Shades of green

Over at The Dabbler I have posted on William McGonagall, the gloriously bad poet – guaranteed to cheer you up on a Monday.

Have to confess I wasn’t in tip top condition this morning. I was left in sole charge of Brit Jnr yesterday and it fair killed me. It’s not twice as hard to handle a mobile and headstrong tot by yourself; it’s at least fifty times as hard. At the park I was required to play ‘hold my teeny hands while I run down this hillock giggling madly’ approximately a trillion times in succession, which, combined with the ravages of Sunday morning five-a-side, left Daddy’s lower back and virtually all other joints and muscles feeling like those of a 90-year old former bareknuckle boxer this morning. However, a creaky stroll just now has restored a tolerable equanimity. I wish you could see it round these 'ere lanes in the autumn sun. By Ratty, Moley and all things holy, there’s nothing like resting your eyes, as the Small Faces put it, in shades of green.

The lanes in Tack

Tack is turning to Hub, if you follow TofE’s adapted Blodgett method for defining the seasons, and the blackberries are beginning to ripen. Who knows what adventures might befall me this year when I venture out with my picking-punnet? Yesterday I strolled towards the scene of my thrilling encounter with the Warning Berry (which I’m sure you haven’t forgotten).

As I walked I saw on the lane ahead what appeared to be a black panther or possibly a puma, peering with malevolent intent into the hedgerow. Getting closer it inevitably became a domestic cat (it only takes a slight trick of perspective to turn moggies into tigers, they are perfect scale models; no wonder these Beast of Bodmin-type stories won’t go away.) Anyway, the cat suddenly leapt at the hedge and ripped away with something in its mouth that squealed appallingly. I wasn’t close enough to tell if it was a bird or a rodent struggling in those feline jaws, but the noise was awful, until, awfully, it stopped. Thus cats; nature’s horrible bastards.

When walking I often like to chew on a straw or stalk plucked from the hedgerow. It’s amazing how having a straw or stalk between your teeth makes you feel…bucked. One can’t help but saunter, swagger even: a mind-body trick, like the alpha male posture of walking with your hands clasped behind your back, front fully exposed as if to say “Look at how confident I am that I won’t be punched. I am invulnerable.” Very few men can walk into a strange room with their hands clasped behind their back, probably just Prince Philip, Barack Obama and a handful of Rear-Admirals.

In Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty there’s a nice little observation about a character who keeps describing the sort of person he is (“I’m the sort of guy who always says what he thinks”; “I don’t bear grudges, I’m not that type of person” etc). The effete narrator marvels at his self-confidence and wonders, absurdly, if he could pull it off: “I’m the sort of guy who prefers Pope to Wordsworth.” Next time the opportunity arises I might declare that “I’m the sort of guy who saunters along chewing a straw or stalk plucked from the hedgerow.” Reminds me of Ron Burgundy’s chat-up line in the brilliant comedy film Anchorman: “I’m kind of a big deal….I have many leatherbound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”

Hmm…though maybe such self-awareness isn’t necessarily so desirable... “I’m the type of person who picks blackberries and then writes about it on the internet.”

The Kingswood Car-Washers

The other week The Local Character and I got to talking, I forget by what conversational route, about Bristol Zoo. The Zoo is small but perfectly formed and sits in Clifton, which is the nicest but most expensive area of Bristol. The LC was waxing wistful about Clifton (he and I live in east Bristol, which is less nice but cheaper).

“It’s lovely just to be up there sometimes,” he said, from on top of his horse. “Sometimes Oi wish I’d moved up that way. Oi had the chance I suppose, years ago. Could of bought up there. But Oi didn’t, Oi bought in Kingswood. That’s the way it goes though, you make these decisions in loife.”

“The buildings are so nice in Clifton,” I observed. “You’ve got the college overlooking the zoo there...”

