minuet

I was not driving this morning up the hill, past the last pig field, now fallow. So I watched the standing crows suddenly switch from random to ranked as we drew perpendicular to the low, wide furrows left after the harrow had been dragged out from the road and back. Each bird stood, for best prospect, on the local maximum, the crowns between the dips.

I had a gentle weekend, a stroll around the charity shops while youngest son partied on the beach; a steady, measured clip of the front hedge - looking carefully for the hidden form beneath this year's long tresses. The form I found was flatter than the last two trims, with just a few hollows where the cows had chewed out the thornless patches. I read the children's books and cooked and washed up and relaxed.

The music is still here. Dried out, my finger tips feel like someone else's. I don't think I'll read braille left-handed now. I find that, instead of finger tip pain, it is finger tiredness that stops me from mandolin practice; that and consideration for my fellow humans.

The hedges, the trees, seem to have recovered from the drought. Under the tall herbaceous stems in the borders though, the earth is nearly bare except for a few drawn stems of grass. No mosses cloak it and, yet, no seedlings sprout. The lawn has kept to green, fruit swells and, in the tubs and lined frames, the ponds and pools are near the brim. My fish, I'm sure, has not survived the December weather, but water will always bring forth life of its own accord. The tadpole pond still has some tiny froggish tadpoles, but we also found, on Sunday, delicate ones with front legs dominating; common newts. We had suspected that we had eggs, but we hadn't had newts breeding there before this year.

I am a troubadour

I was considering a new blog for a new diversion in my life, titled, "I am a musician". This was due to the purchase of a rather sorry mandolin and an intention, after all my previous abandoned efforts, to learn to play a musical instrument. I was prevaricating over the blog idea, because I felt almost certain to fail in this endeavour and so, to draw attention to my failure in public would seem a foolish undertaking. As things have panned out, I began to play a little two weeks ago, slowed largely by the pain in my fingers, only to discover, following an accident on Saturday one week ago, that after all, I was a parent and not a musician at all.

Our day had begun a little slowly, but the list of things to do was begining to stretch credulity, so we set out around 10 in the morning to begin. A couple of hours of activity at a local scouting centre, before a trip to the coast to watch the round-the-island boat race getting blown over, I thought. Just ten minutes of fun in to the day and eldest son fell off an obstacle. I sauntered over, expecting a winded child.

Eldest son was in pain, a lot of pain and I could tell, from my own experience that it was probably not cracked rib pain. Possible bowel injury I thought loudly, but to myself. Certainly worth a check up at A&E. And so it was that we waited in A&E for 3 hours, and then we were seen, and then my week began. We stayed a week in hospital, son and parent. I escaped most afternoons to keep the office work ticking over, returning for medical progress reports and to sleep over, the unsteady rhythm of worried parent and boy under a frequent observation routine. The staff in the children's ward were supreme, I couldn't have wished for better care or information, but in a curious way it was the other parents that brought the most comfort from the stress of our shared situation. I had a memorable and highly theraputic chat one evening with a Mum whose daughter had landed heavily off a rope swing. Just ten minutes in the tea room, sharing our stories of what terrible parents we were and how it had brought us to that place.

Son is recovering from, as it turned out, a ruptured spleen. A week of bed rest and pain control in hospital, a slow return to mobility this week and then a slow, careful return to normality. Three months before contact sports can be considered. I have to smile a little at this final milestone because eldest son has two brothers, which by themselves constitute a frequent contact sport - they have been asked to tone it down a bit, and perhaps they will remember for a few days at a time.

I am back to work and, just a little, back to being a musician. My fingers are still sore, partly as a result of the unaccustomed fretting, but magnified by the poor instrument which, as a result of a bent neck, has a rather high action. The E strings are 100th of an inch steel, stretched hard and deliver a cutting action to the finger tip. I'll stick with the exercises a while I know, but will I find the energy to practise? I never did before, but then I never had an instrument to call my own before. There are three guitars in the house, amongst other things, but none belong to me. The mandolin is comfy, it is petite. I can sit in my crowded office at home and transpose Internet guitar tabs onto it and the noise needs hardly pass the door. Old, bent and cracked (and poorly played) it may be, but I like the tone of the mandolin. I remain a musician and a parent for now.

Dry, but springy.

Last Wednesday, the 11th of May, I ate the first wild strawberry from the front garden. A taste of summer in what is supposed to still be spring. A dry spring it has been; a day of rain since I last wrote.

Foals are blooming in the hedgerows. Two weeks ago, on the scenic route to work, I saw a total of four foals. I can see as many in the first two miles now. The mares are grateful for the relief, the weight off their legs, still patient to let the new life suckle. The foals are in that flaky phase of existence, as likely horizontal as standing and feeding. They stay close, unready yet to threaten passing cars.

