This weekend I am back in the Shire, hanging out with the girl cousins (well, most of them) and slowly stewing myself in the hot tub out on the deck. We’re back at Forest Holidays in Berry Hill, near Coleford – my first proper boyfriend lived round the corner from here and our first date (27 years ago) was at Coleford cinema to see Buster, starring Phil Collins.
A night walk on Friday let us see scores of stars away from towns, a shooting star and the International Space Station zooming across the sky. No wild boars or deer, but lots of tawny owls shrieking.
Two walks on Saturday morning yielded a whole lot of interesting mushrooms and toadstools, as well as a fairy door trail. I kept wandering off the path to peer at treetrunks covered in tiny fungi, narrowly avoiding the acorns plunging down from the trees. They were crashing through the canopy and hitting hard enough to bounce. The afternoon was rainy and the breeze kicked up towards the evening, but the sun came out.
On Saturday afternoon we went to Plates and Shakers for tapas: check out the menus and see if you can decipher what’s in the cocktails, because we couldn’t. We’d booked a table for six, but they only had one for five (but squeezed a group of seven in later, so hmmm) so we squidged up on squashy sofas and drank cava and ate tapas.
Saturday evening was all about cocktails, cake and cheese, celebrating Hev’s birthday in style. Today we’re off to the Saracen’s Head in Symonds Yat for Sunday lunch and then reality must reinsert itself on Tuesday. We’re now planning our next adventure, which may or may not involve ABBA. It’s so lovely having a bunch of people I’ve known all my life to spend time with!
Things making me happy this week
Pumpkins 🎃 – trying to make these tiny pumpkins the right size to go in the small jars I bought has been a bit trial and error but I think I’ve cracked it now. The lovely nail techs at the Nail Bar in Harlow were very taken with them (I was in for a pedicure. Manicures don’t stand up to excessive crocheting)
Being able to go into the office and see people! No tube strikes this week.
Things 2 (with Thing 3 as sous chef) making dinner on Wednesday – Korean Fried Chicken, which was amazing. The worst part of adulting is having to think about dinner Every. Single. Night.
Buying my first Christmas present. Now I must ensure the safe place I put it in is one I can remember.
A long walk in the Forest last Sunday in glorious solitude, to High Beach and back via Copped Hall.
The Merlin Bird App – better than BirdNet. We heard a spotted flycatcher!
This morning if the weather behaves I will head for Symonds Yat Rock to admire the view!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Wild Hares and Hummingbirds – Stephen Moss
Clown Town – Mick Herron
Amongst Our Weapons/Stone and Sky – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)
There are many things I like about summer but mosquitoes are not one of them. No matter how much go-away spray you use before you go out for a walk the little beasts always manage to find the single square centimetre you missed – the bit where your bra strap moved, or (as has happened to me a lot recently) they fly up your trouser legs and savage the backs of your knees. I’m sporting five on my arms and one on my neck at the moment. I’m sure they play a vital role in the ecosystem or something but if they could do it without nibbling me I’d appreciate it.
They are the price you pay when you’re staying by a river and want to go out bat hunting at dusk, however. After London sister Tan spotted a Daubenton’s Bat on a walk along the Blavet earlier this year we were quite keen to find some more. Although the weather has changed from summer heat to muggy drizzle, we’ve made it out a couple of evenings this week for a wander along the tow path.
It’s been magical – there will be a glimpse of one bat skimming along the river near the bank or zooming over your head, and then suddenly they’ll be everywhere – chasing each other in circles, divebombing the river or flitting in and out of the trees. We’ve found that the bridges are popular bat haunts, and we’ve stood for ages on the towpath by the road bridge watching them zip around on eye level with us catching insects. They’re so batty they look like toy bats – the sort of bat shapes that Laszlo turns into in What We Do In The Shadows or Count Dracula in Hotel Transylvania. The battiest bats, in fact.
Bonus points have been scored for the kingfishers catching a last few snacks before heading off into their holes for the night, an indignant heron who took off from the path in front of us, a muntjac deer watching us from the other side of the river before disappearing into the crop growing behind it. There’s a coypu couple who swim among the waterlilies near the bridge, chuntering away to themselves as they potter around doing whatever it is coypu do. The owls start muttering to each other shortly after the bats come out.
