Common or Garden in Suffolk

And suddenly – autumn: Adieu vive clarté de nos étés trop courts.

Though in truth this last summer has not been short. It has endured, nearly five months from May and on into September.

In Suffolk, that is. In Cornwall during my week’s holiday, alas, it was the week of  equinoctial gales, and drenching swathes of rain. But more of Cornwall in a moment.

Some readers have complained that I have recently strayed from descriptions of my twin preoccupations: walking (the Common) and my garden. How odd and how limiting it would be if my life revolved solely around these activities. I do and I will return to them in these chronicles, but not exclusively so.

I was ready for some down time. The first two weeks of the month were spent with my nose to the grindstone, as my father would have said. Editing, sub-editing, nagging for the last bits of copy, laying out pages, tweaking, and checking checking checking – my first print journal for the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome. I felt I was going cross-eyed. The last time I prepared copy for publication was decades ago, not quite in the days of hot metal, but certainly before the days of digital. Maybe I have forgotten what hard work is.

And so in mid-month from Britain’s most easterly county to its most westerly, for a week of holiday with the young dog. She is excellent in the car – you wouldn’t know she was there, but I am mindful of her, and my, need for exercise, and breaks from travelling, so we took the journey in two days, for the most part off motorway so there were possibilities for walks.

My years in France have caused me to forget how wearisome, crumbling and congested are the roads in this country:

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire

wrote Chesterton, but what malevolent maniac made the million Milton Keynes roundabouts?

But soon we came to the straighter roads of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, many of which are remnants of our Roman past. By chance we came across an ancient track, the Salt Way, which runs from Droitwich  on its way to the coast of Hampshire. It is mentioned in a Saxon Charter, dated 969, as “Sealt Street.” Some have supposed it to have arisen from the traffic of salt from Cheshire, while others hold that the name simply implies the “Hill Way.” We stopped and walked for miles.

Thinking of how the Romans built their roads, straight as arrows cross country, always recalls my father’s passion for these tracks and paths. He possessed many books on the Romans in Britain, and when he and my mother retired it was to within a few metres of the Via Devana which slices diagonally across England from Colchester (Camulodunum) to Chester (Deva). I remember him vividly, setting off so earnestly in stout walking shoes, armed with map and compass in an old gas mask bag, to explore.

And the next day, too, this time on motorway, passing signs to Weston-super-Mare, which he insisted on pronouncing “Mar-é”, and listening to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, he sprang to mind. My sleepless childhood nights were disturbed by many composers, their music filling the house from my father’s two enormous stereo speakers, and a great deal of Vaughan Williams with his plangent strings.  It was, I suppose, less deafening than the Wagner…

And how will our children remember us, with our own eccentricities, our own crimes against their childhood?

But to Cornwall…We stayed at Morwenstow, just west of the border with Devon, on a beautiful but murderous stretch of coast, where the cliffs are rugged and sheer.

A sailing friend wrote to me “Absolute death trap in a nor’wester and the only possible port of refuge, Padstow, even worse since it’s a bugger to get into in any sort of blow. But golly, lovely.”  Indeed it was lovely when we could see through the rain.

Morwenstow seems known mainly for its strange Victorian parson, Robert Stephen Hawker. One of his main concerns became the rescue of sailors from ships wrecked on the rocks of the local coastline.  On 7 September 1842 the brig Caledonia was dashed to pieces at nearby Sharpnose Point.  All but one seaman were lost but Hawker ensured the survivor was nursed back to health, while giving a Christian burial to the nine crewmen who were washed up.  The Caledonia’s white pitch-pine figurehead he also retrieved, and used as the churchyard’s grave-marker for captain and crew.

He built a little hut on the cliff at Morwenstow, using timbers washed up from the Caledonia and two vessels wrecked the following year, the Phoenix and the Alonzo.  He’d sit on fine days smoking opium and composing his poetry, and during times of storm scour the grey waters for ships in distress.  For many years he continued this gruesome duty of recovering corpses from the sea. Altogether, he rescued nearly 50 bodies. It is said he plied villagers with gin to inure them to the task of collecting washed-up body parts.

It takes a while to relax into a holiday, to realise – in the sense of making real – that I do not have to be anywhere or do anything, except keep the dog and me exercised.

To this end on the first full day, and the only completely dry one, we set off on a long trek which took us across fields, through woods, alongside streams, and to the coast at a little beach, pleasingly called Duckpool. And then back along the clifftops past the GCHQ listening station to another inlet, Stanbury Mouth, and then back inland towards “home” on country paths. Here I was genuinely scared, no exaggeration, and the thought that flashed across part of my consciousness was “Is this how it all ends?” We were crossing a big field with a large herd of grazing heifers, with a few cows and biggish calves. I think they were Devonshire Red Rubies.

There must have been 30 or 40 of them. I put the dog on the lead. As cattle will, they came towards us, and at first I thought it was just the usual curiosity, but it was soon apparent that it was aggression. Thirty or 40 large animals advancing at a trot and then a canter is truly terrifying. I followed advice and let the dog go, knowing that she could outrun them, and that she would draw them away from me. That worked at first, but then they came for me in a wide semi-circle which then drew into a three-quarters arc.

I knew instinctively that if they managed to close the circle I would be a goner, and I would be killed by trampling. It happens. I opened my jacket to look as big as possible, bellowing and waving my stick, and as the leader came at me whacked it hard on the nose. That caused it to pause, and they all stopped for a second. Then they came on again. The stile at the end of the field seemed very far off. I dared not turn my back. And so, slowly, walking backwards and praying not to stumble or trip, I managed to cross the field, bashing the nose of the nearest as they advanced, and shouting as I went. Heifers, eh…. big hormonal girls.

When we got over that stile I was shaking, and my heart racing. It’s not an experience I would wish to repeat – which is a pity as that path was our most direct to a beach.  I know it is said that it is a myth that the colour red enrages bovines and that they are colour blind – but I was wearing a red jacket.

The remainder of the holiday was not without its perils, either. Storms Helene, Ali, and Bronagh battered the coast in swift succession, rendering clifftop walks unwise. One morning I had to cling to a gatepost to avoid being blown over. Inland paths, with the attendant worries about livestock, tend to peter out and the possibilities of getting lost are many. Once upon a time labourers walked to work; children went to school on foot, and these public rights of way were in constant use. Now farmers understandably do not encourage walkers, and signs disappear, and gates are padlocked, and the paths cease to exist – except on maps.

