kinder was intense. Would the old saying hold good and a new weather pattern establish in May?

And indeed the weather did change as April ended. May blew in with a damaging gale (cue the “Rough winds do shake the darling buds” quote, but of course I should not be so obvious…), and low pressure and Atlantic systems established themselves – firmly. Was it warmer? Barely. Did it rain? A great deal. And all month long strong winds howled, grey and inky skies loured, hail and thunderstorms battered fields and garden.  

As May ends the saying holds true: the sun emerges, the sky has cleared to blue, and there is blessed warmth. Seedlings and infant plants, held paralysed for two months in shivering stasis, begin to grow at last. The fig trees in my garden are beginning to put out leaves:

When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh (Matthew 24, v 32)

But is this glimpse of summer to be trusted? In a parallel process the country, held in lockdown for so long, begins to be released. But the shadow of Covid still hangs over us, snatching our freedoms from us. Will they last? Will the sun go on shining? Maybe there is more chance of the latter, for once again oak came into leaf before ash, predicting a dry summer.

What positive can be said of miserable May? The continual cold caused the flowers of spring to last far longer than usual. The vivid yellow of the rape fields lasted the month long, and provided the only brightness we had some days. Wildflowers bloomed at dates more in keeping with seasons 30 or 40 years ago than with our recent globally-warmed climate. The green winged orchids on the Common put on a show unrivalled in many years, their vivid magenta juxtaposed with the gold of buttercups – another example of Nature’s complementary colour scheme. I can think of no word other than the clichéd “carpet” to describe their range and spread this year. Heated arguments raged on a local forum about whether their whereabouts should be publicised, lest people dig them up, but I have never seen this happen, and the Common and its location is well known as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

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In mid-May the horses returned to the Common to trample down the seeding orchids. There are fewer this year, but two of the mares have foals. Our morning passage across it is less stressful than recent years, thanks to the absence of the aggressive grey mule. When she was there, no sooner was the stile crossed, or the gate opened, than her head would go up, and she would lead the herd menacingly towards the intruder. And if there happened to be an accompanying dog, however tightly on a lead, the intimidation would become intense. But this anxiety is no more. However, woe betide anyone foolish enough to park a car beside the criss-crossing roads: wing mirrors torn off, aerials snapped, bumpers dented.

I have learned something new. I was about to write about the other name for cow parsley, whose bridal frothiness is at its peak just now, and obscures the bends in the lane, making driving on our one-track roads adventurous. That name, I thought, was Queen Anne’s Lace, more dainty and descriptive than the prosaic cow parsley, which more strongly suggests its rural context. But these are not the same plants, and all my life I had thought they were. The (usually) omniscient Wikipedia tells me that cow parsley anthriscus sylvestris, known as wild chervil, wild beaked parsley, or keck, is a herbaceous biennial or short-lived perennial plant in the family Apiaceae, genus Anthriscus. It is also sometimes called mother-die, a name that is also applied to the common hawthorn. Queen Anne’s Lace, on the other hand, is daucus carota, though of the same family, whose common names include wild carrot, bird’s nest, bishop’s lace.

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I am not surprised that the common hawthorn (or may) might be called “mother die”, for when in flower, as it is – somewhat late – at the moment its smell has a whiff of death about it, a slightly indecent decaying fishiness. The old saw “Ne’er cast a clout till may be out” certainly held true this year, but might more correctly be translated as “Stay in your winter woollies till the end of the month.”

In the paucity of new material for this chronicle, I am now going to write of the building work next to my house, and lay myself open to accusations of acute NIMBYism. I acquired this house some 18 years ago after a search for a home where I could live in silence. I don’t mean I do not wish to hear the sounds of the countryside, and tolerate quite happily the roar and drone of farm machinery. But what, since a child, rouses me to pain, and anxiety, and ultimately murderous fury (I now gather this is a thing: misophonia) is the noise of music and voices mediated electronically. You could put a symphony orchestra in the field next to me and I should not turn a hair, but play that on a radio or other means, and it becomes unbearable. Weird, yes, and it makes life difficult. It’s not something one can just “get over” or “block out”, and even headphones don’t cut it.

When I bought the house, there were fields both sides, and I was told it was agricultural land and could not be built on. Down the lane my elderly neighbours lived in a little cottage by the side of the road, but they are long gone. When they sold in order to move to a bungalow in a nearby town, the daughter of a local farmer snapped up both cottage and field at the asking price. The old cottage was deemed to be an agricultural building and thus could be replaced or rebuilt. I saw the plans: a Grand Design, a veritable palace, would go up in its place…but in fact not in its place, but set back from the road, directly overlooking my house.

