On the Routine and the Awe-Inspiring.

Tonight’s twilight was one of those in which you imagine the universe must be in a very bad mood and having a tantrum. All sorts of clouds there were, pure white cumulus mixed with near-black slabs waiting to spit rain, and every shape and shade of grey in between. And the rain did come, and then it stopped, and then it came again. The wind rose and fell and rose and fell. It was difficult to tell whether the sudden onset of roaring was a burst of angry wind or a plane flying low on its way to the airport thirty miles away.

I went for my walk as usual, of course, bearing the bag of goodies and searching for a horse to be the beneficiary. And as is usually the case, I ended up passing through the wood at the top of the lane in the hope that Millie would be close enough to receive the favour. Before I could find out, however, I was greeted by a sight verging on the apocalyptic.

The track through the wood faces west, and suddenly the intense orb of the sun appeared briefly on the horizon. The whole of the vaporous sky I could see below the level of the woodland canopy burned a brilliant hot orange, while the trunks of the trees turned black in silhouette against it. I might have been approaching Atlanta during the burning, or the conflagration at Manderley on the night trip from London. I rarely use the word ‘awesome’, but this was pretty close.

Millie was too far away as she always is, and so I made my way back out of the wood only to see another startling sight. The eastern sky displayed not one but two brilliantly coloured rainbows, a very big one and a smaller one inside it.

I don’t remember ever having seen a double rainbow before, although I might be wrong about that. But with all the firsts that this year has produced, along with all the unusual weather patterns, I can’t help feeling that something of substantial significance is starting, and that maybe we should be prepared for a white knuckle ride up ahead.

On Wellies, Wilderness, and a View of the World.

Today was utterly boring apart from the fact that I wore my new wellies for the first time. It came at a price, of course, because new wellies – along with all new shoes – react with the ground differently and force you to move your legs in a slightly different way. And then your legs ache and you’ve still got two more miles to walk until you can take them off again. Perseverance becomes the watchword and life is about nothing if not trials.

And then I cleared the lane grids of leaves and other debris again. I kept encountering patches of crunchiness on the road surface where it was littered with acorns and beech mast and the winged seeds of ash and sycamore. It brought up that old dream of mine in which I’m twenty years old and in possession of a vast tract of farmland in the manicured lowlands of England. I would stop all human activity on it and let nature have free rein to do what it will. And then I would leave it alone for fifty years before returning to marvel at the wilderness.

*  *  *

But I’m not here to talk about wellies and wildernesses. I’m here to talk about foreigners. I like them, you know; I really do. I think it’s because I was brought up in the English working class at a time when nobody I knew ever went abroad. I was considered posh among my classmates because my stepfather had an office job and so we went on holiday to Devon and Cornwall instead of Blackpool. The closest most of us got to a foreign trip was a sojourn to Rhyl in Wales on the office summer outing. Even Scotland was considered exotic, and Ireland was a truly mysterious place somewhere beyond the mist you could see hanging around Morecombe Bay. The Spanish Costas hadn’t yet been invented and we didn’t even know that Italians ate spaghetti which didn’t come out of a can.

And so all things foreign – including the people – held, for me, the promise of mystery and adventure. They still do, believe it or not, because some early impressions never completely leave you.

So now I want to broaden my horizons by meeting a foreigner, preferably a Swede, and even more preferably a pretty young lady Swede who exudes the fabled Swedish glumness from every pore and can talk for at least half an hour about the hidden symbolism of hard boiled eggs. If anyone feels inclined to apply for the position, I have to say that I’m in no position to offer pecuniary compensation. But I will freely undertake to engage my undivided attention until my perception of the hard boiled egg is educated to a level hitherto unknown.

A Spooky Spot in the Shire.