Vaughan Williams attended our return journey as well, as I listened to Radio 3’s Record Review of his “On Wenlock Edge.” My father loved what one critic unkindly called this “Cowpat Music”, the works of English pastoral composers – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Butterworth. They engender a nostalgia for a lost England, calling up a pre-War world which never was the idyll our false memory clings to.

I was reminded also of a chance and emotional encounter in France, one of those rare moments when the past bursts in unexpected on the present. Four years ago I was working in a pilgrim hostel on the Voie de Vézelay, on the way of St James in the Dordogne. Some Dutch pilgrims arrived one evening, and after supper one of them, René, got out some music and sang unaccompanied from Butterworth’s “A Shropshire Lad.” The surprise was so great, and the emotion of memory so strong, that tears came unbidden. Eighteen months later another surprise: René emailed and invited me to a concert in which he was singing at Oosterbeek.

Back to Suffolk, which had enjoyed continuing summer while we battled the wind and the rain.

And so now there is more darkness than light in the 24-hour cycle. Morning walks start later; a coat is necessary. But the legacy of this extraordinary summer lingers on in the glut of fruit. The hedgerows blaze with scarlet and vermilion hips and haws.The dog joins me in blackberrying. Blue sloes are prolific and await the first frost for picking. Tomatoes in my garden are so numerous they fall to the ground and rot.

Across the Common the horses will soon be moved to winter accommodation. August’s late foal – a surprise – has grown strong and sturdy. The ponds are dry as dust, and we wait for the winter rain.

 

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides tenèbres.

At the end of my July offering I was debating whether to continue with these chronicles, as the year had come full circle since I initiated the blog. There was a positive response, and so here is August.

I could not have imagined, when last month I wrote of the first rain in months, that there would be precious little more for another month. As August ripened the heat built and built once more, this time with sapping humidity. And so it continued till a few days ago. Now another couple of rainy days have seen the grass (and weeds) spring up, and the stubble fields are covered with a sheen of green where fallen grain has germinated.

But what a summer! My two fig trees are bowed down with ripe and luscious fruit. In previous years the birds and wasps had the sparse fruits as soon as they softened. Outdoor tomatoes, even the Italian ones sown in hope rather than expectation, have produced a glut. Harvest is over and all safely gathered in, and the landscape assumes its autumnal aspect as the plough get to work through the dry earth. My own domestic harvest threatens to overwhelm me, and processing of tomatoes and courgettes demands constant attention. I press gifts of vegetables onto friends and family.

 

Drought has produced a premature autumn, and hips and haws glow red in the hedgerows. Blackberries are ripe and plump – how have they found enough moisture?

However, most arable farmers are speaking of a reduced yield this year, though one organic farmer of my acquaintance in Lincolnshire says his has increased. Those who use the old varieties say so as well. Lessons to be learned.

Now, at the end of August, on the cusp of meteorological autumn, the sun has yet to breast  the horizon when we go out for the early walk.

Now even the yellowhammers are silent, and hunting buzzards are the only birds I hear. Sometimes a great grey heron rises with its slow wingbeat from a pond. One day we come across a baby barn owl sitting under a tree, a ball of grey fluff surrounding an improbably stern owlish face. I hold the dog still. Too young for full fledging, he must have flapped down from the nest but couldn’t fly up again. I don’t think he will have lasted long. Another morning we startle a large dog fox. My young dog pursues, then wisely she thinks better of it, and the fox slinks away.

Early in the month, on a blazing day, I went to help set up the Inspired by Becker Exhibition (the regular reader will recall that back in April I was accepted by this art society, dedicated to raising awareness of Harry Becker’s work within the art world and among the general public, and to running events which celebrate his contribution to painting and printmaking in the early years of the 20th century). I also, with some daring – since I am but a self-taught amateur, entered the Paint Out competition on the Saturday of the exhibition. This was held at Blythburgh, where Becker is buried. Some artists chose to paint the marsh landscape of the Blyth estuary, some to paint the church and churchyard, and three or four of us to try and capture the working party clearing the artist’s grave.

I reproduce here first, second and third – and my own. I thought the third-placed one (the pencil drawing) should have won. But what do I know?

I cannot help but write this month of the IICSA (Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) report on the case study of the English Benedictine Congregation, and particularly their abbeys and schools at Ampleforth and Downside. I had thought myself unshockable, but the appalling repetitive catalogue of depravity, predation and cruelty in the report caused me to reel psychologically.

The report highlights how time and again the attitude of former Abbots of Downside (one of whom is our parish priest, for Downside has served the parish in which I attend Mass since 1657) sought to protect the reputation of the monks and the school, sought to protect the offenders, and failed to honour their duty of care to the victims. “Through ignorance, through weakness, through [their] own deliberate fault”… I see only too well how the weakness of our priest, who flees from confrontation, head in sand, and the naïveté of another (who also was priest in this parish) could allow the darkness to continue.

I requested some sort of statement from our priest for our parish website, of which I am an admin. “No comments; no statement,” came the reply. But then when Downside issued a statement I persuaded him to allow me to post it online, and put a hard copy on the noticeboards. After Mass he stood up and said these were available to read, but then spoke of his own stress, with not one word of regret, contrition, or owning the situation. There was much anger and upset among the faithful, and eventually he was persuaded to make his own statement of regret. It cannot have been easy for him, and he did it in a toneless, emotionless voice.

The report suggests that there is still “an entrenched belief that the clergy are superior to the laity.” I see it every day in our parish. And we the laity allow it to continue…“Father” knows best; Father must be supported whatever; Father must not be questioned or confronted. What one commentator calls the infantilisation of the laity. And so we must share responsibility for these abuses of power, through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault.

And the knowledge of how the clergy have abused their position keeps flooding in – the United States, Ireland, Australia, Scotland, England. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of a shift of the tectonic plates in the Church, a new reformation – if only the laity can grow up. I wrote to The Tablet, and support flooded in from all over the world.

End of sermon. The readers who said “Continue” may be regretting their encouragement… And yet abuse of power concerns all the human family, Catholic or not.

But speaking -more cheerfully – of families, August has been a time of visits. One weekend to Northern Ireland to see elder daughter, her husband and their two girls. Lovely girls, growing up fast: one embarking on GCSE, the other about to spend her first day at “big” school. They are a pleasure to be with.