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In January 2020 the old cottage was demolished. Since then, every day (with a short break during the first lockdown) the lane has been busy with vans, trucks, diggers, cranes, constant deliveries. There have been pile drivers sending shock waves felt through the house, banging, drilling, beep-beep-beeping, and – of course – loud thumping music from radios (which to be fair they did turn down a bit when asked). The work is still ongoing.

It will finish one day. That is not the point of this diatribe. What is the point is that all of us who live locally find it an egregious monstrosity. Its size and ugliness dominate the landscape and the streetscape, visible all round in winter. Its Grand Design pretensions sit uneasily in its rural context. “Petrol station”, “detention centre”, “supermarket” have all been thrown at it by aghast villagers. One wonders at planners who permit these buildings, and yet who balk at replacing cement rendering with traditional lime on a 16th-century farmhouse.

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I said that I lay myself open to accusations of NIMBYism. I wonder whether it has been always thus. I think of great houses locally. Did people gape at Heveningham Hall in its Palladian splendour in the early 1780s, and mutter that it was too big, too overbearing, too modern and out of keeping? Did they say the same a century earlier of Ufford Hall in Fressingfield where Archbishop Sancroft lived his last  years? Today we think these buildings magnificent, beautiful. I hope history turns a kindly eye on the “monstrous erection” next door. I am unlikely to. Grump grump grump.

What more to say of unkind May save that I think everyone is glad to see the back of it ? And now with the new month comes summer. It came just in time to spend some hours at Mendham Mill, where Munnings was born. I went with a group of plein air painters whom I join sporadically when I can. On a day at the very end of May under deep blue sky and a dazzling and burning sun, I sat in idyllic quiet beauty by the river Waveney. On the other side of the river was a meadow scene straight from a Dutch pastoral painting. The water sparkled, the foliage was still in its electric lime green of spring. There is nowhere on earth more beautiful, more splendid than Suffolk when the sun shines.

There are two or three commonly-known but often misused quotations about April. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’  probably comes top –

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The next, Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’:

Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England- now!

The third literary April I will come to later.

Even though here I am in England in April and in the country, these lines of Browning still wake a longing inside me: just stop, stop and hold April back a little longer, so this perfection of spring might last, so that the world stays new-born a few weeks more.

The weather seems to be going some way towards granting this wish. The month was characterised by a commentator on the BBC as “bright sunlight and brass monkeys.” The sun has shone gloriously, consistently, relentlessly from an azure sky, but the cold has been bitter, especially here in East Anglia. Each day the wind swings between north, east, north-east, north-north-east, east-north-east, always from the North Sea, and blows hard and icy across our flat fields. The strong April sun which should advance all the spring growth finds its efforts thwarted by this cruel cold.

The nights have brought sharp frosts, the sort which freeze water hard and thick, and turn the ground into iron. Spring planting is on hold, for no tender plant would survive the nights, and the earth is too cold for germination. Every available space and surface indoors and in my greenhouse are given over to the requirements of the nursery.

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And in all this, not one drop of rain. A regular reader of these annals may be forgiven for thinking I am never satisfied. No sooner have I stopped the moaning about mud and constant wet than I start to say – in common with every gardener and grower – we need rain. We so need rain. The land dried swiftly and is now cracked, concrete hard. A spring drought is nothing new here, but this one perdures, exacerbated by the strong winds. What happened to April showers?

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.

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But the rains of winter have produced bright jewels.

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But set aside the frost and drought, and wrap up warm in a winter coat, and set off at sunrise, and the beauty of the morning, the pastel purity of the light, the innocence of the new day, the Magnificat that is spring birdsong, the flowers after the months of monotone, all this will kindle joy even in a wintry old heart. As the morning progresses and the sun rises higher the palette becomes a child’s poster paint set: the young crops deep emerald green; the sky sheer cyan; the endless fields of rape bright chrome yellow.

These sunrise walks bring sights that I think are not granted to those still in bed: a family of nine brown hares in a field, parents and leverets, the young playing as the young do – chasing and racing. My dog’s antennae twitch; she stiffens, her muscles tense, then she quivers. But she is on a lead…

The brown hare (lepus europaeus) is common round here, and regarded as a pest by farmers. They can be shot at any time of year including during the breeding season – and are – but they proliferate. In action they are beautiful, reaching 45mph at full speed. The dog wouldn’t stand much chance, though she is fast.

Last month I said that the passing of the seasons can be seen in the sky as well as in nature. The month’s frosty nights have been of a clarity through which the stars have blazed – Arcturus, Regulus, Procyon – companions of spring nights as I look to the south and west.

Looking upwards in daytime brings its rewards: a buzzard seen off by rooks, or four buzzards wheeling high. One descends for a closer look, and the late afternoon sun illuminates the underside of its wings into pure gold.