“Yeeeeaaaass, but it’s not just that. Everyone’s more, I don’t know, laid back. It’s not so… Well, you don’t see everyone out washing their bloody cars on a Sunday.”

Contempt, pity, great despair, these were all conveyed by that “washing their bloody cars”, for the two classes of Kingswood car-washer (Mondeo drivers and chav boy racers), and for humanity in general. Sadness and bleak laughter too, at life’s arbitrary twists. This was a new side to the Local Character.

“At least we can always go and visit Clifton,” I said quickly, for I could see him sagging in his saddle.

Dead animal spotting update

Following the weasel/stoat controversy, I yesterday spotted another interesting dead animal on the lane. Any idea what this rodent is? A poor photo I'm afraid (for which no possible excuses given that the subject remained very still throughout the shoot) but it was small, perhaps two inches long, with a long nose.

Today I will be taking my family and my healthy interest in spotting dead animals to Longleat Safari Park, though that attraction is admittedly more famous for alive ones. I will also be attempting to spot herpes-infected monkeys, from a distance.

Hedge cutter

The other day in the lane I had to scrunch myself up to avoid what could have been an untidy encounter with a hedge cutting vehicle much like the one pictured above. It was being operated with impressive skill by the driver, who had to use a variety of levers and pedals to simultaneously move the vehicle in the right direction, mow the ground level verge and use the cutting arm to sweep up and down the hedge itself.

Nothing overly surprising about that I suppose – you’d expect someone let loose with one of those machines to know what he was doing. I only mention it because the driver was very, very old and appeared to be operating the equipment half-asleep from a virtually horizontal reclining position.

The Squirrelhunters

Despite the expert coaching of the Lancastrian dwarf I didn’t much enjoy shooting and I didn’t particularly like myself for the bits I did enjoy. This might have helped harden my lack of sympathy for the libertarian argument for guns-as-toys, but there are other, grimmer reasons too. Anyway, I don’t see why people need to own guns for reasons outside of occupational usefulness and I think the fewer guns there are about the place, the better. There may be a further tightening of our already tight laws, as after Dunblane – gun legislation is, after all, the only possible outlet for our desire to do something practical in the wake of the Cumbria horrorshow – or there may not. Personally I wouldn’t oppose further tightening on the basis that the British Olympic shooting team can’t practice (who cares?) or that blasting shotguns is fun (so is speeding on the motorway, if you’re a certain type of man).

Just over a week before Cumbria I was strolling the bottommost lunchtime lane in aching sunshine when some unseen shootists above, but not nearly far enough above, began blasting away. It was fearfully loud in the valley and annoyingly unrhythmical– what was peaceful became fractious and tense. After each shot I heard disconcerting whirrings and pings in the long grass above the lane. All local animal life buggered off and all enjoyment was ruined. I turned around and headed back, half-expecting to feel the hot sting of a wayward pellet at any moment (strangely, I specifically felt that my right ear would be shot off, can’t explain why).

The shootists were, I suppose, the camouflaged squirrelhunters for whom the Local Character showed such withering contempt. I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to march up to them to put flowers in their shotgun barrels, but I did want to say “Oh, grow up.”

Lane etiquette

Adjacent to our office is a small business dedicated to producing magazines about France and Australia. Its employees have been in about a year and they are, with a couple of exceptions, a snooty mannerless bunch who park their cars inconsiderately.

One swarthy chap in particular sometimes strolls about the lanes of a lunchtime, so twice or thrice I have passed him as he walks uphill and I down or vice versa. On each occasion I have arranged my face into suitable nods and greeting-grimaces, even preparing an “Afternoon” or a “Lovely out, isn’t it?”. And on each occasion he has completely blanked me, eyes fixed on the ground as if we were passing in Piccadilly Circus rather than a narrow country lane in the middle of nowhere.

I can only think that he’s a Londoner. At any rate he has no grasp at all of the unwritten but clear rule of Fleeting Greeting: you should always acknowledge a passer-by when it would be more absurd not to do so.

