As ever, Mother Nature had to have the last word.  No sooner had I posted about the mild January weather than she vented her rage by sending the biggest snowfall for years,  Roads blocked or treacherous, schools closed, birds seeking feeders...somehow I feel it's my fault.

Sheltered, as we are by the Lammermuirs, it isn't too bad for us though others have had a hard time

...and yet there is still a defiant primula supporting me.

 As quoted in October, Larkin's message to diarists was to observe "when the flowers come

  ...and when the birds go".

Duly noting this, I went out to observe and found things are not as they were for him in in the 1960's and 70's. 

 There are no seasons only variations of weather.   The flocks of fieldfares and redwings that feasted on the hawthorns and the infrequent, but recurrent gangs of waxwings on the cotoneasters seem to be a thing of the past.  No sign of them.  Whatever prompted their winter migration doesn't seem to be happening now. The days of seeing four members of the thrush family - fieldfare, redwing, song thrush and black bird all feeding on windfall apples in the garden at the same time are a distant memory.

Flowers.   Yes, we expect winter flowering jasmine on its trellis and in the hedge but winter flowering geraniums and fuchsias?   Strange times.

Medlar jelly - supplemental

 After my October post, I did manage to make a single jar of medlar jelly from the tree I discovered in the medieval Priory garden.   The  fruit bletted unevenly so my haul was even more diminished by the time of  cooking.   It had a vague, difficult-to-pin-down taste.  Pleasant, maybe slightly floral, certainly subtle.  I tried it as an adjunct to cheese, a simple Cheddar as that seemed to chime with the medieval vibe. It was a bit like quince but without the heavy scent.    Next year, I will try for a bigger haul of fruits.

Sailing to Byzantium

Continuing the poetic theme....I have always wanted to visit Istanbul or Constantinople.... remembering the playground riddles of seventy plus years ago

"Constantinople is a very big word. If you can't spell it you're a very big dunce"

Then, I had no idea where Constantinople was and, even if I had, I had no idea of travelling to it.  It was a place like Timbuktu, or Timbuctoo as I would have spelt it.   A story book city with a long name.

Now, the world has shrunk.

Now, I can travel wherever I wish.. almost.   Only Time is against me now so, like Yeats...

 ...therefore I have sailed the seas and come to  the holy city of Byzantium.

We flew but the destination was the same.

Istanbul pulsates with vigour.  Everyone seems to be on the move, like a human ant nest or beehive. The traffic is unbelievable, a constant stream of vehicles filling every street and lane and roadway, all going to...where?

                                                               No country for old men

The monuments of its the magnificent past sit unperturbed amongst the bustle.  

 The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are as serene as when they were built.  Unlike the poet, they are secure in their state and status... 

Monuments of unageing intellect

We sailed across the Bosporus from Europe to Asia and drank Turkish tea.  

We walked round the Hippodrome of Constantine the Great where charioteers had steered their horses round an incredibly tight circuit like Charlton Heston in the movies but for real.  We  marveled at the obelisk of Thutmose III, already three thousand years old when it was brought to embellish Constantine's city and its carvings as fresh as the day some long forgotten Egyptian craftsman with a copper chisel and wooden mallet created them.    A monument not to some Pharaoh but to the man who made it.

Yeats seemed to be searching for a means to achieve an after-life in art.

to be gathered into the artifice of eternity

The humble stone mason achieved it more than three millennia before him.

 

 

Ode to Autumn

 Continuing the poetic theme, a week ago, I turned the corner at the burn and saw...

not a Wordsworthian host of spring daffodils but an autumnal burst of autumn crocuses

Where they seeded from goodness knows but they must have been propagating year by year for decades just to give that splash of colour on a rainy October day.

As Larkin suggested, I'm recording "the day the flowers come....."

and "when the birds go..."

Geese flying in for winter.

A New Start

  

  I stopped writing my blog in 2020 because I thought I didn't have anything to say that might be of interest to anyone else.

Two novels and half a dozen plays later, I've returned to write for myself as an exercise, a mental workout, a whimsy, a sort of on-line reverie.

A programme on Philip Larkin, one of the greats of English poetry had me re-reading some of his work and I came across one I hadn't seen or didn't remember, "Forget what did".

"Stopping the diary

Was a stun to memory"

Whatever Larkin's reasons for stopping were, he seems to say that a diary shouldn't be a personal but the pages...

."Should they ever be filled

Let it be with the observed

Celestial recurrences

The day the flowers come

And when the birds go"

So maybe a blog of observations has some value.

                                                          Chaffinch on Blackthorn

A walk around the field edge fringed with a snowstorm of blossom on the bare blackthorn in spring now has sloes, blue-black with a dusting of bloom, on the branches.  Blackthorn, the witches tree from whence theycarved their wands, the tree of misfortune and magic but also the tree of protection that made a stout prickly hedge and from whose hard wood cudgels or shillelaghs could be fashioned.