No sign of the hen harrier or the short-toed snake eagle so far, but there’s a week to go. The two cockerels who live on the same lane have been much in evidence, shouting at random times throughout the day, and the cherry tree outside Dad’s office window has been alive with long-tailed tits while I’ve been shortlisting job applications over three days this week. It’s great that so many people want to work with us but by Thursday afternoon my eyes were crossed and I was thoroughly fed up with AI generated introductory paragraphs. Still, I’m looking forward to meeting the interviewees.
Not having to think about what to feed people for dinner
French bread and patisserie, especially my favourite religieuses
Time to do some fiddly crochet in the sunshine – these peas in pods are crocheted with perle thread and a 1mm hook. I’ve made some bigger ones as well, with friendly looking peas that pop out of their pods.
French supermarkets and their fruit and veg sections
Various family members are arriving today and it’ll be lovely to see them, and hopefully over the next week we’ll see more exciting wildlife (that we aren’t related to). I’m assuming my Things and my Beloved a) have noticed I’ve gone and b) are missing me at least a bit. Two of them have texted me with demands for money, so business as usual there.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading
The Book of Doors/The Society of Unknowable Objects – Gareth Brown
Lies Sleeping/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)
Miss Percy’s Definitive Guide to the Restoration of Dragons – Quenby Olson
Thursday was GCSE results today for Thing 2 – we were at school for 8am and then went straight to her chosen college to enrol. Jill brought me coffee in the queue, as she works there, and when the doors opened we got her signed up on the Culinary Arts course and kitted out with chef’s whites, her very own apron and oven cloth, and a pair of extremely no-nonsense steel-toe-capped kitchen shoes. I can’t decide whether she looks grown up or dressed up, but I’m extremely relieved that she got the grades she needed and onto the course she wanted. Apparently there is a shortage of patisserie chefs, so I have heroically volunteered as a taste tester should she go down that route.
Thursday afternoon had more drama – I’ve been feeding Ziggy and the Piggies for the last ten days or so* (next door’s mighty hunter cat and guinea pigs, not a Bowie tribute band) and while chatting to the other neighbour she mentioned that she thought Ziggy had caught a magpie but not killed it, as it was sitting on their lawn. Off I went with Doctor Doolittle (aka my Beloved) in tow to see if the ‘pie could be saved. Its wings were working as it kept flapping away from us, but its legs were dragging. We couldn’t see any cat damage, and Ziggy wasn’t around, so after some manoeuvring Dr D managed to get it into a cardboard box and we covered it with a wire frame to prevent cat attack. In between adding bits to my learning strategy I tried contacting the local wildlife rescues in the hope they’d come and help but they said that if the legs were damaged it couldn’t be rehabbed. I phoned the vet and took Mr Magpie (no idea where his wife and/or children were, though obviously I asked as it’s only polite) round to them. I suspect they would have had to put him to sleep, as the new receptionist didn’t look very hopeful, but at least he was safe from cats.
He wasn’t a fledgeling as all his beautiful feathers were in. We have experience with fledgelings, as we once rescued a baby woodpigeon who’d fallen out of the nest and kept him in a box on the trampoline for a couple of weeks while his anxious parents flew down and fed him. I don’t know whether he was a single chick who was just too fat for them to get back off the ground or if he just went too early. Eventually the rest of his feathers grew in and he fledged properly over a couple of days and headed off. We also used to have a collared dove pair who nested in the Christmas tree where the treehouse was and we always enjoyed watching their nestlings hop around on the railings. We’re lucky enough to have a lot of mature trees around the garden, and usually have robins, blue tits (who treat the trampoline net as a climbing frame), blackbird, woodpigeon and magpie families raising chicks every year. There’s a fierce wren who chased Ziggy off, much to his surprise and embarrasment, and a poser of a bullfinch who sits on a tree stump and shows off. The odd sparrowhawk has been known to rest on the edge of the sunroom roof, and the roof pigeons like to sit on the glass roof and wind up the cats.
Thing 2 and Colin – a serious business
There’s a gang of teen corvids – a couple of jackdaws, a rook and a magpie – who terrorise the neighbourhood feeders and hang out on roofs cawing, and sometimes we get visits from the village peacocks on a wander. I think they have extended their territory into the woods behind the house as they were regularly waking me up at 4am earlier in the summer despite sleeping in Loop earplugs. Colin the pheasant – named by our builders, who reckoned he strutted about like one of their lads – used to be a regular visitor and was tame enough to hand feed monkey nuts to. We haven’t had a pheasant for a while but we have had badger cubs in the garden again this year, and a fox investigating the Blink camera. I like to sit out and work in the garden and listen to the different songs – the BirdNet app is great for identifying all the different species.