Dead animals

I've been spotting a lot of dead animals on my lunchtime strolls. Some living ones too, but you can get a much better look at dead animals. You can really spot them.

Had an interesting chat with the Local Character yesterday. He confirmed that there really is a stag in Pipley Wood. It mostly dwells in the long grass between the Wood and Dave's pig fields, apparently. He also informed me that most of the living deer I've been seeing are actually muntjacs. But here are some possible non-muntjacs in a picture I took using my expert Nature Photography skills:



The Local Character is pro fox hunting but agin' most of they silly bugg-rrs who come up here in full camouflage an' everything with shotguns to shoot bloody squirrels. Foxes have to die one way or the other and hunting is better than shooting, for the foxes and for the human soul, he more or less said.

Anyway, back to the dead animals I've been spotting. This, I think, is a dead weasel. The only evidence I have for it being a weasel rather than a stoat is that weasels are weasily spotted and stoats are stoatally different (Update: according to Sophie, it is in fact a stoat. Further update: but she's wrong). Either way, it's definitely dead.

And now a very dead badger. It's too revolting to display without a warning, so I've put it here. Don't click if you're faint of heart or weak of stomach.

WEEP NOT! I mean, weep not, for the badger or the possible weasel, however, or else weep for all things: they had their brief spark between the eternal darknesses and Time is meaningless for them now. We go on.

Frontline services

The other week as I hacked up one of my favourite postprandial lanes I observed a small van nestled into a passing point. In the driver’s seat sat a man with reflective yellow jacket and a moustache and a clipboard. As I walked by him I nodded. He did not nod back but instead made a note on his clipboard.

The following day I walked the lane again, and this sign had appeared.




Yes, I think we can probably find £6 billion of cuts somewhere in this state of ours.

Democracy 3: Buzzards and bicycles

The usual hike at lunchtime, taking a break from the Beeb. At the peak of the hill a buzzard pushed out of a tree clump directly below me and drifted, within boomeranging distance, to a clump further down. At least, it may have been a buzzard; alas I had no Nige there to help identify if it was a buzzard or a hawk or a kite or a golden eagle or a wren or a cormorant or a condor or a pigeon or a duck. Then three mountain-bicyclists hoved into view. They were youngish thin bespectacled modernish gents who looked like they probably voted Lib Dem. The first one was saying to the second one: “…he murdered me on the hills. I could beat him on the downhills and flats…I outspin him every time…. Though he might not have been putting the juice in….” The third one gave me a wide beam and a Good Afternoon. Well we are all brothers today. It even might be Con-Lib soon. We all put our cross in the box and hope for the best, with our hobbies and dimly-glimpsed opinions on this fragile shell of a planet. Only 36.2% of us voted Tory but we must all be conservatives or nothing makes sense or has any worth.

Possible stag

First Summer is lasting well. Yesterday lunchtime I drifted quietly through Pipley Wood. That is, it felt like quiet drifting to me; to the fauna of the wood it was no doubt the cacophonous lumbering of a clubfooted troll.

It’s a very small, sparse wood so the sight of a deer rocketing out of a copse some fifteen yards ahead of me gave me a start; you don’t expect to see wild animals much bigger than a badger in such places. The deer whipped through the hedgerow, across the lane and into Dave’s fields. It appeared grey and possibly a stag – I say ‘stag’ only because in that fleeting moment it seemed somehow muscular and male.

When we retell these little stories of wildlife encounters, it’s always tempting to beef them up a bit. It was huge. It went like lightning. Perhaps that’s because there’s a disconnect between how interesting they are to the listener and how important they are to us. For urbanites it’s a rare treat to be suddenly confronted with the fact of being human in a non-human environment; to feel a trespasser because of it; and to try to capture and verify a fleeting moment when relying solely on your senses, memory and grip on reality, without the benefit of the prerequisite source of modern truth, the video action replay.