The next weekend, younger daughter comes from London, and spoils her old mother with breakfast in bed. We walk a long loop of 11+ miles: Cratfield, Linstead, Cookley, Huntingfield (sandwich and a pint of Adnams in the Huntingfield Arms) and home via Cratfield, after a scary encounter with the most aggressive horse I’ve ever had to face.

This is the longest walk since my doubly-fractured ankle, and although the last mile or so were painful, it set me thinking of more serious long-distance walking. Next month, in Cornwall with the young dog, I can test myself on some proper gradients.

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned a new word. This is always a good thing even when it is the younger generation getting one over on me. One of my daughters wrote it to me in an email a few evenings ago. I thought she was just showing off but I gather Twitter was buzzing with it at the time.

The word is “petrichor”. It means the scent given off when rain hits dry ground. This is apparently the effect of a molecule, geosmin, a bacterium produced by Streptomyces, which is released in to the air. The word was coined by scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas in their 1964 article “Nature of Argillaceous Odour”, published in the journal Nature. The neologism is made up from the Greek petros, meaning “stone”, and ichor, meaning “the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods.”

The reader with alert powers of deduction will by now have understood that it has rained. I little thought when I wrote in June that another month would pass with not a drop of moisture. The colours of the landscape had by then become a blanched restricted palette, and  over the course of July green became a rarity: the ditches, long dry, retained enough residual moisture to keep a thin line of verdure along their course, but this gradually diminished to nothingness, and soon even the stressed trees started to lose leaves and shrivel. Grass bleached almost white, crops palest gold or cream, gardens brown and dying. Heat hung heavy in the stifling air. All talk was of the weather which surpasses the legendary summer of ’76.

On the Common there is precious little grass left, leaving only rubbish (weeds, in farming-speak) and some of the horses have been taken off in order to conserve feed. The pond from which they drink is at an all-time low, a churned and muddy puddle.

The longed-for rain came with a storm towards the end of the month. Farmers rushed to get in crops as the clouds approached, bales perched perilously high and leaning. The fields either side of my house were harvested simultaneously,

continuing till the first drops fell, and a violent wind sent the straw flying.

But alas it was the night of the blood moon, the longest total lunar eclipse of the century. After weeks and weeks of clear skies there was no chance of even a glimpse; the evening before, or after, would have given us all a clear view. Maybe better luck for the Perseids in August, but mid-August is notoriously cloudy here.

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But oh! It has been glorious. The beauty of the very early mornings just after sunrise is worth all the sleepless nights.

The dog and I are out then with cool air on our bodies after the stifling darkness. The mornings now are almost silent: there may be a yellowhammer “little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeese;” sometimes the menacing mew of a buzzard; very rarely now a skylark high high in the still air. We go over stubble fields and she chases hares; on paths through the wheat and she dashes up and down the tramlines, the tip of her black tail visible – a swift-moving shark’s fin surfacing on a sea of gold.

She is nearly 20 months old. The relationship deepens, and owner and dog communicate more and more by body language. She knows the meaning of different ways of my standing up, or of a search for keys, or even of a change of clothes. She knows the tone of a sigh. She observes the raise of an eyebrow. And I know her. There is something so poignantly endearing watching her struggle to control her impulses: a large rabbit sits provocatively on the path in front of us; she starts forward; I whistle her back; she quivers, trembles with desire. But she comes back.

Usually.

She is doubtless my last dog. I have tried to keep something back, to not give her my entire heart for fear of the loss which one day will come. Those who know the aching space in a home when a dog has died will understand. But she has claimed my love completely. I must do as she does, live in the moment, and not fear pain.

A recent, but already dear, friend has just had to have his old dog put to sleep. He has allowed me to quote the poem he wrote:

Go now, chase the deer and pheasant, over heath and fields,
through glade and vale, greet the Morning Star,
‘til the yearned for dawn, disperses the dark-aching shadow, and,
at my side again, eastward looking, from warm shingle, gold flickering to the horizon, heavens and seas meld deepest blue and we too, rest in peace eternal.

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High summer. The time of meals, festivals, outings. On one of the real furnace days our parish held its annual outing . Do not conjure up pictures of a Cider-with-Rosie jollity. No – these excursions were initiated seven years ago, and graced with the name of “pilgrimages”, and always involve places of significance in the Christian history of our area. The first was to the wonderful ruins of St Benet’s Abbey (founded in the 11th century) in the Broads. The first and the best: we arrived by boat from Ludham, heard Mass and picnicked among the ancient stones in the sultry heat, watching boats sailing, as it seemed, through the fields. This year it was to the nearby village of Hoxne, to honour the patron saint of our parish, St Edmund.

Local legend has it that, after being routed in battle against the Danes, King Edmund of East Anglia hid under the Goldbrook Bridge. The reflection of his golden spurs glinting in the water revealed his hiding place to a newly-wed couple crossing the bridge. The couple informed the Danes who promptly captured Edmund and demanded he renounce his faith. He refused and was tied to a nearby oak tree. After whipping him, the Danes shot spears at him until he was entirely covered with their missiles – like the bristles of a hedgehog. Even then he would not forsake Christ and so was beheaded and the head was thrown into the woods. It is alleged Edmund cursed all married couples who should pass over Goldbrook Bridge, and to this day brides and grooms will not cross the bridge

The great oak tree stood for 1000 years until it fell in 1848. The tree’s trunk was over 20 feet in circumference. When the tree was cut up, it is said that an old arrow head was found deep within the tree, five feet from the base. Today a stone cross in a field marks the spot where the tree stood with an inscription “St Edmund the Martyr AD 870. Oak tree fell August 1848 by its own weight”.

Parishioners gathered in the grounds of Hoxne church for Mass and picnic in the blazing 33C heat, and afterwards walked to the Memorial. Do we believe the legends? Not necessarily. Does it matter? No.

Another outing. The regular reader may recall that I have, rather to my surprise, joined the local WI. Even more to my amazement I agreed to go on a WI pétanque day, no doubt seduced by memories of my life in the far south of France…old men in berets, clichéd Gauloises hanging from their lips, under the shade of plane trees in the village square. This time it was elderly women (the average age must have been well over 70), mostly considerably overweight. But the spirit of competition, the intense concentration, rivalled the concours de boules of Gallic summer festivities – but with a lot more laughter and, alas, no pastis.