*Ziggy self-catered this morning, however, choosing to picnic on something in our garden. This is fine, as last time I was in charge of him he was leaving me decapitated meeces in the mornings.
Making me happy this week…
This week was vastly improved by the existence of Wednesday which was bracketed by early morning coffee with Amanda and after work (nonalcoholic)* cocktails with Rhiannon. Epping continues to disappoint, as did the High Court interim injunction this week which is bound to be seen as a precedent for all sorts of other councils to take umbrage at the Home Office’s flagrant disregard for change of use applications and so on. Of course this meant there was shouting and celebrating outside the Bell, where the residents are already too scared to leave the building. The ‘decorators’ have been active in our village again, which I hope doesn’t mean they’re going to start terrorising the families in the Phoenix. I am a cynic, so I suspect the lack of public transport and criminal opportunities other than the farm shop and soft play next door might put the hoi polloi off visiting, unless they fancy some expensive sausages and some cake.
Anyway, Rhiannon and I tried a new food hall type place near St Paul’s Station, where I had a ‘Light & Stormy‘ which was remarkably convincing. It had a herbal elixir (an excellent word) instead of dark rum apparently it contains trendy mushrooms. Whatever- I liked it and if it wasn’t just as expensive as rum I might get fonder of it. We didn’t eat although there was a good range of food options. We had agreed ahead of time that we’d spend exactly ten minutes having a rant, although we did add two minutes for AOB (well, expressing our disbelief at members of the local council). We had a timer and everything, and then we had a lovely couple of hours chatting about everything else.
*apart from the tequila slammer that the nice man gave us in exchange for leaving a review.
A solo trip to Harlow where I had a holiday mani/pedi so I have pretty nails – the colour is Thai Chilli Red which isn’t too red or too orange. It wasn’t my first choice but they’d run out of that – red with a burst of gold – and I like it a lot.
Not Amazon, who have annoyed me this week by failing to deliver a parcel three days this week as they were unable to find my front door. Suggesting they got out of the van and walked up the drive was not helpful.
This week I will be working from France, and appreciating not having to think about feeding people or public transport. I shall mostly be shortlisting…
Same time next week, people!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Furthest Station/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)
The Postman’s Path – Alan Cleaver. meh. Took back to library without finishing as it was disappointing. If ever a book needed Illustration it was this one. He kept going on about sketching and doing walks but there were no sketches shon or even a map. Great premise, poorly executed despite good reviews.
Over the last few weeks I have been immersing myself in the Herefordshire countryside courtesy of the writings of John Lewis-Stempel who farms in the border hills (Merrily country, for fans of the late Phil Rickman) and who writes beautiful prose about the most prosaic of things. Who would have thought – speaking as someone bored rigid by the few Young Farmers Club meetings I attended – that the life of a wood or a year in a field would be so interesting? I admit my original interest was piqued by the fact that he’d written a book with a picture of a hare on the front, but that’s me…
His books are pragmatic but interspersed with poetry by people like Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, both of whom spent a lot of time in the area before the First World War. He delves into local language and folklore and in Woodston he traces the history of the land from the earliest hunter-gatherers onwards.. He’s realistic about what it takes to conserve a wood or a field; he shoots grey squirrels (non-native) to allow native birds to thrive as the squirrels steal whole clutches of eggs. There are no ‘oh no, my sheep broke its legs in a ditch, the vet must work miracles!’ moments – the sheep gets shot too.
There’s no woolly ‘rewilding’ although there is an experimental love of traditional methods which bring back wildlife to the area – not by adding beavers but by farming without pesticides for a year, for example, or by managing woods through coppicing, and allowing sheep, pigs and cows to forage and in doing so fertilise and turn over the land, bringing back insects and the larger animals that feed on them. It reminded me very much of the old lady that swallowed the fly, in fact. There is no anthropomorphization of trees and animals – Tolkien’s Ents don’t come into his equation. Trees are trees are trees. Animals do what animals do, and this is right. I get the feeling that Lewis-Stempel genuinely loves the land and cares for it in much the same way as his ancestors – who also farmed in the area – have done for the past seven centuries. He describes himself as a countryside writer rather than a nature writer as he’s writing about the land and the life it supports.
Eyes down, a shadow giantess
traverses faultlines
mapped into Essex clay.
Hooves have printed fossils in the tilth.
She looms over bean trees,
scattering spiders as she goes
while plough-shattered flints
heliograph the sun.
