Floods, Frost and the Ant Hill Mob

My partner travelling for work means I'm getting to walk the dog more frequently than in previous winters, which isn't my favourite thing on dull days. The lack of light always has a dispiriting effect on me, though this month has been a bit different, in part due to the changeable weather.

For instance, we had a very wet spell, when the farmland out beyond Charlton Road suddenly remembered its proximity to the Severn floodplain and filled with water.

Charlton Common

¡No pasarán!

The hedgerow where we pick damsons

The ghostly sorrels poking out of the water here reach my shoulder, so it's a fair guess the water in this hollow must be at least three and a half feet. Below is how it looks usually. 

The ditches at the edges of the fields are currently streams, with a current and appropriate sound effects. Cwtch, who hates getting her paws wet, has been balancing across dams and making prodigious leaps. 

Once again, the golf course was deemed too wet to play on, so we revisited some of the ancient trees from when the course was farmland, creeping around the edges and along the sides of copses to avoid the greens and fairways. 

Funnily enough, it was when we weren't trespassing that we fell foul of an officious golfer, seeking to put us in our places.

As the Northerner and I emerged from the field at the end of our walk, there was a group of four golfers playing a shot, so we waited until they'd finished before stepping onto the footpath that crosses the course.

When they were a few yards from us, one of them said ‘You’re playing a very dangerous game!’

I looked down for a moment, as if it might be us who were suddenly carrying golf clubs. The Northerner was quicker. ‘No, we’re not. You can see us; we can see you. You’re not going to hit golf balls at us from this distance’.

‘You should stick to the paths,’ the golfer persisted, and suddenly I was ten again, and he was towering over me and waving his club in the air. This time, though, I found my voice and snapped at my not-Elder, not-Better, ‘This is the path. Look it up on the Ordnance Survey Map!’

‘The path,’ he explained, ‘is marked with paint.’

‘Erm … actually, this is the path,’ one of his companions confirmed.

He threw up his hands. ‘All right, all right, you’ve made your point!’

So. A footpath is only a right of way if someone at the golf club has painted it with red arrows, not if we’ve walked it for centuries. I've decided to carry my OS 155 every time I walk the dog across the course, like when lockdown ended and all those deprived golfers came rushing back with their git-orf-my-landery. A map isn’t just a defence, it’s a weapon too. I like to think that’s why it’s called Ordnance.

Other days the weather has veered from grey grey grey ... 

... to cold and bright, with dazzlingly blue skies ... 

... and, on one memorably frosty, misty, sunny occasion, was filled with the most gorgeous soft light. 

And often there are interesting, shifting skies. 

We've been walking here long enough now for such observations to have a flavour of the same old, same old, but somehow it's all always a marvel and miracle to me. 

Rooks and magpies seeing off intruders from the rookery never get dull. This time, a buzzard, who was eventually chased over the golf course, where a gang of gulls took umbrage. 

There has been death in the form of a shrew I mistook at first glance for an owl pellet ... 

... and a frog who, in 24 hours, went from dead to zombie.

And decay in the form of a fallen waxcap, heart or canker rot in the hollowing oak, a beautiful piece of twisted wood that was far too rotten to take home  ...

 

... and spectacular displays of jelly ear fungus in the Small Dark Wood of the Mind ... 

... and Rooky Wood.

To counteract the end of things, catkins, which are always apparitions of considerable joy ... 

... and the new leaves of cuckoo-pint, although since it has those poisonous siren berries, it must be considered to have a foot in the other camp too. 

Other features are becoming more obvious as last summer's growth continues to recede. In particular, paths are reasserting themselves. I'm not sure if they're badger's pads or foxes' trods. I saw a fox today, streaking across the field as we entered it and far too swift to catch on video. Badgers are evident mainly by their snuffle holes and fecal marking, plus the occasional hollowed-out hedgehog. 

Also far more evident than in the summer are earthworks undertaken by the Ant Hill Mob, Yellow Meadow family.  

One thing I genuinely haven't seen before is this curious pattern of chain link fencing emanating through the bark of a tree that has turned itself into a living fence post. I can't help wincing at the thought of it. Surely it must be painful? And does the pattern go right through the trunk, in order to be visible from the outside?

Anyhow. I'm going to finish with Cwtch, who's still cocking her leg to scent-mark in areas where many dogs have been, which is a bit of a novelty and not a behaviour she seems to be looking to change any time soon, love her. (I do.) 

Taking flight

My grandmother, Hilda Hill, died in St Peter's Hopsice, then in Knowle, South Bristol, on Monday 12th August 1991. The last time I saw her was the preceding evening, when she'd fallen into a sleep from which she wouldn't fully awaken again.












It was a beautiful sunny evening; the last day of the 1991 Bristol Balloon Fiesta, and from the window of her room, I could see hot air balloons rising from their launch site at Ashton Court and drifting towards the nearby Clifton Suspension Bridge. They were the perfect symbol for the soul's departure, and the end of a life so well lived.

Since then I've never been able to look at the balloons without thinking of her. The next summer, I remember sitting on Horfield Common at Golden Hill with my small children, watching them come up the Frome valley - all the different shapes and sizes of them. There were lots of little frogs in the grass, and it felt as if she was very close. 

A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem conflating those two memories. It felt too small and too personal to be submitted anywhere, but since I've joined an online group for poets designed to get us over the monthly submissions hump, I've been scraping around for things to send out, and eventually 'Balloons' made its way into the world ... and came straight back with a shiny penny in its pocket. Second prize in the 2019 A Poem and a Pint Competition. So, what do I know, about poems or anything?

Balloons

That last evening

as you were dying

I looked through the window of your room

saw hot-air balloons rise over the city

with a sound like humpbacked whales

breaching trees and houses

enormous, cumbrous,

impossibly light

and I watched from the common

as they drifted

dozens in heavy golden dusk

and tiny frogs jumped

from damp grass

as if trying to reach them.

©Deborah Harvey 2019

Spring is Sprung ...

... maybe not entirely successfully (but ooh, look at those colours!)

Yes, spring might still be walking a tightrope for the next month or so ... 

... but even the books at our 400 year old library are beginning to emerge from their hibernation ... 

... and spread their wings.