This morning and afternoon we had the longest spell of sustained rain since the spring. (I was out in it for about two hours.) And then the grey clouds lifted, the sun came out, and the temperature began to drop. Tonight’s twilight walk turned out to be a pretty cold one, but here’s what made it interesting:

Every evening when I go out for a stroll, I take an apple and a carrot in the hope of finding a horse to give them to. Mostly there’s only Millie and she’s too far away to hear my whistle, so the goodies get taken home again. But tonight I saw Cliff – stable mate to Millie and Rosie – in the last field at the top of the lane and close enough to have his attention attracted. He came over to me, put his head over the gate and gently nuzzled my forehead while I took the apple out of its bag and fished for the penknife in my pocket. Suddenly he looked up, shied so violently that he almost fell over, and then galloped away across to the far side of the field where he took refuge behind a bank of shrubs.

It was a bit of a shock and I wondered what he could have seen. I looked around and saw nothing, but horses are renowned for sensing threats even before they’re visible, so what was I to make of it? A mystery; that’s what I made of it. And here’s another odd fact:

Where we were standing is a matter of yards from the point at which the lane joins the main road, and at that point the main road narrows and winds around a tight double bend. The man who is married to the owner of the three horses once told me an odd story about that spot. He said he was driving around those bends when something ran across the road in front of him. He said it would be impossible to describe, but it definitely wasn’t human and was nothing like any animal he’d ever seen. And it ran on two legs.

You have to wonder, don’t you?

When I walked back down the lane to come home I made a point of turning round a couple of times to look behind me, but the cows in the fields lower down seemed unconcerned so I chose to follow their example.

A Notable Notch on the Calendar.

I remembered today that 4^th October is the anniversary of the death of my beloved collie dog, Em. I loved her dearly, and after the vet had come out to the house to deliver the coup de grace, I went out for a walk alone for the first time since she’d entered my life.

I was gripped by a sense that this was a pivotal point tipping my life onto a profoundly different track. My two cats had both died during the previous eleven months, and the third, most heart-breaking, death seemed significant. The following May my wife and I separated. In July I walked out of my safe office job and never went back. The following year I sold the house – the most favourite of all the nine I’d lived in up to that point – and moved into rented accommodation.

A period of turbulence and associated stress took hold in earnest, and the road it led onto has been quite the rollercoaster ride ever since. But I’ve learned a lot and I wouldn’t have had it any different.

And it all began on October 4^th, and I just felt like mentioning it.

A Little YouTube Mystery.

I sometimes watch YouTube videos made by an a capella ensemble called Voces8. They perform close harmony vocal arrangements of various works, including classical and liturgical pieces and also some classic rock and folk songs. And they’re supremely good at it.

I recently entered a complimentary comment on one of their videos, and a few days later I had an email which said ‘Harmonia loves your comment.’ I asked myself: ‘Who or what are Harmonia?’ Up to that point I hadn’t heard of them, so I investigated and discovered that the comment I’d entered on the Voces8 video was now entered on a Harmonia video of the same work and had disappeared from the original. I wondered whether Voces8 had changed their name, but no. They’re definitely two different groups, and the videos were made in different locations.

So how does a comment get switched from one video to another? How can that happen?

A Waddle and Quack Sort of Day.

My wall calendar told me I had an appointment today at the doctor’s for my annual flu jab. It was a nuisance because it meant I had to change my routines around quite drastically to accommodate it, but I set to the task manfully and arrived ten minutes early

The whole site was heaving with vehicles because, as I later discovered, a Covid booster clinic was being held at the hospital next door, so I parked somewhere illegal and made my way into the building. I went to check in at the computer terminal, only to be told – in big red letters – I do not recognise you. Go away. Or words to that effect.

‘Your computer says it doesn’t recognise me,’ I said to the woman on reception. She interrogated her own computer and said: ‘That’s because your appointment is next Tuesday, not today.’ My wall calendar had failed me, so I slunk off with a waddle and a quack and a very unhappy frown.

I decided to take a wander around Ashbourne to check the charity shops for heavy woollen sweaters and thick flannel shirts in the hope of being able to survive the approaching winter season. No luck. And then I walked past the Costa Coffee shop in the high street (which I think they call John Street or something silly; I’ve only lived near Ashbourne for twenty years and I’m still getting used to it. I swear there used to be a plaque at the top of the market square saying ‘Charles Edward Stuart stood here and addressed the crowd in 1745’ but I looked for it and couldn’t find that either.)