I’ve been doing a lot of field trails in the last couple of months as I’ve been training for various walks – at least once they dried out a bit – and I’ve found myself more interested in the hedges and edges as a result of this reading. A local site on the north of Epping Forest has been bought by Nattergal to be restored as wildlands, and at some point I’ll get round to visiting and hopefully learning a bit more. I may even try to walk there. I have one of those custom OS maps which is proving very useful indeed – where we live is inconveniently placed on the official maps so putting North Weald at the centre allows me to plot walks in advance so I know roughly where I want to go. Last week I traced a footpath I’d spotted when we were on our way to collect Thing 3.
I’ve also been listening to Tom Cox on Audible. I first encountered Cox via his Twitter account which featured his sad cat, The Bear, and then I found one of his extremely funny books in our local Oxfam. I’ve since read all his cat (and golf and music) books. He began to write about walking and the countryside about ten years ago – still with added cats and his VERY LOUD DAD – but in a psychogeography mode as he wasn’t attempting to farm the land; only to live in it. His 21st Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook are non-fiction, and Help the Witch is sometimes a weird blur of short story and semi-autobiography. He’s graduated into strangely psychedelic novels which I also enjoy, but I do prefer his walking books.
I think my love of reading about nature probably stemmed from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, which were botanically extremely realistic – well, probably not the fairies, but definitely the flowers. These allowed me to identify flowers confidently, if not accurately as my mother insists on saying 40+ years later. This, by the way, is a very useful skill for both teachers and parents, and has even been known to work on my Beloved who is now very suspicious of all my pronouncements.
To be fair – and almost certainly as a result of spending way too much time on trains, the top of buses and roaming the streets of the city – I’m also equally likely to be reading books about the history or psychogeography of London (Iain Sinclair is a favourite). Right now my work reading at lunchtime is Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops, which is as much about the history of Dulwich and wider London as it is about herself. People are interesting, and so are places. The stories of people in places are even better.
Delivering the last of the sea creatures to the British Library – now making mini jellies and looking forward to making some new stock for summer stalls
A gorgeous swim with the ladies last Sunday
A ten-mile trek exploring a new footpath on Monday
Our first Access Panel on Friday morning
Dinner out with quite a lot of the family on Friday
The library reserves and loans system
This morning I may get out for a walk but GT2 is staying over while his Mama TT2 and Thing 1 are off at a festival. I have not missed being woken up by a small foot in my face, I can tell you. He is a very mobile sleeper, this one, but at least we have a new airbed and I’m not trying to share the sofa with him this time. I may be forced to wake up Thing 2 and hand the little octopus over for the morning…
See you next week!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Wood/Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel
Vianne – Joanne Harris
21st Century Yokel/Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)
Well, here we are back from France, having eaten our own bodyweights in baguettes, boule and in Thing 2’s case, brie.
On Sunday we headed off to Port-Louis where my ever- tolerant family put up with me pottering off into the sea for a dip in my bobble hat. The water was so clean and clear, the sun was out and the kids had a wonderful time exploring rock pools, collecting seashells and poking crabs to make sure they weren’t dead. Port-Louis is always good for tiny jewels of green seaglass so I came back with a pocketful for my collection. Thing 2 wants to try making some jewellery with it.
We hit the beach again later in the week for Dad’s birthday at Larmor-Plage, which is a bit further round the coast and has shiny mica-rich sand. The shoreline was populated with tiny sanderlings sounding like squeaky toys as they skittered in and out of the waves. Cormorants, geese and ducks bobbed up and down a bit further out. We pottered along the headland and onto the next beach, with more rock pools and bigger chunks of glass. The Things are becoming more discerning – not frosty enough, still too sharp – as they scan the sand. Lunch was at Le Tour Du Monde, where I had moules mariniere, and Thing 3 excavated an entire lettuce worth of greenery just to remove the tomatoes from his club sandwich.
Further inland, we took some walks along the Blavet, a canalised river which comes out at Lorient. The towpath has been underwater for a lot of the winter so far, and the water is still high. The usual cormorants were haunting dead trees like baby dragons, a heron and a white egret lurked in the shallows and we were lucky enough to see a few kingfishers flashing along. Tan saw a Daubenton’s bat but it failed to make a second appearance no matter how hard we looked.
The most striking thing is the huge increase in coypu activity. The banks are riddled with their holes and on one evening wander we saw a whole family playing and swimming, including a baby pottering about near its mum. The rain last night was torrential so their dens are probably submerged again.