In April at Easter Tide
When flowers in grass spring to life
The lark at break of day does rise
And sings away with true delight,
With the sweetness of fresh greenery.
Early one morning I did rise,
And heard a little bird on a tree
His own song carolling on high.
I lifted my head to spy
What sort of bird he might be:
In the twinkling of an eye
Flocks of birds descend on me.
Orioles I hail,
And the nightingale,
Chaffinches I view,
And the merlin too,
God knows how many in the air,
Whose names I am lost among,
That roosted on the branches, there,
And began to sing their song.
I walked through that blossoming
Listening to love’s joy ring.
Over the meadow, riding slow,
I saw the god of Love pass by.

(English translation of the Old French “En avril au tens pascour”)

Ten years ago on the fourth of April, my 64th birthday, I set out down a stony track from the hilltop town of Vézelay in Burgundy. Vézelay, where St Bernard preached the Second Crusade; Vézelay, one of the medieval gathering places for pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela; Vézelay, with its renowned Romanesque basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene. One of my favourite places in France, in the whole world.

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I too was on my way to Santiago, some 1900km distant. It was a long-held dream, ever since I had discovered the ancient way across the north of Spain some 40 years before, and it was a retirement present to myself. For the first three weeks or so my way was completely solitary, and I met no other pilgrim. I walked through a glorious spring, in my inexperience carrying far too much on my back, encountering for the first time the hospitality and kindness of strangers that is, and always has been, a characteristic of the walking pilgrimage. I walked through the very deepest of la France profonde, its beauty and its ways of being little changed since I first set foot in France some 60 years before. For the first time I knew the excitement of each day’s adventure, the exhaustion of each day’s endeavour, the sacredness of putting my feet in the footsteps of so many down the ages, the liberty of the mind to reflect, think and pray, the peace of being, literally, in another place.

Later, further, I met two French women, and we walked together as far as the Spanish border, and I learned the companionship of the Camino, the shared experiences of accommodation which ranged from château to the concrete floor of a village hall, of meals ranging from five courses to a shared packet of soup. Into Spain and I was bewildered by the sudden flux of crowds of pilgrims, everyone heading the same way. It seemed to me that this is what the kingdom of heaven must be – everyone with a single goal, different nationalities, races, languages, ages. There is an equality I have found nowhere else. Deep bonds are formed quickly, confidences exchanged, prejudices dissipate, mutual aid trumps self-reliance . In this atmosphere, so unlike the daily run, mindsets change. The journey assumes more significance than the destination. As in all life, the process is what counts.

I thought that this pilgrimage, planned over half a lifetime, would get it out of my system, but I had yet to understand that it becomes addictive, and each year the lure of the open road would call me back for more. And so, through my sixties and early seventies, I clocked up many thousands of miles through France and Spain, across Sicily, and in 2016 along the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome, a journey which has changed my life in many ways.

And this brings me to the third April quotation, from Chaucer:

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes

(Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers to go seeking strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in distant lands)

And I, too, this April long for the adventure, the openness to providence, the liberty, the distant shrines in distant lands. Alas, Covid put paid to any plans for one last Camino in 2020, and now – whatever course the pandemic takes this year – I fear my days of walking 25 miles in a day over mountains (or even 20 or so on kinder terrain) are probably over. An old knee injury, never properly healed, plus worsening arthritis, pain scarcely tolerated, and, well, anno domini combine to ground me. Must we accept these losses that come with old age?

…And yet, and yet…maybe one more? Sometimes I think I would crawl on my hands and knees to have, just once more, what those who have never lived it cannot know or understand.

But I think the dog might miss me.

This is a picture of liberation. It was taken at Minsmere just after 6.30am on 29 March, the day the injunction to “stay at home” was lifted. Throughout the long and dark winter of relative imprisonment I have longed for a different horizon, and accordingly I set off with the dog the moment we could to the tiny hamlet of Eastbridge (whose tranquillity is soon to be despoiled by Sizewell C construction), and walked to the sea, then north along the coast – the Southwold light winking in the distance – and back through woodland and heath.

We saw not a soul, but our arrival was trumpeted by the boom of a bittern. I am a not infrequent visitor to this magical place, but had never heard a bittern before. I have certainly not seen this shy bird, and the photo may explain why, for it is a master of camouflage. Bitterns are members of the heron family with all-over bright, pale, buffy-brown plumage covered with dark streaks and bars, perfect for blending into the background. It flies on broad, rounded, bowed wings. It moves silently and secretively through reeds at water’s edge, looking for fish. The males make this remarkable and far-carrying booming sound in spring, like the far-distant report of a big gun or foghorn.

Walking back, we stopped to see how the Little People were getting on with their tree home, but alas it seems to now have become a receptacle for all sort of mementos, and its branches similarly adorned. Soon it will rival the Groby Tree.