So, the fact is that I haven’t been inside the Ashbourne Costa Coffee shop since lockdown began two and a half years ago, and strange as it might seem – considering that it used to be a regular, weekly, and much-valued practice – I haven’t actually missed it. But today I did. I really, really wanted to go into my old favourite coffee shop and savour a medium Americano, not just for old times sake, but because I really, really fancied a cup of good coffee.

I came to my senses quickly. ‘To do so would be a frivolous and unconscionable waste of resources,’ I told myself. ‘You gave up being a wage slave in 1985 and headed off to do the things you wanted to do. Times were hard without a regular wage, but you put your nous for economy to good use and survived to be where you are today. These are strange, economically perilous times, my boy, so continue the good work. Gird up your loins (that’s a strange expression, isn’t it? Gird up your loins. Mmm…) and walk on.’

And so I did. I walked back to the car with much waddling and quacking and frowning, and came back here for a cup of tea and two morning coffee biscuits. Sometimes I think I’m a heart of oak, and sometimes I sense I’m as thick as two short planks.

An Eventful Twilight.

This evening’s stroll was remarkable for being surrounded by uncharacteristic busy-ness. I don’t usually see anybody in the evenings, but tonight there was a lot of traffic about, both vehicular and pedestrian.

I was curious to know why a man who lives at the bottom of the lane was sitting in his car with the engine running at the top of the lane, poking and stroking his smart phone. Why didn’t he wait until he got home? Was he, perhaps, texting the Other Woman, or am I projecting my own disreputable nature onto some poor innocent?

Why was the woman I frequently see in the morning out walking her dog approaching me at 7pm instead on the same errand? She said it was because the dog was becoming a bit loopy in its old age, but you can never tell, can you? It’s possible she was just trying to avoid me and failing miserably in the attempt.

Why did the unfamiliar woman in the unfamiliar car smile and wave at me as though she knew me when I hadn’t a clue who she was? And there was the man out walking his two unfamiliar dogs who did the same thing. I hadn’t a clue who he was either. Same with the woman riding a horse – the smile, the wave, the nice-to-see-you ‘hello.’ Who was she? I don’t know.

And it all started when I found myself following a woman I do know walking down the lane ahead of me. She waddles quickly on very short legs, but her gait is only about nine or ten inches so she looks like a cyclist peddling frantically in low gear and only managing about ½ a mile an hour. I had to stop three times and pretend to be studying the trees so as not to catch up with her.

But the best was the deep, surprisingly loud bellowing sound I heard coming from a field on the other side of the little wood at the top of the lane. It was a sound I’d never heard in these parts (or any other parts, come to that) and I really did entertain the notion that it might have been a bear escaped from captivity somewhere in the surrounding area. (It does happen, you know. There are people who keep exotic, and quite dangerous, pets at their homesteads, and there are plenty of relatively remote farmhouses in this area where such an animal might go unnoticed.)

But I had to find out, didn’t I, so I went through the wood to investigate. Now, it is a fact that creeping through a wood in the near darkness of advanced twilight can be a little unnerving when you’re entertaining the notion that there might be a bear on the other side of it. But I decided it was unlikely and so my nerve held. I discovered that it was nothing more than a horse in a field which hasn’t entertained a horse since old Ben died several years ago. Mystery solved, but why was it impersonating a bear instead of whinnying nicely as horses usually do?

On Bonding Birds and Badass Beetles.

Having done some shopping, washed the car, and given the lawn what I hope will be its last mow of the season, I spent half an hour outside in the sunshine with a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits. And while I did so I watched the jackdaws.

Over the past week or two they’ve taken to forming large flocks of maybe a hundred or so birds which fly hither and thither as a big, black mass with no apparent purpose. Occasionally two of them will break off and chase one another around, wheeling and diving as though they’re playing a game, which they probably are.