Considering it’s February we’ve been incredibly lucky with the weather. It only really turned bad on Thursday when we went to Hennebont for the market. We changed our minds and took the kids to Decathlon instead to spend their holiday money, and then took a lengthy detour around Lorient and Lanester on the search for the Chinese buffet for lunch.
Every trip out seems to have ended with a visit to whatever supermarket is on the way back: Super U and the Leclerc Hypermarket were the favourites. I seem to have gained a whole shopping bag of French food (and I remembered treats for the office!) including my favourite Surfizz sweets, cherry compôte and caramel sauce. The kids are amazed by the range of food on offer. I’ve got butter and proper Port Salut too.
In the evenings I’ve been working on my crochet jumper: the back, front and half the first sleeve are done. I chose the pattern as it reminded me of a jumper I loved when I was at uni – the link to the pattern is in the Insta post below.
Dinner times have been a chaos of conversation, as usual when we get together. I think Thing 3 will be quite relieved to get back to normal!
And now it’s back to normal service – kids are back to school on Monday, I’ll be back in the office and I’ll have to think about what to feed people again. I’ve missed Thing 1 and my Beloved, of course, and I think I’ve missed being woken at 5am by starving felines!
Same time next week…
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Lost Man of Bombay/The Dying Day/City of Destruction/The Last Victim of the Monsoon Express – Vaseem Khan
In my usual sublime-to-ridiculous way, this week we are hopping from radical inclusion to…. frogs. Yes, frogs. I like frogs.
Also newts, dragonflies, toads and bats (the flying sort, not me).
This handsome chap lives in our garden, and takes no sh*t from anyone.
This aquatic turn of mind was sparked by a last-thing-on-Friday email from our lovely project manager Liz, who is currently thinking about the logistics of getting power onto our new site and – as a pond is featured in the plans – there was a question about how much water would be in it so we’d know how powerful the pump would need to be.
Now, I do not know a great deal about ponds (other than about acclimatising myself to them in the wild) and I know even less about how to calculate the volume of a pond from a flat plan. ‘It looks quite big’, I hazarded. I suspect this was not very helpful.
I don’t know much about frogs either, so I enlisted the assistance of my Beloved who knows about things that happen outside in the garden. He dug a wildlife pond in ours a couple of years ago, which does not as yet have a frog but I live in hope and whenever he finds Tiny* when he’s gardening he puts him in the pond.
Tiny
*Tiny is my newt…sorry
In my head the pond on the new site is not a sterile, shallow water feature which will inevitably be filled with paddling small people without so much as a pondskater to be seen, but a proper wildlife pond where we can have pond-dipping, spot dragonflies and bees and butterflies, and attract all sorts of exciting wildlife including bats who definitely live in Islington and who could be encouraged to come and live on our site if we had a source of quality bugs for them. The pond in my head is raised so people can sit around the edges and people who use wheelchairs can do the pond-dipping activities too. One end of it is a bog garden and the other end is deeper, making a home for things that like deeper water for the laying of frogspawn. (It will have a chickenwire frame over it, so we can lift it for activities and maintenance but cats and would-be paddlers can’t fall in).
Small toad in the strawberry bed
There will be plants like irises and things that oxygenate the water, grasses around it and insect-attracting plants to make this little corner a wildlife haven. My Beloved and I spent the next hour delving into wildlife ponds (starting here) and discovered that you only need a pump if there’s fish – who are apex predators in the pond, and eat all the other things – or if you’re having a fountain. Wildlife ponds don’t need them, but they do like oxygenating plants which also provide cover for tiny wildlife. If we did have a pump it would need a filter to prevent the tadpoles and froglets being sucked up and mangled.
Islington has the lowest amount of green space per person of all the London boroughs, and increasingly where green space is being planted it isn’t publicly accessible. When teachers were consulted waaayyy back in 2023 they wanted to be able to come to the site to explore biodiversity and bringing water back onto the site will be key to attracting wildlife. The site’s history is inextricably linked with the history of water in London, too, so a pond makes sense. Hopefully the pond-in-my-head will become reality, complete with frogs…
Things making me happy this week
Coffee with Brian and Anhar from London Museum on Tuesday morning.
