Mad Englishwoman and Dog: January 2020

Wednesday 22 January 2020

The birds

I’ve been feeling ashamed of the previous post (‘Anger management’) and wanting to remove it, but Frog insists I keep it there. Instead therefore I’ve written this sequel.

The debris

On Monday I passed again the debris from the fencing business that’s piled on a nearby public footpath. I’ve been waiting recently to see if I could catch the man concerned and have a word with him, but I haven’t had so much as a glimpse of him, not even in one of the outsize vehicles of his that hurtle around the narrow lanes endangering Ellie and me as we walk. I’ve had enough, I thought. I’m going to report him to the council.

I decided to ring rather than filling out an online form as the behaviour didn’t fit into a ready-made category such as fly-tipping as the material's been there for ten years or so ever since the business arrived. I got through immediately. The woman I spoke to was utterly charming and professional. She took me seriously. She listened to everything I said and promised that the council would investigate, and as soon as I put the phone down I received an email acknowledgement of the call with an incident-report number.

I felt light-headed with relief. I was a real person after all. I did matter. I might even be able to have a small influence on the world. I didn't feel angry any more. I felt powerful.

The novel

It’s been a wonderful experience serialising my novel on the blog. I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re there in that I get a daily report on the number of page views and the posts that people read. Knowing that people – in quantity - are out there reading the novel has improved my writing a hundredfold and given purpose to my life. But I baulk at the thought of taking the novel further and publishing it as a book.

Do I really want to enter the commercial world? I’ve been there and I didn’t like it. I fear rejection and criticism. I don't want to be taken over by some publicity machine. I've seen (from my parents) how damaging success can be and I fear that success will spoil the life that Frog and I have together. I've seen the pressure that my sister, a successful children's novelist, is under, and I hate pressure of any kind with a vengeance. It makes me ill. (Yes, I know. I'm jumping forward a bit here.)

But I have to take the novel further, I thought on Tuesday. I have something to say and, as yesterday’s experiences proved, I need to be heard. Or at least, for my own sanity and physical health, I need to try.

So I spent the morning preparing material for agents and sent some off. Then Frog and I went out in the car to do some errands (Frog to B&Q for wood, me to the sewing shop for thread and buttons). On the way home I started to feel sick. I thought it was Frog’s driving but when we got back the feeling didn’t go away. I had to sit down quietly for an hour or so and do the ‘trackword’ in our new Radio Times. ‘D’you think this is the result of contacting an agent?’ I asked Frog. ‘Very likely,’ he said.

The birds

The sun was setting and I hadn’t been out all day because it was the dog’s day at the dogminder. I wanted to take some photographs of the debris in case evidence was needed. In spite of how I felt I put my coat on and hurried up the field behind the house – pasture and vineyard, cared for organically.

Even the debris had its charm in the evening light.

And as I walked back down the field a huge flock of birds swished and swooped over the field in beautiful free-form waves. I wonder what they are, I thought. (I know about wildflowers, but birds are a bit of a mystery to me.) I didn’t photograph the waves: I didn’t think either my camera or I were up to it and I wanted to concentrate on watching. But then the birds went to roost in trees in the hedgerow and I managed to get some pictures. I’ll zoom in on these when I get home, I thought, and try and identify the birds.

Roosting birds. (Note the elm saplings. Soon the Dutch elm disease beetle will infect them and they'll die and resprout - like phoenixes.)

More roosting birds

The birds sat in the trees chattering. The noise was extraordinary and I had another of those moments of joy. Even in mid-winter and in spite of everything we’re doing to the environment, here was so much life.

The drain and the nature reserve

You might remember from the previous post how angry I was that the week before last Frog, Dog and I were barred from a nature reserve on the Somerset Levels that we’d hoped to visit. On that day however we did find a walk up a nearby ‘drain’ (drainage ditch) and it wasn’t at all bad.

It was a beautiful afternoon and we had the path almost to ourselves.

On the opposite bank we could see my favourite habitat, scrub.

We could even see some reserve-y bits (old peat-working pools) through the trees.

As we walked back along the road a woman stopped in a car to speak to us.

‘Are the starlings here tonight?’ she asked excitedly. ‘Only I do an online update, and for the last few nights they’ve been here, at the reserve.’

We shook our heads. ‘We don’t know,’ we said. ‘We’re not allowed on the reserve.’

Cars were piling up on the verges and crowds of people were filing through the gates of the reserve.

I knew about the starlings on the Levels, about their breath-taking displays as they came in to roost at sunset. I knew people came from miles around to watch them and I’d always looked out for the flocks as we drove home after days out but had never seen any myself.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted to see the starlings like that anyway,’ I said to Frog as I stomped up the road towards the carpark. ‘I hate crowds and I never want to do what everyone else is doing. And, anyway, I don’t think we should have to drive to see nature. We shouldn't have to keep nature in 'reserves'. Nature should be there for all of us, all the time.’ (I was getting into one of my rewilding rants.)

The sign

Sitting at my computer after my walk up the field, I zoomed in on the birds and started to feel a trickle of excitement. Judging by their shape, size and colour as well as the 'murmuration' I'd heard, there was only one thing they could be.

We don’t normally see starlings where we live, but according the bird book I was reading huge flocks of foreign birds arrive from the east in winter. This was obviously what these were, brought perhaps by the cold weather. And it was only by chance that I was in the right place at the right time as normally, when I have the dog, I walk in the morning.

