Monday 31 January 2022

Coming up to date

 After the recent couple of postings that have seen me looking backwards to very earlier times, it is now the last day of January and time perhaps, to come back up to date with the nature reserve that I look after as it's Voluntary Warden.

The last couple of months have been very quiet weather-wise. December saw us suffer endless days of grey, very damp and gloomy weather that, despite little actual rain, rarely saw anything outside actually dry up. January started off in a similar vein but we did at least get some frosty and sunny interludes but it has changed today, with a combination of strong N.W. winds and sunshine, something we haven't experienced for a couple of months. As a result the ground is drying out and there is some relief from roaming round the nature reserve each day in large areas of soft, clinging mud, left behind by the heaviness of the cattle before they were taken off before Christmas. In their place came the flock of 200 ewe lambs and they haven't churned up the soft ground anywhere near as like as the cattle did. They were brought in to graze the grass over several of the reserve's fields, down to the tight, short sward that will give ideal breeding conditions for the Lapwings in a couple of months time. They will probably be taken off the reserve at the beginning of march.

My little Jack Russell terrier was a puppy when she last saw sheep on the reserve and so I was initially worried at how she might react to encountering them now at ten years old. Many dogs are notorious for chasing them and it might of meant that all walks would have to be done with her on a lead. But no, the very first morning that we walked into the field where they were, she looked up and then carried on sniffing along the ditch bank that she was following and completely ignored them all and that's how it has continued. 

To go back to the weather, while the reserve for the last couple of months has been soft underfoot and always wet and muddy, rainfall has been pretty much absent, apart from the odd bout of drizzle. That means that as we start February tomorrow the water levels in the ditches and fleets on the reserve are at best, average. At this time of the year they should be brimming or overflowing and their should be large areas of floodwater across the grazing meadows, making it ideal for wading birds and wildfowl. March is normally a drying month, with regular dry easterly winds combining with sunshine to dry up wet winter conditions. Should that be the case this year then it's looking very likely that we will be heading into another drought summer as far as the reserve goes.

So, that's enough of meteorological matters, what else is happening on the reserve apart from enduring the cold and the damp and telling myself that Spring will eventually happen, and knowing that some summer birds have already begun their long journeys back to here from Africa. Those winter favourites of mine, the White-fronted Geese that I reported on before Christmas, disappeared for a few weeks but then came back to eventually total their current counts of around 360 birds. The calls of those beautiful birds on a frosty and sunny winter's morning as they fly around the reserve are just so magical and equal easily that first Swallow sighting of the Spring. To date, as far as I know, very few have succumbed to the guns of the wildfowlers that await them on the seaward side of the reserve's sea wall, and hopefully the majority will return to their northern European breeding sites before returning again next winter.

Other than that, little else is happening and I walk the reserve most early mornings, through damp and murky conditions. But there are some dawns when the sky is blue and when from behind the hills over on the mainland, the very first edge of the sun begins to climb above those hills and in literally minutes becomes a great orange ball of fire in a dawn sky - magical. This morning as I left the reserve, in the small farmland copse that I have to drive through, the buds on the crack willows are just starting to burst and the a glimpse of the catkins to come are evident. February can be a  particularly harsh month  but those bursting buds and the Snowdrops in my garden tells me we haven't got long to wait for Spring now.  


 

Saturday 22 January 2022

The Library

 From a very early age a place of both refuge and information for me was the local library. From either of the two places that I lived in in Sheerness up until my early twenties, it was never more than fifteen minutes away.

Books did not exist in our household when I first became aware of them when I was around six or seven, we were a poor household with numerous tensions and unhappiness and so once I discovered the library I spent quite a lot of time there in it's sheltering warmth. It began a literary thirst for knowledge that has never diminished to this, my 75th year, despite all the other internet options. The only thing that has changed in recent years is the source of those books, these days I always buy them. As my age increased into nine, ten, eleven, twelve, so the amount of time that I could be found there also increased. I discovered and devoured Enid Blyton's the Famous Five and my all time favourite book, the "Wind in the Willows". By accident I discovered the early books of David Attenborough, where as a young man, he described his early excursions abroad to foreign countries to catch and cage and bring back to England many unseen birds and animals. By the time that I was around twelve years old I was already exploring the marshes near to my house and regularly looked to the library for natural history books that identified and described the kind of wildlife that I was seeing. As a result, in 1959, I came across information in their well thumbed Natural History section, about the Kent Ornithological Society and joined it as an under-18 member and remain a member to this day. Around that time I also came across "The Eye of the Wind" Peter Scott's early autobiography and I was hooked, I wanted so much to be able to emulate the kind of naturalist that he was at that time, and subsequently continued to be, he was easily my first hero.