Last month I wrote of a portrait commission which had gone well. Most unusually the subject of the portrait not only recognised himself, but said – in a kind email of appreciation and thanks – that it was exactly how he saw himself. A rare tribute indeed.

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This online journal of my common-or-garden life has chronicled a full year now. If nothing else it provides a record of the weather over 12 months. To continue or not? That is now the question.

 

 

I am British; I obsess about the weather. The reader over these past 11 posts will have noticed.

It is almost impossible to believe that two months ago my front garden was under water, as was my drive. But since the beginning of May scarcely a drop of rain has fallen. It is not just here in East Anglia, traditionally the driest corner of the UK, but country-wide. Rainy Northern Ireland has a hose-pipe ban. There are wild fires near Manchester, one of the wettest parts of this island.

It is not just the drought, with cracked earth and shrivelling crops, but the sun – now at its zenith – blazes down from a deep blue sky with Mediterranean intensity. The dog and I walk in the misty cool of the very early morning, and now she lies panting in the shade.

I am a gardener, and so the concern with rainfall, or lack of it, and sun is of importance. For a few weeks in early summer my garden gives a tolerable impression of an English cottage garden,

but now it is tired, dusty, thirsty. The vegetable plots at the rear of the house are also thirsty, but they are at least yielding their first fruits, and few actions give me greater pleasure than picking my supper; so far broad beans, French beans, courgettes, chard, onions and potatoes.

The watering is constant and time-consuming. My five water butts are long since empty. I remember when I bought the first water butt. I went to a builders’ yard to buy some breeze blocks to stand it on:
Employee in yard: what do you want?
Me: some blocks to stand a water butt on.
Employee: do you have a big butt?
…Collapses in giggles.

This hot, dry, burning weather has accelerated the passing of the seasons. At the beginning of June we were scarce into early summer, but midsummer with its flowers has raced past, and now high summer is here. The barley is ripe for the harvest. All in the space of a month. Gone are the cascades of dog roses in the hedgerows, the early summer meadow flowers; gone too is the full-throated dawn chorus, replaced by the incessant and insistent cheep cheep cheep of baby birds, beaks constantly open to be fed by exhausted parents. Soon they will all be fledged and gone.

When spring burst upon us at the beginning of May after months of cold and wet nature’s overdrive ensured that what is usually spread over many weeks happened in a rush. And so the grass seeded all at once, making for one of the worst hay fever seasons I can remember. When I was a teenager taking exams (which in those days happened towards the end of June) that was when hay fever was at its height. Rain was fervently prayed for to damp down the pollen, and when this didn’t happen I sat exams doped and foggy with primitive antihistamines. This year hay fever attacked from mid-May onwards. I walk, dosed with eye drops, nasal spray, Vaseline smeared round the eyes, and dark glasses on. A friend, whose cognitive faculties waver occasionally, suggested I go out in an eye mask…

There have been few excitements this month. Generally I prefer it that way. One of them has been a portrait commission from someone I have never met (but of whom I had heard, for he is famous in some circles) who chanced to see some of my work on Facebook. This is so boosting for an ego which inflates and deflates with every puff of wind. I do not generally work from photographs, for how can you convey the reality of a person without his presence? Flattered, I agreed. It has – I think – gone well; the commissioner was happy (good, since he had paid up front).  Because the recipient, its subject, is as yet ignorant of its existence I can give no further details, but will include photos  next month. And the reaction of the recipient.

The other major event for me this month was attending the massive march in London on 23 June (the second anniversary of the disastrous, ill-thought-out referendum) to demand a people’s vote on the final Brexit deal. I still cherish a very faint hope that the lunacy can be stopped. It was a wonderful event, with more than 100,000 participants from all over the UK, and a particularly large Irish contingent – unsurprising when one thinks of the effects of our leaving on the Republic of Ireland, and on the North, where I have family interest, and fear a kicking-off of the simmering resentments there if the deal does not satisfy both sides of the border. There were people too from all over Europe.

Two days before the referendum of 2016 I was sitting on a train in Italy, chatting in a mixture of stumbling Italian, English and French to an Italian woman who said “Please, no Brexit. Please. We need you. All of us need each other.”

I believed then, as I do now, that 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.

There is one way in which I hope we can regain something of a lost Britain: we were once welcoming to the stranger, the exile, the dispossessed. We took in those who needed to come to our country, and they became part of who we are now. This is our richness as a country – not this “little England” pull-up-the-drawbridge pettiness of spirit. We are historically a bastard race, we have a bastard language. That is part of our strength – absorbing what the newcomers have to offer, and in turn embracing them. I do believe we shall be the poorer when we leave the EU. Poorer economically, politically, culturally, morally and spiritually.

But in the past week or so fortress Europe has fortified itself further. Populist governments are taking sterner measures to keep out the dispossessed seeking a better, safer, life. Italy turns away ships; more migrants drown; Macron continues to turn a blind eye to the gross abuses of human rights in northern France; Hungary is intransigent; Merkel’s position is threatened by right-wing politicians; asylum seekers kill themselves in despair in our own detention centres.

To protest at our policies, and to stand in solidarity with refugees and exiled people two friends and I organized a “Share the Journey” walk for our parish, and filled in cards to be sent to the Prime Minister, asking her to work with world leaders to ensure respect for the human rights and dignity of exiled peoples. Not many came.

And here ends the lesson for this month.

The year has turned, the solstice has come and gone, and the sun has started its slow decline. But for the moment it shines bright from a radiant sky. It is summer, and the living is easy.

It is the law in England that bank (public) holidays should be cold, windy and extremely wet, with television coverage of deserted seafronts with deckchairs blown across beaches, and giant waves breaking on promenades as the rain spoils days out. The exception to this is Christmas when temperatures rise unseasonably high. But “new month, new weather”, and both the May Day and the (misnamed) Whit holidays saw record high temperatures.

The sun has shone almost all month. The barley, rippling in the breeze like newly unplaited hair, has started to turn colour. The bright acid yellow of rape flowers has faded.

Spring came suddenly, and now spring has segued into early summer.

The Common is once more clothed in magic. The orchids were a field of magenta mingled with a million buttercups. The horses returned mid month, and the first foal has been born. The blossom has been magnificent this year.  It is as though nature is over-compensating for the months of grey, wet, miserable, cold.

And somehow symbolising this return of hope is the pure exultant song of the larks high high above the fields. An exaltation indeed.