Sloes have been found in the stomach contents of  Iron Age peat bog mummies.  They are so astringent that if you eat one you can't un-pucker your mouth for about twenty minutes.  So, did the ancient folk cook them or were they  consumed as part of a ritual?  Possibly they were eaten when they had been "bletted" by frosts. I've seen blackbirds pecking at crab apples after they were frosted when presumably they are less tart.

                                                      Crab Apples waiting for the frosts

Medlars are traditionally bletted before consumption.   I've never eaten a medlar but have discovered a tree in the Priory garden so will have a go when the weather changes.

                                                                       Medlars

The best thing to do with sloes is to make sloe gin.

We have an old recipe book that says -

Take 1lb sloes;1pt gin; 12oz sugar.   Prick the sloes with a hat-pin.  Put in a sealed jar, shaking every few days for three months.  Strain, bottle and drink at race meetings.  

Presumably National Hunt or point-to-point in the winter months.

May sayings

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.*

No doubt about that as the gales buffet the fruit trees creating a snowstorm of apple blossom. Our hopes for a huge crop of apples to puree and freeze or trade with the cider maker for a share of last year's output is diminishing with every blast. The plums may have suffered the same fate though they were further advanced and the gean tree has shed a load of nascent bird cherries. 

 What will the blackies and fieldfares do come Autumn and what of the wood mouse who lives in the hedge and whose winter stores of cherry stones I find, each opened like a can of beans to get the kernels ?

May is a spectacularly variable month for weather, scorching sunshine then squalls of rain and wind to follow within a day. No sooner have we got the sun-lounger out than we are putting it away before it tumbles in the wind like a huge daddy-long-legs across the grass.

Ne'er cast a cloot 'til (the) may is oot. **

Last week with its scorching days, proved this a truism as the may blossom burst forth in frothy splendour with their their strange musky sweet scent heavy in the hot sun then, capricious as ever the wind blew in from the North and changed the adage to its commoner interpretation - ne'er cast a cloot 'til May is oot. 

The Merry month of May

The merriest month in all the year is the merry month of May***

A time for courting or "winching" as the Scots would have it, a time for the maypole with its significance, a time for May queens, a time when the may and May become fused into one great celebration of love and fertility.

Near us is the village of Polwarth, remembered in verse by Alan Ramsay in his Polwarth on the Green.

    At Polwart on the green

If you’ll meet me on the morn

Where lasses do conveen

To dance around the thorn

There was a tradition of newly-weds out walk around the hawthorn tree presumably a folk memory of an old fertility rite. Fortunately, the tree still survives and a descendant tree has been grown along side its ancient sire.

The Polwarth Thorn

Young love, fertility symbolism, the queens of the May, the green man, dancing round the may pole.

No wonder that May is the merriest month.

Here we come gathering nuts in May

Nuts in May

On a cold and frosty morning

Yes there are some cold and frosty mornings in May but nuts? There aren't ever nuts in May. It would seem it's really "knots" in May. Knots or bouquets of may flowers collected as part of a children's game pairing boys and girls, an echo of an older custom of choosing a spouse and so we come round again to May being the merriest of the months!

Knots of may

Fertility rites, Beltane (La Beulltain) fires, leaping over the flames, feasting with special bannocks and possets, washing your face in the dew......
...and now we make do with a bank holiday!

*     W.S.
**   Anon
*** Ballad

in not so splendid isolation

It's a surreal world we are living in. Social isolation, communication by internet, conversations across the width of a road. This pestilence has changed the way we live, possibly for ever.

We are lucky, living in a small village in the county.

We can walk for miles in our permitted exercise time without seeing a soul and yet the spring continues to burst out in the gardens and woods unaware of our human restrictions. Unthinking about our problems, the rest of the planet just gets on with what it has always done.

Violets bloom on a bank, a buzzard screams in the sky, the summer visitors arrive, the warblers and the swallows come back to their old haunts, the badgers seek new setts, oblivious of us.

"that breathes upon a bank of violets"

Viola odorata

Our ancient village has seen it all before

There is a plague stone near the edge of the village. Almost four hundred years ago, the inhabitants of Northfield, then a small hamlet, now a large farm, were struck by an outbreak of plague and quarantined. People didn't really understand the germ theory but they knew that contact spread the contagion so they filled the basin in the top of the stone with vinegar and the folk from Northfield would put their coins in the vinegar to buy food.

Today, the local butcher brought eggs, fresh vegetables and fruit to the doorstep and we left the money for him in an envelope. Plus ca change!

Yet people are risking their lives to minister to the sick, to care for the vulnerable, and to treat and save the seriously afflicted. We appreciate them now but will we continue to do so when the plague is defeated or will we go back to idolising vacuous "personalities", sports persons and commentators, game show hosts and all their associated trivia and lavishing vast sums upon them when their contribution is, as we have discovered, at best borderline and mostly unnecessary. 
 We shall see.