As I progressed into my early teens, my association with the library never diminished, it always remained a comforting place where I could hide for several hours each week. My books to lend might of expanded to include detective and mystery ones but they also rarely deviated from my two constant hobbies, natural history and gardening. Then, as I approached and entered my early twenties, I discovered the library's upstairs Reading Room, until then the place that I associated as the place where only senior members sat around, talking in whispers and looking very knowing. There I first tried to emulate them by reading "posh" papers like The Times and The Guardian, papers that reported things in depth that I never saw in my Daily Mirror, oh yes, I was smugly moving ahead of my peers, or so I thought. Finally, that led me to explore the contents of the locked glass cabinets, where a great treasure trove of local history literature was stored, I was enthralled, places that I passed by every day now took on new meanings. 

Today, I buy all the books that I read, I haven't lent a book from the library for probably thirty odd years but I still visit it for my family and historical research, it still has that special place in my heart.



Thursday 13 January 2022

Retrospective times

 Since my last post we have now entered into another new year, one that will be my 75th and I guess that, as I have lived here on Sheppey all of my life, it makes me someone with a quite full memory bank of how things have changed over the years.

My first New Year was that of 1950, a new decade and I was just two and half years old and not celebrating my third birthday until the July of that year. That year and indeed for much of the decade, we were to struggle to rise up from the austerity and poverty of the previous decade and it's World War, I believe that we still had food rationing until around 1953.

I'm always fascinated when old black and white photos from those times appear on on our local Sheppey History Facebook Page, and people comment jealously at how clean and tidy the town's roads were. An easy answer to that is the fact that councils employed teams of local road sweepers in those days, people who conscientiously walked the streets with a barrow, broom and shovel and were aided by the fact that there was none of the throw-away packing and litter that we have nowadays. But it wasn't all the Shangri-La, that those photos made it look, yes life was much simpler but in the side streets and roads behind the High Streets, there was a lot of poverty. In my childhood in the 1950's food  there was only enough food each day because of the invention of mothers who never wasted a scrap. They would shop in local shops each day, buying food that was fresh, in small quantities because there were no fridges and often in ounces rather than pounds. In the butchers the cheapest cuts were always bought and often included ox-tails, hearts, brawn, belly linings, pig's trotters. Chicken was a luxury that we sometimes had at Christmas  and often came from the few scraggy birds that we kept in the back yard for our eggs. The carcass of those birds was used the following day to boil in a large pan with vegetables and turn into a broth. Likewise, a rabbit in a small hutch was also kept each year for the purpose of a Sunday or Christmas dinner and I recall that my grandparents wasted nothing from those animals, even the head was cooked and the brains eaten afterwards!

To continue the non-waste of food, there was bubble and squeak. In my house it was usually left over food items from the Sunday roast such as vegetables and scraps of meat, all fried in a pan the next day to create another belly filling meal.

And what of puddings, or "sweet" as we knew it because it was normally just that, sweet. A common one was suet pudding. Those puddings were a staple of the Sunday Roast, created on the day by mother cooking the ingredients in the well used pudding cloth and then sliced and added to the roast as a typical stodgy belly filler. Any that was not used in the roast was served afterwards for "sweet," coated in sugar, jam or treacle. Other stodgy belly fillers were rice or macaroni, or in the summer months, home-made fruit pie and custard.

And so it went on, nothing was wasted, nothing came ready packaged with use by dates and vegetables and fruit were seasonal, sprouts and parsnips for instance only appeared in winter and when they did were seized on for the seasonal treat that they were.

So, younger generations might look at those old black and white photographs and wish themselves back in those times but in reality they wouldn't know where to start.