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March has showed us both its leonine and its lamb-like character. Early in the month fierce gales blew in, and blew out two 1m50 panes in my greenhouse, showering shards of glass all about. I was unaware of all this going on, being laid low with a virus (not the virus), and in bed for a week. This rare indisposition, which leached all energy from me for some weeks, is my excuse for the paucity of content in this month’s offering. However, I have been lately restored by a few days of exceptional beauty and warmth, which gave us the hottest March day for half a century.

This warmth and the lengthening days have caused spring to spread across the landscape in a great rush of greening. It would be impossible not to be moved each year by this explosion of nature and colour, the burgeoning, the bursting of buds, the intensity of birdsong each morning. The sun now both rises and sets north of east. This year all this has come together with our partial liberation from lockdown, combining into a feeling of hope and exultant joy.

It is not only the daylight, the fields and woods, the flowers and birds which tell out the glory of spring, but the night charts the advance of the seasons too. When the dog and I go out at night our prospect is south and south-west, and I see the steady progress of the winter constellations – Hydra, Canis Major, and above all Orion westward across the sky. Soon they will be gone, to emerge once more in the east in the autumn:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard…” (Psalm 19).

Already the pale primroses, in flower since January, are being engulfed in a rising tide of green. Each year I think they are even more prolific and more beautiful than before. They must profit from wet winters… the violets too. On more open ground there are already cowslips and oxlips, and in the woods the dark green pungent leaves of wild garlic are thick beside the paths.

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I say frequently at the end of a month’s chronicle that surely I must draw them to a close soon. In March the combined effects of an enforced eremitical lockdown existence and an even profounder withdrawal from the world brought about by whatever virus knocked me out, mean I have even less to say than usual. My life has shrunk. I can only hope the advent of summer and greater liberty to meet and speak to others will expand it again.

It is one of those old country saws that as the days get longer, the cold gets stronger.

I had longed for snow, real snow, not just a wet covering here today and gone tomorrow. This is a yearning for the excitement of childhood, heedless of those who cannot get to work, or whose obligations to travel are thwarted. Snow changes not just the exterior but our interior landscape as well. Rules do not apply: fires can be lit during the day, sloe gin can be drunk at coffee time; in other words – school is out.

My wish was granted, and an amber warning for the easternmost parts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex heralded a whole week of what felt like a holiday. A holiday from rain, from mud, and from the monotony of the quotidian. Snow came from the east, swirling, sweeping, wind howling. Thirty-six hours of it. Drifts formed immediately, closing the narrow lanes. These drifts were sculpted by the gale into fantastical shapes – castles, crenellations, cumulonimbus, battlements, billows, pillows, marshmallows, waist-deep and higher.

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Round here ditches are deep, and the banks the height of a man. The first morning, when the snow is still soft and wet, the dog charges across what looks like level ground, and disappears, a good five foot down. She is lost to sight for a minute or two. I panic. Finally she scrabbles her way out. I’d have found it almost impossible to get down and rescue her, and then climb out myself. By the end of the week I too can walk across ditches on compacted snow.

The farmers come out with their JCBs to clear the lanes, and scrape the roads to a fine icy surface, impossible to walk on. They pile the snow high into walls either side, where it remains for a week or so, long after the thaw, getting grubbier by the day. The 4x4s creep cautiously along – the real farming battered 4 x 4s , not the shining four-wheeled fortresses, those must-haves of those new to country living. Towards the end of that week the wind rouses itself again to close off our roads with more drifts. A Tesco van is trapped; a John Lewis van is towed backwards to safety by a tractor. As I write, three weeks later, there is still snow in the ditches.

Walking is difficult, every step an effort with the cold gnawing at the throat and chest taking the breath away. The snow creaks under my boots. I see animal tracks – hares, rabbits, deer, and – alarmingly – all round the chicken enclosure unmistakably those of a fox.

Those of us old enough to remember will tell those who are not that of course it is nothing like the infamous winter of 1962-63, when snow started to fall on Boxing Day, and the thaw did not set in till early March. The snow banks on either side of the roads were higher than the cars, reminiscent of scenes in the Monte Carlo Rally, which held us enthralled each winter on our little television sets in the Sixties. The lake near my home froze solid, and at weekends there were crowds out skating. I was 15, nearly 16, and I remember cramming my feet into Victorian skates with their dainty buttoned boots, belonging to my grandmother.