This warm, wonderful weather has been a kind nurse to me this month, encouraging recovery.

In the old days (when I was young) of television and the “wireless” the announcer would say, in case of a glitch, “Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.” Normality – in terms of daily activities and routine (which, the reader will recall, tend to centre on the Common and my garden) – has been my aim this month. Normality after weeks of immobility recovering from a double ankle fracture. This means back to long walks, and growing my own food. And full  recovery does not seem the impossibility it was during the dark days. Normal service is on the way back.

The ankle survived a silly setback in the middle of the month. The steering group of the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome was to meet in the grandeur of the Guildhall, for our chairman – I am told – is, or was, an alderman of the City of London. I decided I could easily hobble from Liverpool Street Station to Guildhall and back in rush hour without a stick. The unyielding pavements, the crush of commuters, the feeling of vulnerability took their toll, and pain returned. But not for long. The compensation was visiting Guildhall, and the thrilling City skyline from the meeting room.

Often I take the young dog to walk on the vast flat expanse which is Metfield airfield (“RAF” Metfield as it once was). Here the remains of concrete runways make perfect paths for one who is learning to walk unaided again.

The airfield was built for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF)  as a heavy bomber field. During the Second World War it was known as USAAF Station 366. Metfield was one of the most isolated Eighth Air Force stations in Suffolk, built as a standard, Class-A bomber design airfield, consisting of three intersecting concrete runways. Today it is down to arable cultivation, but the signs of its original use are still there to see.

From here the bombers attacked airfields, bridges, and coastal defences both preceding and during the invasion of Normandy , and strategic objectives in Germany, striking communications centres, oil refineries, storage depots, industrial areas, shipyards, and other targets in such places as Berlin, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Gelsenkirchen, Bielefeld, Hanover,and Magdeburg.  I lived in Metfield for a year once, and on moonlit nights thought of the young men setting out in their machines of death, and felt in my imagination the vibration and roar of the heavy planes as they took off.

One evening in July 1944 the bomb dump at Metfield exploded. One bomb mysteriously detonated,  setting off almost the entire munitions storage area. 1200 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs rocked the countryside for miles around. Five men were killed. An elderly farmer of my acquaintance, a nine-year-old lad at the time, living three or four miles off, told me of shattered windows and a barn roof blown off.

Another advantage of walking on the deserted airfield is that, while I am still walking with two trekking poles (and thus cannot easily put the dog on a lead), we meet no-one. In the very early morning, nearer to home, I don’t usually see anyone, but this month had a strange and unsettling encounter.

The compassionate reader will understand that traumatic events are closely connected  with strong negative emotions, causing these memories to be powerful and more easily recalled than those of other events. Although a fractured ankle is not high in the hierarchy of trauma, the memory of the accident stays with me, and I feel vulnerable to the point of panic at the thought of a recurrence. One morning I saw the other dog who, with mine, had cannoned into me from behind at such speed that the impact shattered bones and damaged ligaments. I put my dog on the lead and called out to the owner, an elderly woman who – how can I put it kindly – is not known for her rationality, to do the same. She didn’t. I kept asking, and – for whatever reason – she did not respond. As her dog hurtled towards me I screamed. And screamed several times in a terror born of the memory of that winter afternoon that changed my life for the next few months, and possibly more.

Obviously this triggered something in the woman, who came up to me and shook her stick in my face. No dialogue was possible; there was a diatribe:

– My husband will come and haunt you. Look at the end of your bed when it’s dark and he’ll be there
– God will judge you and you’ll go to hell.
-You’re an intellectual nobody

And so it continued as she danced to and fro, shaking her shillelagh in my face as she got near.

Her last two statements may well be true, but I am happy to say that the first was unfounded. I had no glimpse of her husband in my bedroom… But we avoid that path at certain times now.

As one commentator on last month’s blog said, “Who would have dogs, eh?” Well, the answer still is – I would.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Probably many blogs written about April begin with Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

It’s a bit of a cliché to do so, but in truth this month has not been kind, giving only the briefest glimpse of what might be called spring. Since the new year there have been few exceptions to the dark and drear weather here in East Anglia. Day after day the rain has fallen from a dark, louring, cold sky. One hopes for better of April. The month began, on Easter Day, with a prolonged and chilly downpour. The front garden flooded, the drive was under water and had to be pumped out before deliveries could arrive. April ends, similarly, with temperatures far lower than those of Christmas Day, gale-force winds, and a pitiless constant deluge. April’s new foliage stands out, electric lime green, against the grey.

What keeps us going? What keeps us from despair? Always the hope of better to come. And, mid-month, there was a snatch, a tantalising tease: a few false, fleeting days of spring – of summer, even. The sky was a soft blue, the sun shone from dawn till dusk, near-record temperatures soared. The siren voices whispered, “This is it. This is how it will be. Abandon your fires; abandon your five layers of woollens. Relax the muscles which you tensed against the cold. Here is balm for your body and soul.”

But we were deceived, seduced by amnesia, forgetting briefly that in this country warmth and sunshine rarely perdure, and foolish the person who hopes otherwise. The cold and grey and wet flooded back, and have not relinquished their grip.

Easter Day

“Come to lunch”, said a friend, “There are one or two coming.” One or two turned out to be 32, a banquet laid out in…their coach house, where they entertain large gatherings, for these are estate-owning, Tory-voting, Brexit-supporting, landed friends. I painted him once, consciously as lord of the manor; the next year I painted his dog, who adopted a similar pose.

These are good friends, probably the only ones to whose politics I can turn a blind eye. I remember asking them and other friends, including an Irish woman, to supper once. My land-owning friend’s wife was heard to say from one end of the table, in piercing patrician tones, “All immigrants should be sent back to where they came from.” From the other end of the table came a feisty, Irish, response.