A catch-up with Cath on Wednesday evening in the local pub, where my existence was met with ‘what are YOU doing in here?’ from my daughter
An exciting meeting with Apple at their Battersea offices, which they described as ‘joyful’ and said my creative activity was ‘supercool’ and that they were going to try it with their kids. I’m not sure they’d seen paper and pencils for a while…
…and the trip back to the office was on the Uberboat to Bankside, with a walk back via St Paul’s and St Bartholomew the Great
I made a start on a new spiderweb scarf using the gorgeous yarn I bought last week at the Wool Show, made a pair of dragonscale mittens for my colleague’s birthday as she feels the cold, and started a hexi cardi with yarn from the stash.
Sunday at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show with Heather, where we squished a lot of yarn and I was quite well-behaved. When I got back I got all my skeins out of the stash and turned them into balls so I have no excuse not to use them – thank heavens for the winder and swift gadgets!
Open Day at Waltham Forest College with Thing 2, where she hopes to go in September
Impressing Thing 2 with my excellent French accent when she made me try on a beret. Well, who doesn’t do ‘Allo ‘Allo impressions under those circumstances? I am, apparently, ridiculous.
What is is about magpies? Three of my friends – all from various bits of Yorkshire, which may or may not be a coincidence – behave very oddly when they see one. One of them asks where its wife is, one asks after the health of its wife and children, and the third forks his fingers and spits between them as if warding off the evil eye. In all other ways this third one is possibly one of the most gentlemanly people I know, but when a magpie is foolish enough to come into his field of vision he gets all medieval.
It’s only solo magpies, apparently: more than one is absolutely fine. Jill even knows the numbers after seven in the one-for-sorrow, two-for-joy rhyme – it gets a bit post-watershed from eight onwards, it turns out. There’s more information here about it all, anyway, and it turns out some places even consider them to be lucky. In Sussex if a magpie sits on your roof it means your house won’t fall down, which I would find quite reassuring.
“There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.
Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
You may wonder why magpies are on my mind this week. Previously I have waxed lyrical on how entertaining I find the baby magpies in the garden, as they’re scrappy and scruffy and play like children. I have felt sorry for the mama magpie, who comes and sits on next door’s roof for a bit of peace. There’s a nest at the end of the garden, so they’re a constant presence.
However, I do not love them quite as much as I did, as this year’s brood have taken to sitting on the guttering above our bedroom window at dawn every morning and starting their day with a noisy discussion about whatever it is magpies feel the need to debate at that hour of the day. I would go so far as to say that these six would be very unlucky indeed*, if I was able to fly.
(*not really, as long as they shut up.)
Things making me happy this week:
Still crocheting octopuses, although I did branch out into a hyperbolic coral thing
Baby horses spotted on my walk yesterday
A field full of hares on an early morning wander
Still my new job
Strawberries from the garden
The garden full of kids, grandkids, dogs, Timeshare Teenagers, and various extras, and my Beloved is in charge of the barbecue.
And on that note, I’ve done my walking for the weekend and there’s a bottle of Rattler with my name on it in the fridge.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Two for the Lions/One Virgin Too Many/Ode to a Banker – Lindsey Davies
Ok, I might be exaggerating a bit here, but one of the wonders of living out here in sunny Essex is the variety of wildlife we get in the garden. The majority of it is welcome but some – like the odd rat – is less so. Living near farmland and with a watercourse near the house it’s inevitable, of course, but I still don’t want them snacking on the bird seed.
My favourites at this time of year are the blue tits who colonise the nest box and produce a brood of noisy chicks demanding feeding. The first sight of the babies as they peek out of the hole and glare at us is always an ‘aaahhh!’ moment, and one of the very bedraggled and exhausted parents paid us a visit one evening this week too. Rather foolishly, it had stopped for a rest on the fence outside the back door which surrounds the cats’ outdoor space – Lulu thought it was her birthday but Thing 2 came to the rescue. The bird was remarkably tame (or possibly just knackered) as we were able to get very close. It flew from Thing 2’s hand to my head before we were able to put it safely out of reach of the cat.
Bedraggled blue tit
The local shrew population has less luck when it comes to Lulu. The occasional one ventures in to the cat space (probably after the strawberries) and doesn’t live to tell the tale, instead becoming a love gift for my (and her) beloved. She’s always most annoyed when we take them away from her. She did bring a mouse in just before Christmas which we didn’t realise until it peeked out from behind my sewing machines, leading to a frenzied twenty minutes with a wooden spoon, an empty cheese sauce pot and finally a rehoming in the compost bin.