Is this an autumn thing, I wondered. Are they engaged in some sort of bonding exercise so they can huddle together through the winter in an attempt to stay warm and survive? I expect an ornithologist could probably tell me, but I don’t know any ornithologists so I’ll have to remain ignorant.

And last night I had a Devil’s Coach Horse beetle in my kitchen. It’s there again tonight, and although I generally like beetles, the Devil’s Coach Horse does encourage a minor fit of the creeps. Apart from being black – which many beetles are – they have long, sinuous bodies which waggle slightly when they walk. They’re notably aggressive creatures which prey ravenously on invertebrates such as earthworms and wood lice. When threatened – even by something as big as a human – they show their displeasure by opening their jaws, raising their abdomen in the manner of a scorpion, and emitting a foul smell from glands in their abdomen. And if you get too close, they can give you a painful bite.

The Wiki article pointed me in the direction of the omens associated with them, but I looked the other way. I have stresses and bad dreams aplenty already, so I don’t need any more. The last time I saw one was in August 2019, which was just about the time Covid was entering the world.

On Sherds and Shards and a Big White Bunny.

Would you like to know the difference between a sherd and a shard? (They’re archaeological terms in case you didn’t know.) I was reminded of it tonight when I came to that point in Maddie’s opus where she explained it to me in a comment on the original blog from which the book is taken. Are you ready?

A sherd is a fragment of pottery. A shard is a fragment of anything else. (Well, almost anything. A fragment of a deer’s pizzle wouldn’t be called a shard because it’s biological, but you know what I mean. Glass, metal, that kind of thing.) So why the difference? Because ‘sherd’ is an abbreviation of ‘potsherd.’ See what you can discover if you happen to bump into a highly intelligent and erudite American?

And do you know what just occurred to me? You might remember me mentioning a favourite bed time story my mother used to tell me when I was but a flea on the dog’s dinner. It was called ‘The Wig and the Wag and the Little Yellow Bag.’ For all the relevance that title had to the story, it could just as easily have been called ‘The Sherd and the Shard and the Little Pack of Lard.’ But now I’m being pointlessly whimsical, so let’s continue…

Maddie is a proper archaeologist now, you know. She’s Dr Maddie. I do so like to boast that little old uneducated me knows a real archaeologist, although I’m reminded of the fact that I did sort of know another archaeologist quite a long time ago. He was the man my wife took up with after we separated and his name was Cliff. When they engaged in cohabitation, they took my pet rabbit, Beaumont, with them. It was a blessing for dear Beaumont (he was a big white Dutch rabbit) because my lifestyle had been such that he’d had to spend a lot of his time confined to a hutch. After the translocation he was able to spend much more time wandering their garden at will, and he repaid their kindness by digging up the vegetables in their vegetable plot on an entirely voluntary basis. Weren’t they lucky?

Birds Behaving Oddly.

Over the past few weeks I’ve developed the habit of going for an evening stroll timed to bring me back just as the twilight is beginning to deepen. Once I get back I top up the various bird feeders so that there’s breakfast waiting for them when they get up, which is a damn sight earlier than I do.

During the process of conducting this duty (I tend to regard my routines as matters of duty, especially when there are other little lives involved) I’ve noticed over the past few nights that there’s been a robin standing in the same spot on the lawn in front of my house. It watches me until I’ve gone to the back of the house, and then hops over to get a drink from one of the water bowls. It’s becoming a nightly routine which fits perfectly with mine. You wouldn’t think that birds would be creatures of routine, would you?

And then there are the pheasants. Remember me mentioning a few nights ago that I’d witnessed the unprecedented sight of five cock birds flying together over the garden? Today they were actually in the garden, foraging in a tightly knit group under one of the bird tables. I’ve occasionally seen as many as three in the garden, but they’ve always been widely separated. To see five all together – shoulder to shoulder, as it were – is something else I’ve never seen before in the sixteen years I’ve lived here. (And one of them was an unusually large bird with a white crown. Is that significant? I’ve no idea.)

I gather there are those who say that birds bring us messages. Whether that’s true I wouldn’t know, but I’ve had several avian firsts this year and I’m beginning to wonder whether they know something we don’t.