Watchgoose

A goose not dissimilar to the one pictured above patrols the entrance to the yard of Dave’s farm shop. It and I have taken a dislike to each other. It fancies itself as a bit of a watchgoose. Or perhaps a nightclub bouncer goose, and indeed it conveys this character so convincingly that when I approach the shop I often find myself inadvertently glancing down to check I’m not wearing trainers.

My method of dealing with its aggressive honking, flapping and neck-wagging is to clap my hands and pretend to laugh at it. In fact, I give it as wide a berth as possible while maintaining some degree of human dignity; its beak is at crotch level and I’m not too keen to get into a fight.

The lanes in Spate

The notion that we have four seasons in England is a risible fallacy. In fact we have six: Spring, First Summer, Rainy Season, Second Summer, Autumn and Winter (or if you follow the Blodget method: Tally, Spate, The Time Of Mighty Remonstrations, Tack, Hub And Bolismus).

First and Second Summer can last anything from an hour to a fortnight each. Yesterday was the first day of First Summer (or Spate), a glorious bonewarming eye-screwing sun. I went for my lunchtime walk in my black Winter (or Bolismus) coat, but soon had to remove it and hang it artlessly over my shoulder with a hooked finger, much like a male catalogue model. Once or twice I also gazed across the valleys with one hand shielding my eyes so I imagine I cut quite a dash.

At the crest of the hill, beyond the piglets, I inevitably encountered the Local Character, on horse and with dog as usual. We had our best ever chat, covering the weather, the countryside and the MPs expenses scandal. The Local Character is not keen on electioneering. “Politicians and vicars are just the same, they only come to see you when they warnt something,” he grumbled enigmatically. I agreed.

As we talked, hoofthumps sounded in the field beside us and three horsey women came cantering along in the soil track parallel to the lane. The leading one called out an “Afternoon, M____” to the Local Character and then whipped her eyes guiltily down the hill. “Oh dear, I think we’re going to be told off”. A battered Landrover was roaring up the far edge of the field at terrible speed. The three horsewomen dashed onto the lane and tried to trot innocently.

“They’ll never get away from him at that speed,” said the Local Character. He was right; the Landrover caught them just at the bend in the lane, so we had a good view of the farmer leaning out of his window to give the trespassers an almighty bollocking.

“I always sticks to the lanes. There’s no need to roide on his land, though he’s alroight with me if I asks him cos my horse is old now. But I seen 'em roide roight in the middle of the field and go in circles. Not roight really."

As I walked back down the hill the Landrover passed me again. By the time I got to the field of the piglets the farmer was already there, lugging a vast plastic vat of whatever his pigs eat, working the land, sweating away in his place of business, over which the horsey women had trampled for their brief amusement. His name is Dave, I spend a bit of money in his farmshop. He’s a good man, if a touch lunatic about the eyes.

Approaching the Piglets

Scandalously, my Alpaca film only managed third place in the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way.

Banksy won it, of course, with a video of a day glo orange Guantanamo inmate holding a megaphone but with his mouth taped up, entitled An Obvious Gag.

However, such is the emotional and aesthetic force of my next piece, Approaching the Piglets by the Side of the Lane, that I’m considering saving it for the Turner. I won’t patronise you by explaining the meaning – it speaks for itself.

If ebony and ivory…

...can live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my pyaano keyboard, O Lord, why can’t these alpacas on the alpaca farm* down the road from my office?




This film is my entry for the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way. I feel that, in a powerful way, it explores issues around identity.



*not llamas on a llama farm down the road from my office, as I previously thought in my goddamn ignorance

Local characters

Gaw’s excellent and highly amusing ramble down the rural Welsh lanes of his youth reminds us that there’s nowt so queer as country folk. Is there an evolutionary analogy here? Don’t leave things in isolation too long or, unchecked and unbalanced, they turn very strange. Thus the kangaroos and platypuses of Australia; the giant tortoises of the Galapagos; and the people of Cornwall.