That lake had belonged to a a great house, Gobions, which had been a residence of the More family, and it is thought that Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, probably wrote “Utopia” there, then called More Hall (also known as “Gybynnes,” then “Gubbens”, then “Gobions”). After More’s execution in 1535 the estate reverted to the Crown, being restored to the family in 1607. Basil More sold the estate in 1693, it being purchased in 1708 by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke (d 1754), who made major improvements to the property. In 1730 Charles Bridgeman, the Royal Gardener (d 1738), was employed to make a ‘Pleasure Garden’ in Great or Gobions Wood. The wood – where I played as a child – contained various formal features, including a bowling green and canals linked by straight walks, enclosed by avenues crossing the adjacent fields and parkland. The lake on which I learned the basics of skating that winter was part of it. James Gibbs designed, c 1740, a temple facade to terminate the largest canal, together with the large Folly Arch, a three-storey gothic gateway, to terminate one of the main avenues at the southern boundary of the estate. Daniel Defoe, ten years later, called the place “one of the most remarkable Curiosities in England.” I well remember Folly Arch, which I cycled past on the way to buy bread in nearby Potters Bar. In my childhood what is now suburbia was rural.

If you are still reading, here comes one of those amazing six-stages-of-connection coincidences.

In the summer of 1968 a friend and I, having just graduated, were hitch-hiking round France. In Provence, in the Var département, we had had a lift with an elderly gentleman, who invited us to his beach-side house in Six-Fours-les-Plages for a meal with his wife. These things happened back then, and innocently. During the meal they of course asked where we came from, and I mentioned Brookmans Park, assuming they would have no clue other than my saying it was north of London. “Ah! come with me,” said the gentleman, and he led me into a dark backroom where an ancient lady sat in a chair: his mother, whose age he said was 100. As a girl this woman had been in service in the great house in the Gobions and Brookmans estate, belonging then to the Gaussens family, which had burned down in 1891. She named the landmarks for me, and remembered that lake where I had skated during the long cold winter of 1963. I remember nothing more of her story, save for this coincidence. Being so young myself I didn’t think to ask how a teenager from the Var had come to work in a grand house in Hertfordshire.

And now, suddenly, it is spring. After the snow the temperatures soared. The snowdrops are nearly finished; banks and ditches are star-spangled with primroses; daffodil trumpets proclaim the change of season, and daily the morning orchestra of birds swells and grows. The sun appeared after what seemed like months, and remained in a radiant blue sky for some days waking the energy in the earth – and in me. A spark of hope was lit, and flickers. There’s a long way to go yet.

I leave you with a stone found on one of our walks under a bench in the churchyard at Wingfield (see September 2019). I note the message.

A late offering, for which I apologise, and a hastily written one. There have been many calls upon my time, too many of which involve peering at a screen.

Reasons to be cheerful

1. January, drear, dark, dry, sempiternally long January is at an end. When I say ‘dry’ I mean in the sense of abstinence from alcohol. Certainly, and emphatically, not dry meteorologically.

2. There are signs of spring. Towards the end of January there is a shift in the light which tells us we are past the deepest darkness. At last the mornings are growing lighter apace with the afternoons. Although my snowdrops are not in flower, their dark green pointed leaves have broken the surface of the saturated ground, and the usually later primroses are already blooming on south-facing banks, and even beside the paths through the woods.

3.The birds are singing; not the full territorial spring symphony of mating and nesting, but the over-wintering residents are tuning up in the mornings. There is a particularly noisy song thrush in the trees opposite, two insistently repetitive great tits, my garden robin and wren, the melodious blackbird, and many others. Flocks of fieldfares settle on the fields and fly up again in one swooping movement, and a lark rose high over me as we walked on the flat and windswept airfield. Rooks circle and caw, and the crows’ “parp parp” sounds like ancient klaxons.

4.Making marmalade, the annual new year treat that fills the house first with the sharp tang of cooking citrus, and then with the sweet comforting warm smell of caramelised oranges. I thought this year that the Seville oranges might be scarce because of Brexit difficulties with imports, but they appeared on time, the lumpy rather shabby-looking oranges, which remind me of walking through small towns and villages in Andalucia and Extremadura in the autumn, the ground littered with them, split and squashed beneath my boots.

4.There are moments of transcendence. As we came home across the Common one frosty morning the rising sun caught the wing tips of the hunting barn owl, and – fleetingly – transformed them into a translucent roseate gold. Such instants of grace illuminate a whole day, and number among the blessings which must be counted if we are to survive these strangest of times.

Among these reasons for optimism, the fact that we have had some “real” winter weather appears to sit oddly, for who would want frost and snow? Last year there was scarcely any frost, and climate change promises more warm wet winters. But frost and snow should be the norm, and there is a comfort in the right order of things in a changing world. We had quite a blizzard, turning the landscape monochrome, and piling up the snow on the window sills. As they say round here, “that snoo.”

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Hard frosts are a joy, freezing the ankle-deep mud into sharp ruts and ridges, almost more painful to walk on than rock, but allowing passage along  impassable footpaths and over fields usually too claggy to contemplate. We return on these mornings, boots and paws clean and dry. The dog rolls ecstatically on icy grass. These are the champagne days, bubbling and fizzing with the energy that comes from the all-too rare sunshine and blue sky. As with everything good, it seems, they do not last.

