The Hot Dog Days of Summer

Right now it's 29°C and tomorrow it will reach 34°C in Bristol, where I live. Temperatures that were anomalies - record-breaking, even - a few years ago are fast becoming commonplace, and it's wearying - and worrying. 

Our city rivers are running very low ... 

The River Frome at Winterbourne Down

The River Trym at Badock's Wood

The Hazel Brook at Blaise 

... and the parks and nature reserves are tinder dry.

Bronze-age round barrow at Badock's Wood

Blaise

Purdown

Vassalls Park

And the trees continue to drop branches, and in some cases, fall, as they have ever since last summer, which was also extremely hot and dry. 

Lincombe Woods

Snuff Mills/Vassalls Park

Though they might not actually be that safe to walk around, Cwtch and I have stuck to the woods on our daily walks as much as possible, given that it's several degrees cooler in them than being out in the open. Even so, we've tried to get out as early as we can, to miss the worst of the heat that builds throughout the day and peaks late afternoon.

sunrise on Purdown ...

... and in Hermitage Wood

Watching rabbits at sunrise

Other parts of the Frome look a little fuller. We've been mooching through Snuff Mills regularly ... 

... and one morning we went through the stone stile on the far side of Frenchay Bridge and walked through Lincombe Woods. 

Further upstream, at Winterbourne, it was cool in the quarries and Cwtch was happy to dabble her paws ... 

... while at Blaise we wandered along the banks of the Hazel Brook, a tributary of the Trym, and lurked in the ditches of Kings Weston hill fort, scouting for feathers ...

... of which there have been many, from all of our walks. Though as always, they have to be hunted for, rather than just found.

Of course sometimes you find a lot all at once, which is a shame ... 

... but if there's not too many, we make a little shrine to honour the dead one(s) ... 

thrush shrine

... which have often met their end at the beak and claws of a sparrowhawk. 

My best feather finds to date have been a wren primary, to go with the one I picked up last year, both in gateways on the eastern edge of Barn Wood on Purdown (though what I'd really love is a wren tail feather) ... 

... and this jay tertial, the first one I've found which has some blue on it, and also some very natty banding - such a lot going on in one feather.

Apart from the aforementioned rabbits and sparrowhawks, most wildlife has been lying low, the birds in moult and the rest possibly because it's so hot. Much of what we've seen has, as usual, been dead:

CLOCKWISE from top left: a new brood of thrushes; dead rat; dead and alive squirrels; dead crow; blackberry-eating badger poo; decapitated mouse; robin

CLOCKWISE from top left: buff-tailed bumble bee; Speckled Wood; Gatekeeper; Red Admiral; demoiselle wings

Most of the wild flowers are over themselves too - just the following late bloomers:

CLOCKWISE from top left: wild clematis; wild carrot; burdock; rowan; loosestrife; creeping thistle; the dreaded Himalayan Balsam

Fungi, on the other hand, are coming into their own. I'm not very good at identifying them, so I now have an app, but I'm not sure it's much better. Anyhow, here goes:

TOP ROW: pinkish porecrust; oak mazegill; King Alfred's cakes; branching oyster

SECOND ROW: ganoderma; dryad's saddle; beefsteak fungus; something with mould on it

THIRD ROW:  chicken of the woods; shaggy bracket; dead man's fingers; oak bracket

BOTTOM ROW:  artist's bracket; penniporia fraxinea; lumpy bracket; green elf cup 🙂

Oh, and stinkhorn in various stages

Finally, hoggin - not something I actively look for this time of year, when there are feathers to be found, but I got quite a haul all the same, including some quite big bits.

And in case I ever forget where I am in the heat of the moment:

The umbrella of neurodivergence

It's a little irritating when you go to your GP and ask for an ADHD assessment because you've been pretty sure for years that this is what lies behind the distractibility and executive dysfunction that has plagued your entire life and is now getting to the point where you're really struggling to get basic tasks done, and the GP listens to you describe how stressful the surgery waiting room is with the inanities of Heart Radio blaring over conversations between receptionists and patients and the passing traffic outside, making it impossible to concentrate on the book you've brought to a) while away time and b) have something else to look at other than the orange seating, and says 'I think you should be assessed for autism too', and you say 'sensory sensitivity is also part of ADHD though, isn't it, and anyhow, I tick none of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments' (which is how they diagnosed your children with autism 30+ years ago) and she says 'oh that's very old school, we don't do it like that any more', and then when your ADHD assessment happens, the psychiatrist says 'the fact you obsessively check your work for mistakes despite having ADHD makes me think you might have autism too, so I think you need an autism assessment as well', so you apply for one and wait for months and when it comes along you have four days' notice, and the next day a whole load of unrelated stuff starts kicking off, but you press on anyway even though you don't feel you've prepared enough, and the psychiatrist doing the assessment, who is a different one from the first one, says you 'don't reach the threshold for a diagnosis of autism because you pick up on vibes and other people's feelings' (and this is true, you once spent an afternoon listening to a friend who was really stressed as she poured out her troubles, after which she said she felt much better and you drove home with her migraine, despite not actually suffering from them yourself), and adds that 'sensory processing issues are also part of ADHD, don't you know, and there's nothing in your symptoms that can't be explained by a diagnosis of ADHD with hypersensitivity and anxiety'. 