*Twelfth Night  W.S.

A turn off the road

Yester Kirk

Graveyards are always worth a visit when stravaiging about the countryside. The older ones attached to a kirk never fail to provide a story or two (Blog 2/7/2015).

On the way back from a necessary but fairly uninteresting visit to Edinburgh, I thought I deserved a turn on to the road less travelled and left the coast and the dual carriage-way for the Lammermuirs.  

Sign posts

Following some very specific sign-posts, I arrived in Gifford, perhaps the birth place of that noted misogynistic Calvanist, John Knox, a claim that is also made for the neighbouring Haddington. What that railer against the "monstrous regimen(t) of women" would have made of the current equality of the sexes in all walks of life and not just politics, would be interesting.

A gravestone to a former minister, James Witherspoon, mentions his son, John, who was the only clergyman to sign the American Declaration of Independence.

A look round the quiet kirk-yard showed the prominence of the Hay family, the Earls and Marquesses of Tweedale as well as other little historical insights. Two, dedicated to officers of that forerunner of the global economy, the East India Company, gave a reminder of Empire and the Raj.

Stones with the names of Gian Carlo Menotti and his wife, Malinda lie side by side. 

 They lived in Yester House, once the seat of the Earls of Tweeddale. Menotti composed several operas but his most well known must be Amal and the Night Vistors, a children's Christmas opera specifically conceived for television.

Yester House

It is surprising where a five minute stroll can take you on a turn off the road.

Gifford is also the site of the Goblin Ha'  at Yester Castle, giving its name to a local hotel.  Mentioned in Marmion by Walter Scott,  it is a fascinating place but too far off the track to explore today.  I'll have to come back again.

Hairst*

We approach the autumnal equinox. The full moon of September, the Harvest Moon, has just waned.  Before artificial lighting, its glow allowed farmers to take advantage of a dry spell and harvest their crop well into the night.

Driving home under its light, I came across a newly dead fox, no doubt hit by a car. It looked young, not much more than a cub with its soft red fur and black ears and socks. Part of the dispersal as the young foxes move out seeking territories and mates for themselves, this one hadn’t developed the skills needed to survive alongside humans. Few of the local community would mourn the death of a fox but it did make me feel sad.

The next day, I did have a chance to save a furry creature from the wheels of the cars when I found a black hairy caterpillar, a hairy oobit, crossing the road and ushered it into the verge. Hopefully it will grow up to be, I think, a leopard moth.

The fields have a roughly shaved look, and the last of the swallows have departed. Only last week, the tail-enders of this year’s brood were sweeping over the stubble like tiny jet fighters and then, in one day, they were gone on a journey already taken by their parents to a place they have never seen. How do they manage it?

As they move out, the long straggling skeins of geese come honking in from the north.

The hedgerows are flushed with haws and berries awaiting the return of those other visitors, the redwings and fieldfares and. hopefully, waxwings.

Haws, Hips and Scrogs

The warm sun still brings out the butterflies and dragonflies around the loch but after it sets the twilight has the cold touch of coming winter. Once more, the year is on the turn.

*Hairst,  the Scots for autumn is synonymous with harvest. Hairst-home is winter.

Cornflower blues

After the visitation of the Painted Ladies in August, ( Blog 31/07/19 ) other butterflies having been appearing in the garden. The recent burst of hot weather has helped to bring out more species fluttering around the fields and by-ways

Following a path by woodland, I tried to capture the latest batch with the phone camera but their compound eyes mean that they are off as soon as you approach, dancing enticingly from plant to plant never settling long enough to get the phone close to them. (Memo to self - bring the SLR the next time.)

Green veined white on thistle

Comma

They did lead me to a field of pasture being munched by a contented flock of ewes and there, along the field edge, growing among the sheep sorrel, were cornflowers.

Once, these "weeds of cultivation"were common in cereal crops as their names suggest, - cornflower, corn spurrey, corn marigold, corn cockle. Now, due to the use of agri-chemicals, most are rare but their seed can survive for a long time as witnessed by the proliferation of poppies along any roadside verge after digging by local councils or service providers.

Cornflowers, like poppies, grew in the churned up fields of the Western Front in WWI and were adopted by the French as their flower of remembrance – le bleuet de France

Now, they are seldom found in Britain except in gardens as part of a "wild flower" sowing or where environmentally friendly farmers have reintroduced them.

Wild flower meadow

My few were almost certainly survivors from an older time still managing to set seed despite the munching of the sheep.

Sheep sorrel

Sheep sorrel is a food plant for the small copper butterfly. I saw none that day but worth another look (with a better camera!).

Odd how the flowers of remembrance the field poppy and the cornflower are scarcely to be found in the countryside where they were once so much part of the landscape - a lost generation of blooms.