The Women’s Institute

Rather to my surprise, I joined the WI last year, as a result of attending an informed and convincing talk on climate change organized by the local branch. We are a small rural gathering of women who –contrary to the myth – do not spend our lives making jam. Among our number are highly skilled and experienced professional women; the topics for discussion have a bearing not only on our community but on national and international matters.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I accepted an invitation to speak to them. They are a not uncritical audience, and ringing in my ears was their feedback on one of last year’s speakers – an unfortunate woman who would do well not to show her face again…

My subject was “Pilgrimage”. I prepared a PowerPoint slideshow to illustrate the general theme and to demonstrate this with reference to my own walking pilgrimages. The linking of my computer to the projection facilities in the village hall required not a few journeys there and back, and a constant to and fro of orders from Amazon of this connector and that cable and this plug and that socket in response to well-meaning and sometimes misinformed advice. But we got there, and – having spoken of pilgrimage in general, and our hard-wired need to create and visit shrines of various sorts – I shamelessly played for my audience’s admiration with pictures of cramped dormitories, unsavoury washing facilities (a showerhead between two urinals), arid treks through Spain, climbing through snow on the Great St Bernard Pass, and various wildlife – wild boar, snakes, mosquitoes, bedbugs…

And yet I hope I conveyed that there is something in that rhythm of walk-eat-sleep, walk-eat-sleep, something in the solitude, the space, the liberty, the pattern of meeting and loss that is not only the rhythm of life itself but is also, in some wise the Way, life in all its fullness.

But maybe this is all I convinced them of:

Inspired by Becker
Harry Becker was the son of a German immigrant, born in Colchester in 1865. At 14, his artistic talent being clear to see, he was sent to the Royal Academy of Antwerp for formal training. He finished his education in Paris during which time he was greatly influenced by the Impressionists, in particular Edgar Degas.

From 1886 Becker lived in Colchester where he painted watercolour portraits as well as landscapes in both watercolour and oils. In 1894 he moved to London to open his studio where he became well known for his lithographs and dramatic graphic work. But in 1913 Becker took the decision to shun the commercial art world, and moved with his wife and daughter to Wenhaston in Suffolk (near here), and lived in near poverty till his death in 1928. His pictures of the Suffolk landscape and skies and an agricultural world now lost inspire local artists, and an “Inspired by Becker Art Society” (IBBAS) now flourishes, exhibiting annually in Wenhaston. With some daring (because there is a great gulf fixed between the formally trained and the untrained artist) I applied to join and have been accepted.

__________________________

In that brief taste of spring, the few sunny days of warmth, buds opened, flowers emerged. A winter landscape of skeletal trees was transformed in what seemed like hours into a dazzling jazzy intensity of green.

I now hobble far enough on my mending ankle to witness the great constellations of primroses on the side of ditches being succeeded by cowslips and oxlips, and the blackthorn come out in bridal finery; to see the sooty black tips of ash twigs  (Tennyson’s “More black than ashbuds in the front of March”) transform within a day into silvery pink flowers.

On one of the few sunny days of the month I was driven to the orthopaedic clinic at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, some 30 miles away. This ran with expected efficiency on well-oiled NHS wheels: plaster room – cast cut off; x-ray; orthopaedic registrar…who peered at the x-ray (an armoury of metalwork in the ankle), wiggled the scabby swollen foot, and pronounced me good to go –and my delight was such I barely heard the warning that I was unlikely to get full range of movement back, and that arthritis was a certainty.

And just as that door to freedom, to walking, and a more normal life opened ajar, the way was barred by a writhing monster of pain. The fracture is healing well, but all the soft tissue damage – the ligaments, tendons and nerves hitherto protected – started to sing out. And they sang loud! I have been reduced to a gibbering, sobbing wreck, and any activity has to be followed by a period of rest with my foot up, waiting for the agony to subside.

As with this spring, one step forward, two steps back.

 

The reader who follows this online journal will recall that I have been immobilised by a double ankle fracture. My world has perforce shrunk: no idyllic walks, no amusing anecdotes from village life…my scope now extends no further than the four walls of the house, and – cautiously – to the end of the garden.

So this month I assume the mantel of pedagogy. A lesson follows. Some readers will know that the last decade of my professional life saw a complete change of career (I am not sure my succession of jobs and positions could be called a “career” – though it’s been fun). At 56 I retrained as a fitness instructor, progressing from a basic qualification to a first qualification in “Exercise Referral”, enabling me to take patients referred by GPs. And then came highly specialised training and qualifications – cardiac rehabilitation, mental health, obesity and diabetes.

As well as instructing individual patients, I took groups,  the doctors being most willing to prescribe exercise for the intractable cases. I wish I could say that lifestyle change (the object of referral, other than getting the patient out of the consulting room) always ensued. The benefits ceased all too quickly when the course of exercise finished, but some persisted.  The main reason for referral was obesity and its many co-morbid complications. My aim with the Over 60s group was to keep them independent and active as long as possible. As we age we lose lean muscle mass rapidly; our balance deteriorates; proprioception (the awareness of where our bodies are in relation to what is around us, and of where parts of our body are in relation to the whole) diminishes. This is why elderly people are more prone to falls.

I drilled my poor over-60s (many were over 70s and 80s, and I had two nonagenarians) like a sergeant-major.

We did weights; we did aerobic work; and we did balance exercises. Reader, break off now for a moment and see how long you can stand on one leg. Try going up and down onto tiptoe on one leg. Then the other. Now close your eyes and try. We used wobble boards and steps as well – all geared to fitness for autonomous living.

And how grateful I am that, however boring and wearisome these exercises are, and however unwillingly, I have kept them up. Before I was allowed to put my foot to the ground with gentle weight-bearing I had to do everything on one leg (the side with my dodgy knee)  and I don’t know how I’d have managed had I not been in practice.

Here ends the lesson.

Other lessons, for me this time.  My lower leg is still in plaster and I am still on crutches, so I cannot carry things. This I do with the aid of a “Rollator”. How are the mighty fallen! One moment you’re triumphantly marching into Rome after 2000km on foot, and the next hobbling round with a walking aid like a geriatric. Patience (the word that people love to say to me at the moment); forbearance; and above all – gratitude.

Gratitude first of all to both daughters who have given up time, work, family to come and care for their mother, but it is a decade or so too early for one’s children to become one’s parents. They proved themselves to be tender and thoughtful carers, cooked delicious and nutritious meals, and walked the dog for hours through more blizzards and gales. Gratitude to friends who shop, visit, and transport, and also walk the dog through snow; and to kind Providence and the answer to prayers that have found me reliable and intelligent gardeners; a wonderful dog walker who can cope with the ebullience of the young dog; and a cleaner who doesn’t appear to mind the inevitable mud and dog hair.

And that is March. Will the view have extended beyond the confines of house and garden by April? Spring and hope spur me on.

 

The snow is pouring out of the sky – a white out – whirling wildly, and the strengthening wind sends it crashing and avalanching heavily off the branches. I love snow with a child’s excitement: the world is transformed into a place of tranquillity and beauty. People, too, are changed – all too temporarily – by it: they stop and speak, they help neighbours, they face challenges together.