Today I have been joined in the garden by a baby sparrow, and every year we have robins, blackbirds, dunnocks, goldcrests, woodpigeons and collared doves. There’s a raucous family of magpies too, whose antics make me laugh. They are scrappy and behave like human siblings, arguing amongst themselves and rough and tumbling in the garden. The poor mother (I assume!) takes refuge on our neighbour’s roof, and as soon as the juveniles spot her they all go and join her. On one occasion there was a panicked squawking as one landed on the telephone wire and ended up upside down without enough sense to let go….
Other garden birds are woodpeckers, the odd sparrow hawk, starlings (nesting in next door’s roof), red kites soaring overhead, moorhens in wet springs and for the first time this year parakeets have flashed past. For several years we had a very tame pheasant who our builders named Colin after one of their colleagues who also strutted about. This year Richmond the Rook is a regular, stalking about in his fluffy rook trousers and hanging about with a couple of jackdaws.
The less feathered friends turn up too: we’re privileged to have badgers visiting from the Common as well as foxes, rabbits and the occasional muntjac. We can usually track their progress by the nibbled plants, much to my Beloved’s disgust. A slow worm can often be found in the greenhouse enjoying the warmth, while toads lurk under stones and tarpaulins and newts haunt the flowerpots. Most years we have a bumble bee nest somewhere, as well as squirrels and tiny mice.
One of my friends described coming through the back gate once as like walking into Narnia – sometimes I think she’s not far wrong!
Other things this week have included cheering on the RideLondon cyclists as they zoomed through the village, binging Stranger Things seasons 1-3 in preparation for season 4, seeing this year’s museum fox cubs playing in the sunshine, Thing 3 going off on his first solo sleepover at London Aunty’s house (it’s fancy, apparently), much crocheting of a shawl which is taking forever, a glorious swim, a mooch about the market, an early walk, and making some tiny things.
This week it’s half term and there’s only three days in work thanks to some Queen or other having a jubilee. The village has broken out in bunting already. I have promised my beloved that I’ll sort out my shed next weekend….
See you next week!
Kirsty x
The Betrayal of Trust/The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill
Yesterday my best friend and I marked off the third on the list of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries of London with a trip to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. I’m rather ashamed that, despite living or working in the borough for 22 of the 25 years I’ve been in London, this is the first time I’ve visited what turned out to be a really pretty and peaceful spot smack in the middle of Mile End. We discovered a mutual love of graveyards back in Preston when we were at university together, so this is a thirty year old tradition. For once we weren’t exploring in pouring rain, which is usually the case on our expeditions!
Here it’s more about the nature than about the big names buried in the site, and there are no enormous monuments or mausoleums like those on our previous adventures at Highgate and Kensal Green. We were also not chased by strange men jumping out of a skip, or confronted by a pickled baby. We did have a very good mocha from a tiny coffee TukTuk called the Blue Daisy though. Many of the headstones are tiny, well below knee height, and all the stones are higgledy-piggledy and crammed together as a lot of the park was cleared by the GLC in 1967 after it was closed in 1966.
There are local ‘names’ buried there – the wild animal importer Charles Jamrach, for example, whose story I told for years in my London immigration sessions at Museum of London Docklands. Clara Grant, the social reformer and ‘Bundle Lady of Bow’ is there, also remembered in the name of a local primary school. She believed that children could not learn effectively if they were cold, hungry and unhappy – it’s a sad fact that more than a century after she started the ‘farthing bundle’ scheme there are still huge numbers of children in poverty in Tower Hamlets. There’s the grave of Alfred Linnel, who was trampled by a police horse in Trafalgar Square when he attended a protest against the Bloody Sunday violence the week before. You can also see the Blitz Memorial, built of the bricks of damaged houses from Poplar and commemorating those who died in the Blitz. There are public graves, such as that of 27 of the people who died in the Princess Alice disaster in 1878.
The site was declared a local nature reserve in 2000, and even in this urban area with the District Line rattling past we heard the drumming of a woodpecker and the shrieks of the now-ubiquitous parakeets. The ground was covered in snowdrops, winter aconite and crocuses and there were plenty of magpies, squirrels and this rather Goth pigeon lurking about. He was patient enough to let us take a photo before flying off.
Spot the pigeon.