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All-too rare. For, surpassing even last year’s record totals, the rainfall has been constant and heavy, and the sky louring and dark all day, the clouds pregnant with water in unprecedented quantities. People are saying “I’ve never seen it like this, not in all the years I’ve been here.” Walks involve long detours to avoid floods, the roads are awash, and I have lost count of how often I have had to pump out my drive so the postman can come up dry shod. Farmers cannot get on the land – except for one neighbour who gets his tractor out before daybreak on days when the frost is hard, and ploughs then.

It would be peculiar, and in a way disrespectful, not to mention the wider context of this January. The new year had scarcely begun when we were locked down for the third time in ten months. A combination of social mingling and travelling at Christmas, and a new variant of Covid 19 – of swift and fierce contagion – had hospitals all but overwhelmed, and deaths reaching record levels. One day more than 1800 bereavements were recorded. Maybe we are becoming war-weary and inured to these losses, the daily statistics, unless they affect us personally. But whoever thought to see so many deaths in one day in peace time? One Covid denier (“It’s just ‘flu”) has now seen three friends die, and at last urges prudence. And yet still, despite lockdown, rules, strictures, fines, horrific scenes nightly on our televisions, still the disease spreads.

Covid is cruel. Its selection of those victims most viciously attacked seems arbitrary. But the irony and the tragedy is that the very ways human beings connect – through speech and touch – are the vectors of disease and death. We can unwittingly kill those we love the most, or they us, and the burden of guilt and loss will last for decades.

Some readers remark on the melancholy tone of these chronicles. These are tragic, difficult times. But I’ll move on to my favourite theme – Suffolk. I live about 20 miles from Sutton Hoo, the subject of the film “The Dig”, released last week. It is a film very much of two halves, and the first – before the excavation is swamped with archaeologists and cluttered with box office undercurrents of love and sex – is beautiful. It is as muted and undramatic as east Suffolk itself, gently hinting at a metaphor of both things and feelings hidden and under the surface.

Ralph Fiennes transforms himself into an old Suffolk “boy” to play Basil Brown, the self-taught archaeologist, astronomer, and polymath. Fiennes has the Suffolk accent – those slow diphthongs – absolutely right (regional English accents portrayed on the screen are so often cringe-making). When I first came to Suffolk in the early Seventies there were many in the village who dressed exactly as Fiennes/Brown in the film, who cycled long distances if they needed to go somewhere, who spoke the same, stood the same, moved the same. This is the Suffolk of Harry Becker, of “Akenfield”; and I have watched the first half of the film through three times now, gazing at the facsimile of a lost age, and a lost world, the nostalgia all the sharper because of the uncertain times we are living in.

Most of my life is indeed lived through a screen now, for lockdown perdures, and there are at least another five weeks of isolation to come. Friends, family and colleagues live in my computer; entertainment comes on a different screen. I little thought, three and a half years ago, when I started this monthly record that I should be recording a global pandemic, and that my world would have shrunk to the confines of garden, Common and the fields and woods around them.

Now is the passage which leads to a new year, it is a blessed time of rest, and not a little indulgence. The earth sleeps. Midwinter. We look forward to a new beginning.

The signs are there already. The dawn is no longer silent. We go out, torch in hand, into the dark and cold, with Venus bright ahead in the south east if we are lucky. The owls are busy hunting, their eerie calls the first sound that greets us. On the Common we see the barn owl gliding low, pale and ghostly. Then the squawk and whirr of a pheasant disturbed; a blackbird’s call of alarm as we pass by. Light comes late and slowly, and now there is a constant twittering of small birds in the hedges. They know the year is turning. In the garden the spring bulbs have already pushed their green tips through the earth. Is it possible that light is seeping back?

Signs of hope. Never were they more needed.

Reader, many commentators are reminding us of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” The times are indeed so interesting, so darkly confused, so unlikely to yield certainties in this uncharted territory of pandemic, that any comment from me on them would be otiose.

However, in case some future archivist, fossicking through the internet offerings of 2020, chances upon these chronicles and requires some context, I will just say that December 2020 was the month when the pandemic just got a whole lot worse: a new strain (B117), virulent amongst the young particularly, has proved itself up to 70% more transmissible than its older cousin, the one which emerged a year ago and with which we were just beginning to feel familiar. It has hit us, with soaring rates of infection (as I write more than 53,000 in the past 24 hours), at a time when the United Kingdom is about to be dealt another  grievous, but self-inflicted, wound: Brexit becomes a reality at 23h00 GMT on 31 December when the transition period ends. I weep bitter and angry tears of loss: the country I have called home for years, and whose literature, language and culture were more familiar to me than my own now regards me as an alien, a foreigner from a “third country.”