I had a slightly frantic walk on Friday evening, on my way to collect the boys from their evening out. I left myself a little too short a time to walk a circuit on my way there. Across the green and thence into the thin strip of woodland that follows the Western boundary hedge. I saw deer, I got within a tree's length of a cuckoo (I must have heard a round half-dozen calling on my way). I passed a field of 50 rabbits and then, following its side hedge, saw a fox duck through the wire part way up. After four miles, I arrived home with sons, having paused only for an ad-hoc game of blind-mans-buff, in just over the hour.

Over the weekend, in our garden, I sawed fallen hawthorn. Eldest child found a slowworm, youngest thinks he was buzzed by a rose chafer. I saw the first holly-blue of the season. On the drive, the cotoneaster is feeding the new crop of bumble-bees.

Speckled play-off

For a few years, in my blogs and journals, I have felt the rising sap of spring force its way up from my toes to drip gently across my writings and typings, but this spring, exciting though it has been, has gone unmarked. This is not the time to question why, but I feel it may be time to catch up a little.

Spring started, by my recollection, about 7 weeks ago, although I've heard reports of earlier brimstone butterflies which are one of the earlier heralds. I can only claim to have seen brimstones, small whites and a distant brown of some sort so far, but there have been quite a few moths, most of which I have no chance of identifying.

At the Easter weekend we had the pleasure of watching a couple of dragonflies emerge from one of our lilly ponds, without looking it up I would guess they were broad bodied chasers. The ponds also contain tadpoles (mostly frogs I expect) frogs, common newts, dragon and damsel larvae, stone-fly larvae, pond skaters and innumerable small floating and wiggling creatures, including shrimp and leech. We were also visited in the garden and the conservatory by a hornet, one of the early brood even, not just a queen.

On Thursday last week, my slow walk was interrupted briefly to watch the hunting of a slowworm, on the verge by the local football ground. I've seen them there before, but not since the field was re-fenced. Good to see the habitat still suits these golden reptiles.

The apple trees have largely lost their blossom now, although the may is glowing white still. Tree canopies are expanding and glowing verdant greens.

Blackbirds, again nesting in the garage ivy have brooded and been destroyed by a cat (again), jackdaws are in the chimneys and starlings in the eaves. I have seen swallows and heard a cuckoo, an unusual visitor to the village.

The village is gently overrun by the first lapping wave of tourism, the usual contrived flood has been allowed to cross the village road, by someone's judgement then we expect no more frost. Litter has begun to bloom again in the hedgerows, more than is usually dropped by the college crowd.

I saw my first foal a week and a half ago, and a donkey foal a week ago. The cow herd I pressed through this morning on my way to work had a number of small calves. Some of the lambs, I'm sure, have already been dressed in mint.

The weather has been dry for a couple of weeks. Monday was so warm I wore shorts, to the beach, but I was not as brave as my two youngest boys to enter the water. The waves waxed and waned in height, from a gentle lap to six foot high crashing monsters that chased the rising tide-line up the beach and surprised the younger members of a few families, dampening the trouser legs of their guardians and causing splashing dashing into the shallows to retrieve small buckets and floating spades. Th ice-cream choice was a hard one. Rain is now promised, and not just to wet William's wedding, but I hope, to bring a little relief to the stressed parts of the garden flora and the forest trees and heaths.

I saw, from the kitchen, a speckled wood and a new-fledged robin. Speckled play-off.

I return to people

I see I have missed blogging in a headlong rush of panic that dissipated last Thursday lunchtime, when the capability to deliver my urgent work arrived almost simultaneously with the knowledge that the customer was not ready to receive it. Deadlines still loom, but not in a sleep disturbing way, no longer to a frantic rhythm, just a small rush.
I was, anyway, going to take a day off on Monday this week. A sad excuse to catch up with family members presented. A sincere feeling of sadness, even though in the presence of slight hypocrisy on my part, shared in a religious structure, and a spot of gardening up on a windy hill. Then an opportunity to mourn, chat and celebrate in various measures.
Most of those present have not been seen for ten years or so. A cousin, who I last saw at his wedding, arrived with three children. I caught up on careers, classes, qualifications, subsidiary matches, hatches and other dispatches without once mentioning the fact that people had grown since we last met. How I have missed these people in the chaos of bringing up small children.
The weather was disturbed. Not a dignified frozen and still event, but a wind-swept, rustling, coat flapping one. The earth was damp and the trees shook. The vicar, her back to the storm, flapped like a tethered magpie. The people though, remained calm, unflappable, dignified. Quiet as, at times.
Having gone North with my family, I returned with my sister, and a train. A small entertainment, a distraction, for the weekend, was the procurement of cheap rail tickets for Monday evening. I booked these on a tablet device, eyes straining in the write-only form font, but made the simple error of using a debit card which the ticket machines could not read. The train-line's technical support proved pathetic, but, fortunately, the desk clerk was up to such a small challenge. We got our cheap tickets, and they were accepted by sundry machines along the way. The cross-London route surprised me, because I had forgotten it. A route I knew intimately only (only!) 14 years ago, the corridors, the platforms, which carriage to board. It soon came back and with such speed I had to wait an hour for my onward connection. Time at least to sit, to chew, to reflect and to smile about the people again.

