The Equinox

"I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring
and gentle odours led my steps astray"........Percy Bysshe Shelley

It's the 21st of December today, the Shortest Day, the one winter's day guaranteed to bring a smile to my lips. With, first every second, then minutes, then hours, we now start the process of longer days, inching nearer towards spring - to warmth, to flowers, to light evenings.

Just lately it seems as though everything is always wet or damp, it seems to rain part of every day. This morning, after overnight rain again, we awoke to a strengthening, gusty and warmish, SW wind. Being outside was liking around in a cool steam room, everything seemed to be dripping.
On the reserve, after two bone dry winters, this winter is most definitely not going to follow that trend. The grazing meadows are now showing numerous splashes of shallow water and the rills that were dug on the meadows are now full of water. The tracks and gateways are very muddy thanks to the cattle that were supposed of been taken off by now but still haven't been. The ditches are still only half full but overall, the reserve is well on it's way to looking like it should do in the winter and to be honest, in a brief sunny spell, it looks quite superb.

Between my front drive and that of a neighbour's, is a tall and fairly wide hawthorn hedge that I planted when I first moved here thirty odd years ago. It is populated for much of the year by up to fifty House Sparrows. In the spring and summer some nest in it and for the rest of the year they shelter in it in order to pop out on to the two bird tables alongside. Sitting in the conservatory the other afternoon watching the birds on the bird table, I suddenly became aware of two rats making their way up through the branches and then jumping across on to a bird table and eating the food. My Jack Russell was going mental with rage through the window but I couldn't let her out to catch them in case they ran out into the road alongside. So that night I put out my baited rat trap, which catches them alive for me to deal with later. Before I went to bed I noticed something was in the trap and on going out there, it was a hedgehog, which should of been hibernating by now and is likely to die if it does hibernate now because it clearly won't have a good enough fat store. I tipped it out, gave it some dog food and off it trotted. The next night I caught it again and so the trap idea was abandoned and I resorted to some securely placed rat poison that hedgehogs and other animals couldn't get to, some people might like rats but I don't. 

Growing up - some of my lives.

A brief trip through my life.

Sometime before I was 5

 Sometime after I was 5 - at London Zoo

1966, aged 19 - the folk years

1967 - convincing myself I looked like Bob Dylan

1972-ish, married two years and the first of my continuous line of Jack Russell terriers.

1970-80's - the rabbiting me.

 1985 - the sporty and nude me.

Still 1980's

 1990's and well past 40

 Early 2000's and starting to show my age

 Gawd! - current day, 71 and looking every inch of it. Why did I do some things to excess!

Humbug and all it's enjoyment

We're now in that bloody awful run up to Christmas and the New Year, short dark days, crap weather and everywhere you go, Christmas and all it's expense is rammed down your throats - and bloody awful Christmas music in many shops!  The only good thing in this period is the Shortest Day, when at last, by just seconds in the beginning, then minutes and then hours, each day gets longer and Spring gets nearer.
I've hated Christmas for most of my adult life, partly because it heralds the depths of winter and everything I detest in winter, as I said above, the short dark days, the not being able to get out in the garden and do much, the endurance of suffering cold, wind, rain and sometimes freezing temperatures as I walk across the reserve. Even worse is the big day itself and all the excesses that your are encouraged to take part in because "it's Christmas" - the over eating, the over drinking, the waking up and over eating and over drinking all over again, because "it's Christmas".
One of the greatest joys of living on my own is that if I choose to, I don't have to endure that. I can put out some washing on the line on the big day, it it's a good drying day,  I can even have egg and chips for dinner rather than an over-flowing plate of turkey and veg.that I don't feel like eating.

But then of course, comes Boxing Day. After an exhilarating walk on the reserve with the dog, home for a bottle of wine or a rum and coke, probably a tad earlier than normal, and sport on the TV, until that is, the bloody adverts drive you nuts. Adverts every few minutes promoting bloody sales in the shops, whereby people, who only a few days before, had spent a small fortune on Christmas presents, waste their Christmas holidays in retail scrums incurring even more debt buying stuff that they can easily survive with purely because it's cheaper. Unfortunately the later credit card bills don't show the same Christmas spirit, they just increase.