I have in my armoury an anecdote about a mad Cornishman my father and I encountered in a pub in Pendeen about seven years ago during our infamously slow, episodic and pub-interrupted walk “from Land’s End to John O’Groats” (so far we’ve made it to North Devon). It is an anecdote so powerful and irresistibly hilarious that it poses a hazard to the general public. Of the bloggers I’ve related it to at various times, Martpol collapsed into dangerous paroxysms, Nige was a giggling wreck and even The Yard, a man of carefully-honed aloofness and otherworldity, was unable to stifle a loud chortle. Unfortunately I cannot relate it on this blog, partly because you can’t give away all of your best material for free but mostly because it requires the use, suddenly and unexpectedly bellowed, of an Anglo-Saxon expletive – the very worst one in fact – which would contravene Think of England’s Profanity Policy. However, if you ever happen to meet me in real life, remind me and, so long as the proper health and safety measures are in place and everybody is sitting down, I will tell it.

In the meantime we must stick with our more genteel rural folk. Following the Zen Bones post some readers have questioned whether the Local Character really exists. I can assure you that while I made the Zen bit up, the man himself is perfectly extant and he really does have a big horse, and he really does look remarkably like the actor David Bradley, and he really is a former Leisure Centre Manager and he really does own a caravan near Exmouth to which he sometimes decamps for a week when the pressure of ambling around the North Somerset countryside gets too much.

And here, to prove that he isn’t a figment of my imagination, is a picture I took of him the other week after we’d stopped for a tolerably content-free chat, plodding off round the corner on his admirably ancient, infinitely patient, near mummification-ed, marvellous old horse.

Tracks

Even in this crowded country you don’t have to walk for very long to feel cut off from the reach of CCTV and the great swarming human ant colony.

A steep downhill path through Baron’s Wood connects two of my lunchtime lanes. Usually this path is a mudslide so walking it is impractical in office clothes, but on Tuesday everything was so frozen that I thought I’d give it a go. On top of the hard mud was a thick layer of untouched snow and tiny flakes were still falling. The wood was silent, leafless and had that strange perspective that comes from the contrast of dark branches covered in bright white snow. About halfway through the wood I suddenly felt a spine-shiver of extreme isolation. Tree stumps glimpsed in the middle-distance morphed momentarily into human shapes. In other words, I got the willies.

The willies soon passed but like most people I rather enjoy getting them, so yesterday I decided to walk through the wood again. There was another fresh layer of snow but this time, running down the hill and more or less following the path, was a single set of tracks made by a fox or possibly a small domestic dog off for a sneaky solo walk. I followed the tracks carefully, using them to guide me through the uneven ground to help reduce the risk of twisting an ankle. My concentration on the tracks prevented me from getting the willies, but when I looked back up the hill it occurred to me that at that moment I was the only person in the entire unimaginable vastness of space and time who knew that a fox or possibly a small dog had stepped in those spots that morning. Furthermore, any person or persons making the walk after me would see my size 10 footmarks mingled in with the pawprints and would likely bet their bottom dollar that the tracks were made by a man taking his dog for a walk. But, ha ha, they would be quite, quite wrong about that, because the tracks were made by a fox or possibly a small solo dog and by me at completely different times of day, so hard lines and put that in your pipe and smoke it you bloody know-it-all presuming fools!

Cold thighs

In Bristol, 1 January 2010 broke cloudless but with a lingering frost on the windscreens and grassy patches. Mine eyes haven’t seen the dark side of 9am for many a New Year’s Day, but having a five month-old baby wreaks havoc in all areas of life. Brit Jnr saw the decade in at midnight as part of her normal sleeplessness pattern. In theory, that should be the last New Year she sees in until the 2020s, which is an alarming thought.