After a good wander around the paths and desire lines we decided we’d walk through to Spitalfields for lunch – a good two mile wander along some of the side streets and then along the Mile End and Whitechapel Roads where you can still see some gorgeous houses among the Pizza-Go-Gos and fried chicken joints. Whitechapel and Spitalfields markets were buzzing, unlike Oxford Street where I’d been working on Friday. You forget what a stranglehold the Arcadia Group had on the British high street until you see the empty shop fronts of House of Fraser, Debenhams, Top Shop and so on. (Soho, where I had a meeting in the afternoon, was reassuringly busy and grubby still, complete with businessmen taking three or four attempts to go through the ‘private dancing downstairs’ door and ‘rooms by the hour’).
I really fancied noodles so we went to Xi’an Biang Biang Noodles on Commercial Street, where we both had the hand-pulled BiangBiang noodles with beef in special sauce. Gloriously splashy and messy and well-earned after our long walk. All in all a good day out, and our next one will be Brompton Cemetery in April.
This week it’s half term and I have an exciting co-creation project lined up with Spotlight and the mixed-media and materials designer Scott Ramsay Kyle, which will be full on but fun. See you on Sunday!
This week my walking buddy Jill (cover photo artist!) and I have made the most of being off for Christmas and headed out ‘early doors’ (she’s from Yorkshire) for a couple of welly walks. We love our walks: we put the world to rights, appreciate the scenery, stomp on icy puddles and squish our way through the muddy ones. Some weeks she is grouchy, other weeks it’s me. We test out ideas for work or catastrophise in the knowledge that we can go into the office the next day with our heads back on straight. It’s like therapy. There’s something about walking next to someone, not facing them, that allows stress and those wake-you-up-at-3am thoughts to spill out.
Some days we go further than others: round the roads to Tawney Common, or across to Toot Hill, or round past Dial House and the farm to see the cows, or the old golf course and flood meadows. Sometimes it’s the short 5k through the woods and back, or to the end of the village. Whatever, I always come back feeling better and ready to face the week.
It was a week of extremes: one day it was -4°c and the world was white. The sun was coming up in spectacular fashion, the puddles were frozen and we crackled our way down to the farm and home via the station. The plan was to check what time the light fantastic train was running that day so we could drag the kids up to Marconi Bridge to watch it go through, but they were only doing the Santa Special till after Christmas. We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the smell of frying bacon from the station cafe and indulged in a bacon roll and tea, listening to the brass quartet playing Christmas carols and watching overexcited kids waiting for Santa’s train to arrive.
SunriseA horse posing nicelyMorning, baby cowsCrackling puddlesFrosty grassSignpostHardy blackberry blossomWell earned breakfastSignal boxSanta’s on his way
The following day was much warmer so the puddles were squelchy once more (as you can see from the cover photo). That day’s route took us through the fields to the radio station (hence Marconi Bridge) and past North Weald Redoubt, finishing up at Jill’s house for tea and a rummage through boxes of craft stuff from a friend’s house clearing. I was very good and only came home with a few balls of yarn and some toy eyes. My plan this week was to try and destash some craft things from the shed, not bring home more – I did send some yarn up to Jill’s mum, and got rid of a whole lot of jewellery making stuff, which was a start.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed at least a few days off and will be grabbing the opportunity for a Boxing Day welly walk – we have A, H and the grandchild over today, but I’m looking forward to a few more walks this week.
All can now be revealed…
The last batch of the pigs in blankets….Yes, I made them open it before ChristmasOne of two tiny owls with Hogwarts letters
As it’s after Christmas I can share the gifts I made – the wall hanging was for our Dungeonmaster and his wife and I made them open it while I was there playing board games on Monday. The ‘Eira Owls’ were for their daughters. The little pigs in granny square blankets have been ridiculously popular and I ended up making more than 20 of them as Christmas ‘cards’* for colleagues and my swimming buddies, and then as requests for people who’d seen them on Facebook. They’ve gone off to Wales, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and London. I still have several to do after Christmas but I have to get two presents out in January and a couple for February first!**
(* I don’t send cards to anyone but immediate family, but donate to a charity every year instead – this year it was the Trussell Trust. I make little decorations that can be brought out year after year – I love seeing people’s photos of their trees with my work on!)
(** Yes, I am taking orders. They are £6 each plus postage!)
I hope you’ve all had a great Christmas with family and friends, that you’re all safe and warm and looking forward to 2022. By the time next week’s post appears we’ll be in a whole new year!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Untold Story – Genevieve Cogman
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (Audible)
A Spool of Blue Thread – Anne Tyler
The Toast of Time – Jodi Taylor
The Long and the Short of it – Jodi Taylor (Audible)
What Kirsty did next 