After the brief breathing space, for some of at least, along comes New Years Eve, another festival of excess and noise. In recent years, instead of being able to ignore it, go to bed and wake up in a new year, fireworks have become the norm - every bloody where! I've lost track of the amount of times I've sat up till gone 2.00 in the morning consoling my trembling dogs as every drunken neighbour for miles shoots countless expensive rockets into the night sky.

Roll on January the 2nd when normal life returns.

Happy Days

Joy of joys, a day to lift the heart strings, we are having clear blue skies, warming sun and light winds, it could of been early Spring. It was lovely to get up at 5.30 this morning, look out of the back door and see the moon and stars in the sky, rather than rain.
I arrived at the reserve just as the sun was rising from behind some distant clouds on the horizon and the effect that it had on the marsh was amazing, no more grey and gloom, oh no, the reserve looked green and sparkling. OK, it was still wet and muddy but it just felt better and the first bird that I saw, was a female Hen Harrier, gliding over the tops of a nearby reed bed. Ellie and I set off to walk round the whole of the reserve's grazing marsh, watching and listening to Curlews as they came off the arable fields alongside and made their way out to the nearby tidal mudflats, now becoming exposed as the tide ebbed away.
Next on my list were the grazing geese out on the marsh - 70 Greylag Geese (our resident birds) and 17 White-fronted Geese, truly wild birds that breed in the far north of Europe and visit us in the winter. As the winter progresses and especially if cold weather on the Continent gets bad, the flock will normally build up to c. 200-300 birds, they are lovely birds. Yesterday there was a lone Barnacle Goose with them but I couldn't find it today. We carried on through the 40 strong herd of young cows, next year's breeding stock and Ellie and they normally manage to ignore each other. It was then that my spirits really rose, I spotted the male Hen Harrier gliding across the reserve. I knew that there was one about but it had been evading me up till now. Seeing the male bird in flight with it's silvery grey plumage looking almost ghostly is a spectacular sight.

We carried on as the sun became warmer and brighter, Skylarks were springing up from everywhere, some resident, some winter visitors, and one or two even climbed into the sky to sing, now that really did make it seem like Spring! Two Buzzards, mewing like lost kittens, joined the raptor list, while several Herons and a couple of Little Egrets rose from the ditches. 

We walked up on to the top of the sea wall and begun to follow that for almost a mile, with the saltings and the tide to the left and all of the reserve's grazing marsh to the right. That stretch of sea wall has on it's landward side, the sea wall fleet, or Delph, thick with tall phragmites reed beds. As we carried on a couple of Bearded Tits "pinged" away with out showing themselves but I did eventually get a count of 22 Reed Buntings along that same stretch. Coming to the end of the sea wall we cut back on to the reserve and followed the reserve boundary ditch the mile back to the barn where I had left the car. On the farmland side of this ditch there is thick line of mostly hawthorn bushes and it is a magnet for smaller birds at this time of year and today was no exception. Feeding on the berries were several dozen Fieldfares, as they have been for a couple of weeks, also there were Linnets, Chaffinches, a few more Reed Buntings and the odd Wren and Robin.

That's been just a few of the birds that I saw today as we wandered round and boy, did the whole walk in that weather make me feel good.

Wet and Miserable.