2010 has thus far been cold, but countryside cold is of a different quality to town cold. This morning, as part of my post-Christmas exercise regimen, I arrived at the office early so as to take a brisk stroll around the surrounding lanes. Ice-stiffened and clogged with mist, the whole valley looks like the ghost of itself. After a while my thighs became cold beneath my trousers in a sharp stinging way which suddenly took me back to my primary schooldays in Portsmouth; a Roman Catholic job where we boys were required to wear shorts in all weathers. Mulleted footballers, cold thighs and the fizzy drink Quatro, that’s the early 1980s for me.

On the way back I spotted the Local Character’s poor old horse grumbling around in its field. Its back appeared to be covered in frost. Is this possible? Can horses frost up, like motorcars? I will have to ask the Local Character when I see him, which surely I will if he made it to the other side of Christmas. I hope you did too, and that you had a good one. Having begun 2010 with a bang I will almost certainly continue it with a few hundred whimpers. This was merely the first.

The Rolling Hill

So the next day, a Friday, braced and full of beans after Thursday’s thrilling blackberry-scrumping adventure in which I had unequivocally stuck it to The Man, I took a northward lane up the hill towards Lansdown.

By and by I happened upon the gate depicted below. I leaned there and gazed out across the valley.




The above picture deceives by flattening the hill. In reality, the gradient is fairly steep and – in a flash it struck me – eminently rollable. There was, I realised, absolutely nothing save societal convention, the fear of being observed and the odd cowpat to prevent me from leaping over the gate and tumbling, like a giddy child, down the grassy slope.

Once again I was faced with a test of my sense of adventure, of my capacity for devil-may-care spontaneity, perhaps even of my very manhood. I had passed the blackberry exam with flying colours, but would my determination to be master of my own destiny allow me to take this further, still more daring step?

I took a deep breath, and – do you know what I did? I thought ‘nah’, turned and walked down the lane, back to the office: a slinking failure, a simpering poltroon, a hollow man, a wretch.

The Warning Berry

This is a tale of thrilling recklessness. Last Thursday my lunchtime stroll took me, almost against my will, along lanes eastwards, eastwards, past the llama farm, down hill and up. In this direction lie the best blackberry bushes, though the season is on its knees and few edible specimens remain, just the odd over-soggy bloater or, saddest of all, the shrivelled black geriatrics, spent on the bramble, ripened and rotted without ever gracing so much as a crumble.

After a while the lane is abruptly interrupted by a locked gate (pictured below), which signals that hereafter it is a private road, and walkers may take themselves down a steep footpath to the right if they wish, or else turn back, or else go hang.




Sometimes I like to lean against this gate and ruminate, and I was doing exactly this when I noticed that just beyond it, in the private forbidden land, was a bramble adorned with the finest, juiciest-looking blackberries you could hope to see, certainly this late in the year. What a terrible waste it would be, I thought, if they were to shrivel unpicked and unappreciated. And all I needed to do to save them from this fate would be to jump over the gate and pick them.

So there I was, weighing up the ethics and analysing the cost-benefit ratio of a three-foot trespass, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something unsettling. Balanced on top of the gate was a very big, fat, dead blackberry. (If you click the pic to full size you can probably make it out, about halfway between the right edge of the sign and the end of the gate). The sight sent a chill down my spine. Obviously it has been put there deliberately, but to what end or purpose?

I could only think that it was a Warning Berry, fulfilling much the same function vis-à-vis would-be blackberry-scrumpers, as did severed heads on stakes for potential invaders of ancient citadels.

This, clearly, was a test of my sense of adventure, of my capacity for derring-do, perhaps even of my very manhood.

It was too much to bear, it had to be done. I looked quickly about, girded my loins and, as if in a dream, I clambered over the fence, snaffled three of the choicest fruits, reclambered, and marched westward, westward, home to the safety of the office, with pounding heart and Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law on my lips.

But how were the stolen blackberries, you ask? Reader, they were above average.