It could (just) be worse for there is a trade deal of sorts, but the wound comes from the limitations to our children’s future, to employment, to human rights, to freedom to work and travel, to security, to who we are in the eyes of the world, to our culture, to our heritage. And for what? For our “sovereignty” – which was never in question. We have become a small-minded island, inward-looking, xenophobic, mean, insular. Community always – always – trumps isolation.

I fear that lockdown and the Covid constraints of the highest level tier 4 produce an effect in microcosm on me – and doubtless on many others who live alone – similar to that of Brexit on our country. This year has taught me that community not isolation is essential if one is to be healthy, or ‘whole’ – a better word. Without this contact we are wounded, we do not flourish cut off and alone. For some this may be a mortal wound. Soon, I fear, going out ‘normally’ will be so abnormal that it will appear frightening for many; we shall have to learn again how to be social, how to behave without fear of infection, how to be in the company of others.

I find my Book of Common Prayer (1662) and look for the prayer “In the time of any common Plague or Sickness” (did they know how much worse it would be three years later?):

O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of King David, didst slay threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest; Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We have already surpassed the three score and ten thousand deaths.

Of course most of us no longer believe that sickness is some sort of divine retribution visited upon mankind for sin (though I have met some loony Evangelicals who do), but we do know it is a consequence of our actions. Until we respect nature, no longer destroy the habitat of wildlife and cease to eat wild species, we shall continue to see these zoonoses develop, and some will be deadly. I fear this plague year will have taught us little.

Added to this grim picture here in East Anglia there have been serious floods. All along the river Waveney, which forms the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, unprecedented water levels have been recorded. The Shotford bridge on the road to Harleston (just in South Norfolk) was closed for fear of collapse as the river rose over it. I have never known that in the decades I have lived here. A friend at Bungay was evacuated from her home on Christmas Eve. Driving down to Fressingfield early that morning I was flagged down by a walker, warning me I should not get through the 300m-long flood where the beck had broken its banks.

On all counts I am among the lucky ones, truly blessed in that I can stay safe and warm in my home, with the company of a dog who keeps me laughing and an aged cat whose dementia drives me to distraction. Little need to go out except in my daily attempts to tire the dog, and I shall now start to consume the contents of my bulging “no-deal-Brexit” box, assembled over long months of apprehension. I am sitting pretty but alone, sovereign but solitary in my kingdom.

And so in these down days between Christmas and New Year, this liminal time of waiting while the earth sleeps in the depths and darkness of midwinter, I adopt my ‘normal’ practice and celebrate the feast. I do no work other than the necessary tasks of winter – carting logs, sweeping leaves, a bit of tidying up. We go for long walks, and although I think it wrong to drive in order to walk we go to the sea, the heath and the forest for a change of scene, to breathe different air, and to avoid…the mud.

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The mud! Reader, I fully understand that sometimes I see my glass of blessings as half empty (a Facebook ‘friend’ chirpily reprimanded me recently), and I furthermore am conscious of the fact that any mud encountered on Suffolk walks is as nothing as compared to that of the trenches 1914-18. However, it begins to get one down. It comes in differing varieties: there is the liquid mud as slippery as ice, where keeping one’s balance requires intense concentration and a strain on the knees and ankles; there is the deep glutinous mud which sucks at the boots, holding them fast, dragging them from the feet, often leaving them behind, necessitating a filthy hobble back to retrieve the one which has disappeared into the morass. There is the claggy mud of a ploughed field where the farmer has not reinstated the footpath, and which results in a kilo or two of weight dragged on each foot. And then there is just…mud…acres and acres of it, churned by the passage of many feet, paws and hooves. I put the dog in the shower. She is not impressed.

Reader, what can be said that has not been said? We must let the past, and in particular this year with its losses, its bereavements, its sickness and strangeness, go.

I apologise that I have really nothing of value to say, other than to wish you a happy, safe and healthy new year. The road goes on.

So, hands up who noticed there was no October? I’ve heard of only one so far, which suggests to me that it probably is time to stop soon.

So what happened to October? The absence was mainly because I decided to spare my readers yet another month of complaints about rain. There are only so many ways one can describe wet, and the daily drenchings that dampen the spirits, the mud that mires the mood as well as the boots and paws. The times we live in are difficult enough without inflicting this moaning on others.

Another reason was that I write these chronicles at the end of the calendar month, and at that point in October I had deserted Suffolk, its fields and woods, and my garden for a week on the Northumberland coast, a week away from work, from bills and attendant anxieties, from routine – and, as it turned out – from rain.

I had searched, with strict criteria, somewhere to stay: it must of course welcome my dog; it must be quiet with no noise of neighbours; and it must be within easy walking distance of those vast empty beaches of golden sand that stretch for solitary miles. And I found it – a small stone cottage, a mile from the sea, with its own track to the beach over farmland, and to the nearby village.