I have a dress circle view of it, but I am not out in it, enjoying the purity of the white fields, watching the young dog cavort and frolic, seeing the myriad tracks of small animals. This month’s journal is written from a bed.

I have just been discharged from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, having had a double and displaced fracture of the base of the tib and fib pinned, plated and plastered. In front of me stretch a good three months of recovery and the frustration of dependency. When my father was in the last year or so of his life, and obliged to accept a certain loss of independence and dignity, I used to say (no doubt pompously) that dignity lies in acceptance. These things come back to bite us.

On long walking pilgrimages one learns the kindness of strangers, and to trust that provision will be made and needs met. Now it is the goodness of friends and family. I am accommodated by dear friends in luxury surroundings being waited on till a relay of dutiful daughters takes over. The dog is being looked after. I want for nothing.

You couldn’t fault the much-derided NHS (except in the culinary department, but then I wasn’t hungry). The care was first class, explanations were given, I was treated with intelligence and respect. I tried to add up what it would all cost in the private health care sector (those of us who pay vets’ bills get a glimpse of the astronomical sums for surgery and nursing and drugs).

But it was nevertheless an enormous relief to be liberated to a peaceful bed where the nights are silent and the room dark. Because of the lack of an orthopaedic bed I was put on a surgical ward (with its attendant risks of infection from open wounds – I have to wash with anti-microbial stuff for another week). A stout Polish woman beside me snored like a grampus all night, her phone regularly leaping into life with a loud tinny tune. On the other side an elderly Irishwoman with dementia (and obviously frightened) took exception to the Filipino care assistant, and the nights were filled with piercing shrieks of “Get him away from me. Don’t let him touch me. They’re doirty doirty people.” The patience and kindness with which this was met was astounding. But three nights passed with little rest.

And so here I am.

The Year of the Dog!

And how did all this occur? Ah, the irony – at the Chinese New Year and the dawning of the Year of the Dog! I was walking up a country track with a local dog-walking friend and her black Labrador. The two young dogs play fight all the time and came racing at top speed up the track behind us, heads down, tussling over a stick. My dog weighs 26kg…bang! I went down screaming. But then had to hobble home with a stick. Oddly, it didn’t hurt that much, and so I put off going to A&E thinking it might improve. Five days of lying on a lonely bed, shuffling downstairs on my bum and a friend bullied me into seeing a doctor. The doctor pronounced “Ligamentous, but get an x-ray to be sure.” Just as well I didn’t, by then, believe him. Another kind friend took me to Casualty. The worst bit was the manipulation of the fracture before the temporary cast. Entonox somehow didn’t quite cut it.

All this has meant I didn’t get back to Calais with a second load of cold weather goods (tents, sleeping bags, hand-warmers, clothes) for the Auberge des Migrants. The situation there is worse than ever with the French police under orders to eliminate “tout point de fixation”, which means that anywhere a migrant can linger, or find a spot to shelter in, must be destroyed – and this means the brutality I described last month. I cannot imagine their life in this freezing weather, burying their meagre possessions like animals to keep them away from the police. Fortunately a fellow parishioner took it on himself to go in my stead.

Before my accident all was going so well. Spring seemed just around the corner, the mornings and evenings noticeably lighter, the signs of hope multiplying.

My elderly cat, having spent a year in huffy isolation outside in a cat kennel because he refused to come inside to be plagued by a bouncing puppy, suddenly decided he’d had enough of winter, and now prowls the house and refuses to leave. He tolerates the dog who is delighted to see him and wants to play. He has even decided that he prefers dog food to his own food, and presents himself at dog feeding time to get in before it has all been wolfed down. The cat shows an intelligence not seen hitherto : the dog has a Pavlovian response to the 6pm chimes of Big Ben – “Supper time!” – and reminds me this is the hour. The cat now also recognises the moment and is ready to get there first.

The rescue chickens, unrecognisable from their former featherless selves, are thriving. I had started to give them some liberty to range, and they took to it like….ducks to water, scratching and pecking and finding worms.

This month’s journal is very “me me me” but I know the reader will understand. In a month’s time shall I still be resigned, still accepting? Certainly still dependent, but at least by then I should be able to be weight-bearing a bit. Watch this space!

 

 

A rainy January evening in Calais. I have temporarily abandoned my common or garden existence in order to come to Calais and work a week with Help Refugees at the Auberge des Migrants, bringing with me a carload of goods donated by my own and a neighbouring parish. What a spotlight that has been on people’s attitudes: many generously bought good quality new items from the “priority needs” list. Others unloaded dirty smelly old tat.

The day of my arrival the police (the CRS, the French riot police whose brutality I had witnessed several times when I lived in France) had done one of their “clearances ” – the systematic destruction or confiscation of refugees’ belongings, depriving them of any means of shelter against the winter weather. That day’s raid had been more violent than usual, and a teenage migrant had lost an eye when a CS gas canister hit him full in the face. It was one more skirmish in the war of attrition waged by the French authorities and police with the regular use of beatings, CS gas, and pepper spray aimed onto migrants’ clothes, sleeping bags, tents and even water supply, often in the early hours of the morning.

These gross abuses of human rights, in part funded by the British taxpayer, do not remove the migrants from Calais, but they do make their desperate lives a degrading misery.

In his speech in Calais two weeks ago President Macron said that migrants’ illegal camps and squats would no longer be tolerated and that migrants must go to the CAES (Centres d’Accueil), but these do not house or feed them, except in exceptionally cold weather when they open containers. Unfortunately the authorities close these without warning, with migrants’ few belongings lost inside. And despite Macron’s saying that the State would henceforth ensure people are fed, there is no sign of this. He also said police who acted violently and “without respect ” would be punished. Ha! Only nine days later the 15-year-old lost his eye. When he comes out of hospital there is nowhere for him to go; no-one to look after him.

Another result of police action is that Help Refugees and similar organisations have to work doubly hard to replace the goods destroyed. The day I wrote the above there had been a day-long distribution of 360 tents. In the afternoon we were called from our usual jobs of sorting and packaging clothes to help roll, tie, bag and pack 750 blankets. Two days later these had been removed or destroyed again.