So I’d seen starlings after all. I’d had my own private display.

It seemed like a sign, a reward.

Monday 13 January 2020

Anger management

Frog and I have become involved in watching a Channel 4 programme called SAS: Who Dares Wins in which women and men who hope to join the SAS are put through gruelling physical and mental tests. Last night’s episode concentrated on aggression and anger - when to use them, when not to use them, and how to switch them on and off. I was riveted.

In my post ‘A solstice walk’ I wrote about how women aren’t supposed to be unhappy. In my experience they’re not allowed to be angry either. Of course we women do get angry, and in a lot of cases we have more right than men to do so, but because we have no way of expressing it we turn it against ourselves. And internalised anger is I think behind the migraines I’ve suffered for forty years.

My internalised anger is specifically against men. Of course I get angry with women too but that anger doesn’t last. Sometimes I can talk to the woman in question, sometimes she apologises, sometimes it just fades with time. But with men the anger festers. It never leaves me. I’m still having imaginary arguments with my father even though he’s been dead for a decade. And I think this is because the fight is unequal, because I have a sense of powerlessness, because I’m frightened of what will happen if I do fight back.

Almost every day it seems I come up against some man for some reason or other, and add to the load I carry.

There is the man who has set up a fencing business one field away from us. Whenever he sees me he finds something about me to criticise. I hate him for this, for his fences that are enclosing the hedges around here, trapping wild animals and me and defacing the countryside, and for the overflowing skip, concrete rubble, rolls of chicken wire, rusty metal gates and general litter lining the footpath opposite the gate to his yard that I walked past this morning.

Then on Friday there was the man who stopped Frog and me and told us we couldn’t walk on the Avalon marshes nature reserve to which we were headed, and for which we’d driven an hour and a half, because we had a dog with us. I did have an argument with him at the time, pointing out that according to the Ordnance Survey map I was holding in my hand the route in question was a long-distance public path. ‘Oh, we don’t bother with the map round here,’ he said. I’m still arguing with him too, in my head.

I used to campaign and I’ve always written – letters, articles, books. But I’m not sure that any of it was ever heard, or made a difference. And I certainly don’t feel any better. I do affirmations, I try to forgive. But I’m obviously not very good at either as nothing changes in me.

Perhaps I should take a leaf out of the book of one of Frog’s nieces who does weight training and can lift a heavy suitcase above her head. Or that of the woman in the programme last night who was made to box with one of the male recruits and in doing so healed some of the mental damage inflicted by a violent partner. She fought back. She landed a punch, and she was praised for it.

I’m fed up with this anger that comes between Frog and me. I’m fed up with migraines. I’m fed up with the world being run by and for men. But what’s to do about it? I’d love to know.

Saturday 4 January 2020

Norway update: Högfeldt, Lidberg, Larsson and a vimpel

In the summer of 2018 Frog and I travelled to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother, to attend the seventy-fifth birthday of my aunt who lives there.

When I was a child we used to travel there as a family every summer and in my teens I went there several times in both winter and summer to stay with relatives, but I hadn’t been back for nearly half a century.

In my youth I took the country for granted but now I was bowled over by it – its natural beauty and wildness, the lack of commercialisation, the sense that here was a fairer and more egalitarian country than poor old Britain.

Since then, having decided that Frog and I are too old and poor to emigrate, I’ve been grasping for any connection to that gorgeous land, in particular two Scandinavian artists Robert Högfeldt and Rolf Lidberg.

Robert Högfeldt and Rolf Lidberg

Högfeldt (1894-1986) was a Dutch/Swedish cartoonist, a print of whose hung in the family kitchen for as long as I can remember.
Swedish Lidberg (1930-2005) is best known for his enchanting troll paintings, two small posters of which Frog and I had come across and bought long ago.
With our new enthusiasm for all things Scandi, we began to hunt for proper prints of both artists but to date all we have found is two postcards, one of which arrived in the post this morning. So here they are.

First, one by Högfeldt entitled ‘Glädje och Sorg’. ‘Og’ is Norwegian for ‘and’, so ‘och’ may be the Swedish equivalent, which may mean that the other two words are names. Are they people Högfeldt knew, one wonders.

'Gladje och Sorg' by Robert Hogfeldt

The card below (published 1984) is called ‘The Bookworm’ and is from a watercolour by Lidberg.

Scandinavian artists, troll paintings and children's books, Nordic folklore

'The Bookworm' by Rolf Lidberg

Judging by the delightful write-up on the back of the card, Lidberg was a much-loved man.

The back of the Lidberg card

Carl Larsson

And while on the subject of Scandinavian artists, here are two cards from a box that my brother J found in my mother’s effects and gave to me. By the Swedish Carl Larsson (1853-1919), they are perfect portrayals of the relaxed prettiness of Scandinavian interiors, and remind me of my aunt’s house. The original watercolours can be seen in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum.

Scandinavian artists, traditional Nordic interiors

'The Studio' by Carl Larsson

'Cosy Corner' by Carl Larsson

Incidentally, my aunt is now apparently plotting her eightieth-birthday celebrations. Whatever they are, I hope Frog and I are invited.

The vimpel

And here is the vimpel (the triangular version of the Norwegian flag which we discovered flying from so many houses during our visit), which Frog bought when we were in Norway and which is now flying proudly from our new flagpole.