The 'you' is me, of course, and actually I can work with that diagnosis. What I really need, though, is medication. I've been waiting ten months for titration to start. (Submitting my weight and blood pressure four months into this wait to comply with the legal requirement for providers of mental health and psychiatric services to start the process within that length of time hasn't really made a material difference to my situation.)

I do wonder, however, if these categories will wither away in the future, much like the Triad of Impairments has as a diagnostic tool, because this morning I completely missed my footing on my dog walk and fell down some steps, narrowly missing landing in the River Trym, and my ribs and hip are hurting badly. There's also a big black bruise on my forearm from where I misjudged the distance of the door handle while walking from the kitchen into the hall last week and banged right into it. This not-always-knowing-exactly-where-my-body-is-in-time-and-space, plus the nine pins and plate in my leg from when I fell off the doorstep eleven years ago, speak of dyspraxia to me. And though I'm good at spelling, I can't tell my left from my right and I gave up learning to play the piano after eight years because sight-reading musical notation is so laborious for me, both of which deficits are related to dyslexia.

Not that I'm going to request any more assessments. I'm done with that now. It's just that I'm starting to think of my situation and how it presents more from the perspective of neurodivergence as umbrella term, with a pick-n-mix of symptoms. And since I see things the way I do, this gives me a precise picture: the umbrella is a dusty black, faded along the folds from being stored in a sunny hallway. It has various coloured patches, and other holes and tears, though it makes little difference whether the holes have been patched or not with regard to their ability to keep out the rain and sun; they let both through at the same time. And that's the beauty of it, really.

This is Pameli's umbrella from some years ago now. It's not the umbrella of neurodivergence, but I like it.

Venerable trees and old stone bridges

I was hoping to get out for a few modest jaunts around the West Country this summer, but no sooner did the holidays begin than life kicked off with an entirely different game plan, and it's looking like I'll be staying more local that I'd envisaged. 

I did get to do a walk I'd been planning for years, which is the Leigh Woods veteran tree walk - in fact, I actually set out to do it some years back with my son, Samuel, and my oldest friend, Liz, but we chatted so much, we missed every waymark and ended up meandering around the middle of the wood, noticing very little. This time around, I found most of them, I think, although the instructions appear to have been written before a separate cycling trail was established in 2011, which makes them a bit confusing in places. But here they are:

veteran oak pollard

veteran yew

veteran oak

wild service trees, an indicator of ancient woodland

monolith beech, the branches having been removed because of a fungus called Ustulina

layering yew

a possibly veteran oak in a line of four, apparently, though all looking a lot younger than lots of other oaks we passed

this might have been another one in days of yore, when the walk was devised

veteran lime coppard on the rampart of Stokeleigh camp

re-pollarded veteran oak

There were quite a few trees we passed that seemed to me rather more interesting, by which I mean gnarly than some of the trees on this list. 

birch, and below some oaks

Stokeleigh camp

remnant wood pasture

another recent tree victim, presumably of climate breakdown

Cwtch in the woods

The other ne-to-us walk Cwtch and I did was the stretch of the River Frome that runs from  where we walk in Winterbourne to Frenchay Bridge, just above Snuff Mills - a sort of filling-in-the-gap type walk. One day I'd like to walk the Frome from its source near Little Sodbury to where it joins in the River Avon in central Bristol, but right now a piecemeal approach will have to do.   

There were lots of stone stiles ...

and stone bridges, the first of which was Frenchay Bridge.

Almost immediately our route took us away from the river briefly, past a house once owned by Edward 'Squire' Higgins, a wealthy gentleman by day and a highwayman, horse thief, house-breaker and murderer by night. He was transported to America in 1754, where he promptly robbed a house and paid for his return passage within three months, settling in what was then called Great House in Frenchay in 1763. He was finally hanged for his crimes in Carmarthen in 1767.

Grove House, formerly Great House

We then cut back down to the Frome and walked in its company as far as Cleeve Bridge ... 

... before then detouring away briefly.

An electricity substation masquerading as the earliest known branch of McDonalds. (It was actually a 19th century dovecote.)

Back down on the Frome we passed under the A4174 ... 

... whereupon I encountered one of the Frome's tributaries, the Ham Brook, which gave its name to the nearby village of Hambrook ...

... and the 17th century packhorse bridge that crosses it (here partially obscured by a fallen tree). 

The bridge by the former Hambrook Mill beyond the M4

plums

The bridge on Moorend Road

The last half a mile or so to our finish point, at the unnamed bridge near Mill Steps, was along road; once there, the gap was filled and it was a question of retracing our steps back to Frenchay Bridge, a lovely deep dive through the summer woods.