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And so we spent a week, the dog and I, walking and walking and walking – across the expanses of sand shining silver in a low sun, over dunes and fields, to tiny fishing villages, to castles dominating the cold North Sea, proud on their promontories. And every day the sky was full of geese flying south, squadron upon squadron, their eerie creaking cry as the formations passed overhead the companion to all our walks.

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The skeins were high against the sky, and it was difficult to tell what breed they were, but I think from their pattern in flight that they were Brents.  Brent geese migrate in family groups, flying in wavering lines or flocking loosely together. They seldom fly in V-formation. These groups stay together from one breeding season to the next. They search for marshland, coastal grassland or farmland to rest and feed on, before pushing onwards.

These Brents breed in northern Russia and spend the winter in southern and eastern England. They nest on the boggy Arctic tundra, where the severe climate allows them only about two months of good weather in which to raise a family. By mid-September, they have left their breeding grounds, and arrive in large flocks on our shores from early October. They spend the winter feeding on eelgrass in estuaries and on crops in adjoining fields. In April they leave and head north once more – east to Siberia. They stop off along the Baltic coast before reaching the Arctic in early June, just as the snow and ice is beginning to thaw. 

We probably saw pink-footed geese as well, for we were within sight of Lindisfarne, where they arrive from Iceland. Barnacle geese too can be seen in huge numbers with up to 30,000 passing through. There is something mysterious – primal – in these mass movements of birds, called by instinct, by  forces within themselves to fly huge tracts of our planet, twice a year every year.

If a dog can be aware of the concept of ‘holiday’ I am sure mine was during that week. At home she has, as I frequently remind her, a pretty good life: daily long walks, freedom to gallop across fields in the dawn, a garden for interminable games of ball, food, warmth, and my abiding love which forgives all her sins. But here she is an only child, having social contact with few other dogs, and she longs for that. When I saw her bound onto the beach the first afternoon the joy was plain to see, and it was worth the 350 miles for that moment. Every day she ran, she chased whole packs of other dogs, and was chased in turn, she stole balls and obediently gave them up, she frolicked in the sea, jumping waves, rolling in the sand, racing up and down the dunes. I don’t think it is anthropomorphising to say that this was a happy dog.

As we walked down to the village each morning we passed what must have been the results of an effort by the entire population to celebrate Hallowe’en, with 20 or so decorated grisly and ghoulish figures lining the grassy path. I offer three examples:

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Our efforts in Suffolk are less scary, and more in the spirit of public service:

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On our walks I often meet the elderly farmer who constructed Pumpkin Man (he who brought us “Hidden camaras” and “Greengageges”). He is the source of much local knowledge, history, and can tell stories about all the native residents of our two villages. One day in October before Hallowe’en he hailed me from afar:

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Him: Do you believe in the paranormal?

I hurried towards him, and as soon as I was near enough the dialogue went like this:

Me (cautiously): Well, I think there are unexplained things…

Him: I’ll tell you what happened to me last winter.

Me (thinks): We’ll be here for a while.

Him: I was up here one morning last winter just as it was light, and I saw this man with a round head and waxy complexion. And, do you know, he was wearing little diddy swimming trunks and a white vest.

Me (politely): How strange! Did he say anything?

Him: “Rood!”

Me: Rude?

Him: Yes, He said “Rood! Where’s the rood?”

[I should interject at this point for those unacquainted with the Suffolk accent that a long ‘o’ sound is pronounced ‘oo’ and conversely an ‘oo’ sound is pronounced ‘o’, so that if one went to school in Scole, it would be said “I went to skole in skool.” When someone dies there is a fooneral.]

Me: Rood?

Him: The rood, that rood over there.

Me: Oh…the road!

Him: That’s what I said. And I shooed him where the rood was.

Me: And then what happened?

Him: He disappeared. He just disappeared. I turned round and he was gone.

I must report that on none of our matutinal excursions have I ever seen a waxy round-faced man in diddy swimming trunks, and I suspect this was either an attempt at a Hallowe’en scare, or the old chap had seen a party-goer the morning after from a nearby venue. Who knows.

Now as I write we are coming into the true dark of the year. The days have been drear with fog, and scarce light all day. Fierce winds earlier in the month have whittled the trees bare, and their skeletal shapes loom out of the murk. We are condemned to solitude, and imprisoned alone in this darkness, in this second period of lockdown to control the virus which has ruled our lives for most of the year. And Covid Christmas forces a choice: loneliness or a potentially lethal togetherness.

We need light, any light; light from the sky, light at the end of this long, long tunnel. But it is Advent, and that points to a greater light, “And the darkness comprehended it not.” For many it will be hard to glimpse.