cold and dry or warmer and wetter?

Since we are having a proper winter this year, the debate about which sort of inclement weather is preferable is alive and well in the kitchen at work. I have always been something of a fan of warm damp weather, in fact I prefer it to sunny weather in the summer. I love the long drizzly days when the rain is so light,and the temperature so balmy, that it is possible to walk around without actually getting any wetter than is comfortable.

Winter wet though is a different kettle, but with temperatures above freezing I still think it is better than the sort of weather that makes your nose hair tingle with the first deep breath of the morning. (I will make exceptions here for the occasion of skiing holidays)

Wednesday last week was the first day of car ice scraping for a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks in which my preference for water over ice might have been tested somewhat, were it not for the fact that none of my journeys by car were actually interrupted by impromptu rivers, even if the views were dominated by lakeside scenes more than usual. My longer route to work was visited by a half acre of water on one side of the road, at a point usually blessed by a bridge, unfortunately at this time the water levels differed by about a yard from one side of the bridge to the other. Quite a pretty lake, with an unusually large number of trees for a regular lake.

As I stood and scraped on Wednesday, I was reflecting on the mild atrophying of my scraping muscles, and the comparative ease of running, head down, to the car and jumping in, damp. The change from wet to cold occasioned a few slippery patches on the way, including the return of a width of frozen stream across my route, where someone had made an unfortunate dive into the hedge back last January. I turned on to the lane that passes my workplace thinking that it might be a bit tricky and aware of the familiar memories of the sorts of things that had gone wrong on this stretch of road in previous years. I was somewhat relieved that none of my colleagues were meeting me, having been forced to turn round due to accidents, as has happened before. Nearly at work, I arrived at the scene of someone else's accident. They had had the decency to have most of the accident on the verge, although there was an inconveniently parked wreck and a lady standing on the verge appearing to wish to take off as she waved both arms in an attempt to encourage cars from both directions to slow. I concluded, from an eye witness account of the event I heard later, that the problems had begun for this particular driver when she herself had been forced to slow down, on the regular stretch of sheet ice that forms on that particular bend, by an oncoming vehicle.

An early start on Thursday might have made me reconsider my preferences. I drove across a quiet and flat part of the forest, with the full moon hovering over the horizon to the West, as the rising sun slowly filled a pool with molten lava in the East. As the dawn advanced and the moon sank, the thin clouds in the East turned from red to orange and the con-trails lit up like flying rapiers, short, pointed and glowing with metallic reflected light. I suffered a moment of disbelief listening to the local radio traffic report, with the news that cars were finding trouble in the icy conditions and that the A35 Dorchester bypass was slow due to a car spinning on the Puddletown slip-road. This message was delivered completely straight, but I laughed for at least 5 minutes.

Friday made it a hat-trick of window scraping, but with promises of a warmer weekend.

Did Pigs Fly?

The weekend after the first snow in December, after a couple of days carrying a thermos flask in the car and wearing sensible shoes, I took to my bed for the weekend with, largely, exhaustion, but also general muscle and head ache. I had a day off work on the Monday, because, as I told myself, I needed a weekend, after the one I had been through. I discovered quite quickly though, that having enough crud in my lungs to drown in was a good excuse too. On Tuesday, feeling slightly better, I went to work. Now really I was in work because I had a deadline for the Friday, but my symptoms were quite bearable and I was expecting to improve, thinking I was over the worst. Wednesday I felt no better and on Thursday I gave up pretending to work half way through the afternoon and went home again. My intestines had a couple of days off and I was exhausted, hot and headachy; another weekend in bed.

Since then, I have steadily recovered. December was not good for energy, I vegetated the evenings away. It was not really until the Christmas break that I finally got to feel human again. So was it flu? was it even swine flu? I'm reasonably certain I've not had anything that would grant immunity to H1N1 in the past. I know one or two people who've had swine flu diagnosed and that have been very ill with it, particularly with secondary chest infections. I was as ill as I've been in ten years.