Following the feet

Even if March, a lunchtime walk beyond the first water meadow slightly dusts my feet. Mud is there to be found by the thirsty wasp, the probing beak of waterfowl, but the path is dry. The leaf litter rattles and pops in the sun and the occasional scurry of furred or feathered feet. Birds call out, love and alarm, threat and food. Great-tits saw, chiff-chaffs call eponymously, wrens laugh and trill in greater proportion to their size; crows crow and all over the woods, the nuthatches are whooping at each other like the ones in my garden. Amongst the brimstones I see a single white, a single brown (some sort of fritillary I wonder).

I pass the place I watched a chaser last year; this year just a stream, the pool deleted by waterway maintenance. Across the water meadow looking out for the swampy patches, flagged by soft rush, but finding only cracked mud. Black spiders run, avoiding my shadow; I avoid them in turn, twisting my footfalls to mimise the genocide. A ground beetle.

I pause on the following bridge to watch the still ditch. I hear gulls testing out the thermals over the wooded ridge, the alternating alarm and scalding of a wren, hoping to keep the destination for its full beak of moss a secret, but still in a hurry to build. The faint stink of still water frequented by livestock overcomes the air, which is otherwise almost undisturbed. The nearest hawthorn trees are marked with a green outline and further up the ditch is a willow with a straw coloured halo. These colour patterns follow the field edges and merge with the faint pink of silver-birch trees and the stubborn browns of the slower oaks and the beeches, still diplaying a crisp crop from last autumn. Towards the town and river a dog barks, its owner barking still louder, so I move back again, mindful of the spiders but watching the shape of two buzzards following the gulls and crows up in circles.

Joining the few open bluebells in the woods I find a single violet and, returning to fields and sun, a dead-nettle in bloom. The dandylions poke their golden muzzles up, measuring the year as surely as their later seeds will measure the hours.

First Magnolia

Unadorned yet with leaves, yet with tulip blooms revealing their inner layers, ready to point to the compass marks and every heading in between, an ivory feather duster palm greets the spring sunshine on my way to work, just as the camellias bring forth their third flush of pink and carmine. The best one in the village is just about to peak (again), but unusually has already started to grow out its shoots of paler green and fresh foliage. The bravest of all these plants began at Christmas, in that warm spell we enjoyed away from work and strolling and chasing children, who hoped, forlornly, for snow.

Now a variety of bees buzz in the garden, spiders are already looking round and ready to lay their silked eggs. The birds pair off by species. Robins are building by the conservatory, in a pile of pots; blackbirds strut and squabble; doves love and coo; a trio of coaltits confounded the still air on Sunday by the compost bins. Last afternoon, while washing up, a brimstone fluttered. Two weeks since, the pond started to gel with the spawn of frogs; the water's surface dances every time I pass en route to the shed with potential mates, bathing.

Saturday was beautiful. Saturday was gorgeous, down by the Solent, a few rounded sails passing in front of the needles. We visited the sailing club to sit or stand and chatter, laziness excused by refreshments. A very few were sailing, but spring cleaning and the first mechanical service of the year were being exercised out on the water; tenders plied and faces shone at the prospect of the start of water sports again.

A third flush of camellia flowers

I've been reading about the process of learning mandolin on the forums of mandolin cafe from a bunch of folk who have been before me, and had enough interest to pass on some tips. The first tip that struck me as useful was to actually know the piece that you are trying to play, and I was reminded how poorly I knew some of the tunes in the my Hal Leonard Mandolin Method Book 1. Much of the material is folksy or bluegrass, neither of which genre is particularly familiar to me.

So I sat down and actually listened to the accompanying CD, indeed I ripped it to my MP3 player and listened to it and - some of it I don't like much and much of it is played technically perfectly, with great detail and precision, but a total lack of soul. I realise that this is part of the teaching method, and that more advanced techniques bring the soul back in and add some enthusiasm and verve, but it left me uninspired.

I've tried stealing my youngest's guitar tunes, but they have a bad habit of hitting G and carrying on down. So I decided to buy myself a mandolin book that I could have a bit more fun with: Beatles For Mandolin. Lots of tunes that I know, that I enjoy and that I can listen to with pleasure. Like all Beatles transcriptions, I'm sure that there are detractors of these arrangements, but some are suitably simple and fun and they sound fine to my ears. For example, it so happens that the introduction to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is very simple for mandolin, but instantly recognisable. I'm racing through "Here Comes the Sun" at the moment, but the instrumental parts are too hard for me.

The second tip that came to my notice is that the strike on the mandolin strings is an oblique one. With the arm still and rotating the wrist, the pick is stroked across the strings at an angle. This gives a much more mellow sound; sounding the two strings clearly.

Other suggestions were to make every fret count (In other words to avoid playing lazily and carelessly) and also to play loudly - I think because it amplifies the errors.

Anyway, the consequence of these ideas and a new book and some practice, is that I'm having more fun and improving. I also treated myself to a Snark multi-instrument tuner, which is a gorgeous little toy.