Since my last post, going on about the damp and gloomy weather, we are currently enduring our fifth day since then, of wet and gloomy weather. It has rained for part of every day and night, sometimes heavily but often light and drizzly and it has been cold. Everywhere and everything seems damp, even indoors when the heating isn't on.
Now I know that I've spent most of the last year or so praying for rain, just as the Librarian is in Germany at the moment, but with any type of weather there comes a time after enduring it endlessly, that you scream enough is enough. One day of blue skies and sunshine would be so uplifting after all this depressing damp but it seems like a dream at the moment.
And the reserve, is it now getting wetter?, well on the surface it is. Walking round is fast becoming hard work in the mud and the splashes of water, especially if one is getting soaked through by the constant rain at the same time. It doesn't bother Ellie my dog though and there she shows her perversity. At home, when it's wet or rainy, she has to be almost shoved out of the door for a pee. She will then go to absurd lengths to avoid walking on the wet lawn and when she finally does, it is by gingerly lifting one foot at a time as though she is walking on hot coals. Take her to a wet and muddy marsh and she'd gambol about on there all day if you let her.
But incredibly, so far, water levels in the ditches and fleets have barely risen, although they look much refreshed. It takes a surprising amount of constantly heavy rain to water-log the marsh after a prolonged dry spell and earlier this year it was only a heavy snow fall, slowly melting, that cured last year's drought.
So, as I sit here looking out at wet roads, wet gardens, a pond that is lapping over on to the lawn and heavy grey skies, I find myself looking very much forward to the Spring.

A Winter's Day

This early morning on the reserve was simply a repeat of yesterday - low cloud, gloomy, slightly misty and  drizzly damp. In summary, everything I hate about this time of year and a good reason why I become easily depressed in the winter.
I guess that there are people that like short hours of daylight, damp, cold and dreary days, but I'm not one of them. How that they can like such days is beyond me, what can be better than getting up in daylight at 5.00 in the morning to be greeted by a warm sunrise and to know that that would continue through a warm and sunny day until gone 9.30 at night. No thick and heavy winter clothes, no head and neck recoiled down into your coat to keep out the cold, no every hardship going in order to battle the elements of winter. I took this photo this morning in black and white because by doing so it emphasised the bleak greyness that met me there when I arrived.

Yesterday however, in my local supermarket, I bumped into a special friend who I hadn't seen for a couple of years. She has an unpleasant illness that results in too many bad days and nights, but yesterday was one of her "good" days. We chatted at length about various things but in the main, about her illness and she so inspired me with how she faces it, how she stays remarkably cheerful about it and above all, how she has retained her sense of humour.  It kind of put my depression at having arthritic bones and a dislike of grey winter's days into perspective.

Lastly, I have to apologise for resorting to "Wind in the Willows" again and the following, an extract from the Toad's imprisonment in gaol and the kindness of the gaoler's daughter. 

"When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, of the purring of contended cats and the twitter of sleeping canaries.

I guess most of us can identify with such moments.

Winter begins

I'm sitting here writing this in my south facing conservatory. Today it is far from warm in here, I haven't got the central heating on and outside heavy grey clouds race across the sky, pushed along by a gusty and cold ENE wind. Added to that are frequent light showers of icy rain, it's the 19th November and winter is finally beginning to appear on the horizon, made all the more obvious by flocks of Fieldfares, fresh in from Scandinavia and feasting on the hedgerow berries.
I've been out in the garden briefly today, digging a piece of border and pruning a Cotoneaster shrub, but as a whole, the garden is almost pruned, dug and mulched as I want it and ready for it's winter sleep. Let's face it, today is one of those days when it's simply better being inside, looking out, drinking a glass of something, reading something or just just mulling over what the last eleven months have been like. 
So I've been sitting here,  reading a newly published book by Matthew Dennison entitled "Eternal Boy - The life of Kenneth Grahame " who of course wrote "Wind in the Willows, and was captivated by a passage in it that seemed to express the way that days such as today, should end.
Kenneth Grahame and a friend had been walking in the countryside on one cold weekend. "we came home happy and tired, bought some chops and fetched a huge jug of beer from the pub. We cooked our dinner over the open wood fire, then great chunks of cheese, new bread, great swills of beer, pipes, bed and heavenly sleep". Oh yes, the summer is a time of very long and busy days, with short, hot nights, but the winter offers the reverse - rising late, a brief day and the snugness of giving in to lethargy, early darkness and the comfort of a long winter's night wrapped in blankets, planning next year and re-living this year.