Other regular jobs at the Auberge Des Migrants include cooking and distributing as many as 2500 meals a day, cutting and bagging firewood, and the School Bus Project which normally goes on the road twice a day to offer educational facilities . There is also an Info Van where people can charge their mobile phones and get wifi.

But the recent brutal suppressions have meant a great deal of tension, anger and volatility among the migrant communities, and volunteers’ safety can be jeopardised. My own work in the warehouse has no dangers, other than exhaustion, but I see migrants crouching in the scrubby bushes round makeshift fires outside our locked compound.

The displaced people of the world number many million; in Calais the prospect of getting to the UK draws hundreds, sometimes thousands, of them. It is one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our time.

It is all a long way from the tranquility of rural Suffolk.

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January has been a miserable month at home, but Calais puts that into perspective. There has been scarce sun, and we have lived in a perpetual sullen twilight punctuated by tremendous storms. The mornings are still dark when I set out with the dog, who detects through her nose all the scents and creatures of the night. All around in the darkness I spot the comforting lights of farmhouses, so many named for – presumably – the trees that grew beside them – Willow, Poplar, Yewtree, Elm, Holly Tree. Some are descriptive of their location – Common Farm, Mill Farm, Rookery, Hall, Church, School, White Post, Spong (which meant a narrow strip of land), or owners long dead – Larter’s, Watson’s, Slade’s, Gissing’s.

But one morning there was a more absolute dark. Winds of nearly 70mph had brought down power lines, and we were without electricity for more than 14 hours. This lack slows down life: candles must be hunted for, lit; fires laid to provide some warmth; water heated. No telephone, no computer, no television. I read by crepuscular candlelight in pre-Victorian gloom.

The Common, all but under water, was – for three days – home  to a huge flock of fieldfares. They stood thick on that ground which was unsubmerged, occasionally taking to the wing in a synchronised starling-like murmuration. One day, as the dog and I splashed through the wet, I saw three buzzards fly above the Common, scattering all smaller birds in panic.

Towards the end of the month the light changes, a subtle shift, and a feeling that spring is not the impossibility it seemed at New Year. In the morning a blackbird sings, then a thrush. Snowdrops suddenly are there, green and white among the dead leaves.

And this intimation that life is coming back stirs a longing in me, that desire to be walking the paths of freedom once more, off on adventure, the challenge of the unknown day:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
Walt Whitman.

I cannot go. I chose to have my joyous crazy dog instead, but oh, the longing is intense.

 

In the deep dark of the year the land sleeps; the garden sleeps; small animals sleep, and even my circadian rhythms respond to this time of hibernation. The Common, unusually dry for twelve months is, after heavy rain and melted snow, on the way to being a wetland once again. Walking the fields on public rights of way collects kilos of mud on my boots, weighing me down, slipping and sliding; but returning home over the Common provides an ever-deepening boot-wash and clean. As I write, on the final day of 2017, the nearby Waveney Valley has been turned into one long lake from Beccles to Diss.

In mid-month there were blizzards and the land became monochrome, blanched of all colour. We have had snow, ice, gales, torrential rain and then, suddenly for Christmas, as so many years, temperatures of late spring, mild, soft and gentle. When the family comes for Christmas I need my garage as fridge and larder, but once more Christmas Day was warmer than early June can be.

More than 16 hours of night in each 24. Drear weather and days when gloom never lifted and the day never grew fully light. I love the cheer of the annual festival of light and feasting, even if it seems a million miles from Bethlehem. A nearby village is the very Las Vegas of Christmas, with vying flashing Santas and their reindeer flying across roofs, illuminated blow-up Santas ho-hoing in the gardens, electric Happy Xmases, giant snowmen, and multi-coloured lights twinkling on and off. I offer just one example:

My own efforts are more low-key.

But sometimes there is deep frost, real midwinter weather when the fields are iron-hard and the ice on the puddles crackles under foot, and the world glitters as the sun rises. These are champagne mornings of exhilaration. The dog gallops off, nose to the ground, reading the invisible alphabet of scents and their message. Just occasionally I too catch the reek of fox. Was this the one that made an end of all my hens last May? On less frosty mornings there are tracks – deer, their small muntjac cousins (the enemy of all who grow vegetables), rabbits (ditto), hares, stoats, and … the fox.

The name I gave my young dog when I acquired her nearly a year ago now has got me into trouble. My father’s mother came from the Black Country in Staffordshire, and brought with her dialect words which my father learned. For example, in my early years I was told to go and “wash your donnies”, a word still used in parts of the country for “hands.” When searching for a suitable name for the puppy one of my daughters suggested “Nerker”, for that was the dialect for “mischievous child” – so apposite in this dog’s case. That is what my father called me, and then later my own children. It did not occur to me that it might mean anything else. But it does, and Facebook friends from further afield were not slow in pointing this out when I posted a picture of Nerker on her first birthday. In North America and elsewhere in urban slang it is a variant of the n***** word. Oh dear, and the dog is indeed black as the ace of spades.

What to do? I cannot now rename her, so I must comfort myself that few in this Suffolk backwater will understand as I call out her name.

If you’re not interested in the words I heard from my West Midlands granny skip this bit:
Mucker – mate. Donnies – hands. Fisog – face. Trazis – trousers. Ganzy – vest. Weskit – waistcoat. Kaline – sherbet. Wommel – dog. Fawpny hock – four penny hock. Fake break – fag break. Tuttie pegs – baby teeth. Kiddling – dribbling. Wooden hill – stairs. Bobhowlers – moths.

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Early in the month I was preoccupied with the production of the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome’s first e-newsletter. Last March I gave a talk to the AGM of this organization after my own walk from Canterbury to Rome in 2106, and was then rash enough to volunteer to become the editor of its publications, taking over from that great name known to so many walking pilgrims, Alison Raju.

I suggested the Confraternity should start to publish regular electronic updates, as well as produce a printed bulletin annually. Pride dictated that this first effort be a good one, so there was much labouring and sweating over unfamiliar technologies. It was done, despite and not because of British Telecom, who managed to deprive me of broadband for the fifth time since September.

It makes one despair of this country: rubbish broadband if you don’t live in a town; roads and airports unusable after a couple of centimetres of snow; and a bigoted, blinkered 52% who voted to leave the Union which has ensured peace and relative prosperity in Europe for nearly seven decades.

And that last does not fill me with unmitigated hope for 2018. On a personal level there is of course always hope. Dear reader, I wish you a very happy and blessed new year.