Things That Change and Things That Don't.

A good many of my attitudes and preferences have changed considerably as I’ve gone through life, but a small number of things have remained immutable.  

 

One of them is my fondness for bluebells, especially large gatherings of them. I remember being taken on a spring nature ramble from my primary school when I was a young boy, and being captivated by a carpet of bluebells in a local wood. It’s never left me, and I’ve been pleased to see that they’re running rampant in the wood at the top of my lane this year. They’re springing up on the roadside verges too, in places where I’ve never seen them before. And so, as much as we have good cause to worry about climate change, I’m wondering whether my friends the bluebells actually like it.

 

 

 

 Another comes back to my old obsession with twilight, that magical time when the diurnal pendulum swings through the change from the life of light to the mystery of darkness. I first felt it when I was fifteen and on a school field study trip to Swaledale in North Yorkshire. The first night there I sat on a low wall through a cool, damp, still twilight, looking over the river valley and having my first experience of something unseen and unheard, yet strongly felt. And so it was in my cool, damp, still garden this evening. The two sycamores, now heavy with leaf and standing as natural pillars to delineate the view, looked fixed in time while I stood in thrall to the experience.

But some things do change, like the view which slopes gently down to our own river valley on the west side of the Shire. What was once a vista of pale green provided by young barley shoots is now a sea of glorious gold, courtesy of the flowers topping some form of oilseed crop. On a practical note, we’re told that the crisis in Ukraine is causing a severe shortage of sunflower oil for cooking purposes, so maybe the change is meant to help address the problem. But the crop was sown last autumn, so is it mere coincidence or did somebody know that a crisis was in the offing? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?