Five on Friday

I’m writing this post as part of a blog link-in hosted by ‘I live, I love, I craft,I am me’*. The subject is gratitude and here are five things I’m grateful for.

Firstly, thanks to you for reading this blog. Writing (for me) is all about confidence and believing in what you’re doing, and every page view helps.

Thanks to The Literary Consultancy for arranging a second assessment of my novel (by a different person) free of charge because I’d found the first report so unhelpful. It brought my writing (apart from this blog) and hence my future to a juddering halt, but now things are opening up again.

Thanks to the police for taking seriously my complaint about the cage-trap on a neighbouring farmer’s land and thanks to a neighbour for being with me in this matter. (See my post 'Meltdown' on the subject.)

Thanks to the lockdown for simplifying my life and enabling me to see what really matters.

Which brings me to my final item. Thanks to Frog and Dog, my favourite companions, for being with me at this time.

The dog is there, honest. Can you spot her??

And I've just realised it's Saturday today, not Friday. Oh well.

*If you've accessed this blog through 'I live, I love, I craft, I am me' you may not be able to access the links. You'll need instead to visit my blog (www.belinda-whitworth.blogspot.com) directly. 

Horsetails and a walk 300 million years back in time

It all started on Wednesday when Frog, Dog and I went for a walk along a nearby canal. With the bird-scarer going off every fifteen minutes near home, Ellie was in a permanent tizz and it was becoming impossible to walk her around my usual routes. So we decided to go a little further afield.

    It was a glorious day and the air was full of what we would normally have called midges but decided to call mayflies as it seemed appropriate.

Swan and mayflies

Everywhere we saw baby water-birds.

I love the way these cygnets are copying their parent and preening themselves exactly as s/he is doing

Mallard pair and ducklings

A tiny black moorhen chick scooted across the canal into cover on the far bank, watched over by a noisy parent who continued screeching angrily long after the baby had disappeared into safety.

Along a shady stretch I saw my first orchids of the year, Early Purples with their leopard-print leaves

Early Purple Orchid (and Bluebells)

The leopard-print leaf of the Early Purple Orchid

and this exquisite plant which I’d never seen in Devon before but vaguely remembered seeing half a century ago on the chalky North Downs of Kent where I was brought up.

    ‘Woodruff’, I said to Frog, the name popping out of my inner directory without conscious intervention. What else could it have been called?

Woodruff

As we neared the end of the restored section of the canal, I saw this plant, with its feet firmly planted in the water.

The plant with its feet in the water 

‘Mare’s-tail,’ I said. Or was it Horsetail? I really wasn’t sure. I knew the names, but the plant I remembered lived on the land, in damp patches, like this one on the bank immediately behind the water-plant.

The plant on the bank

I also remembered Frog’s brother pointing out the land version to his young daughter and saying that it was one of the most ancient of plants, around at the time of the dinosaurs, and that intrigued me. The plants did look alike and they did both look strange - like bottlebrushes. Were they the same, with the names and habitats interchangeable? Or were they related? Or was something else entirely going on? I had to know. (I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to wild plants.)

Back home, I trawled through my reference books and the internet. And here’s what I discovered.

Mare's-tail and Horsetail

The two plants are completely unrelated, even though their appearance and their common names are similar. Even more confusingly, they have similar scientific names.

Mare's-tail
The water plant (the one with its feet in the canal) is indeed Mare’s-tail, as I thought. Its scientific name is Hippuris vulgaris, from the Greek ‘hippos’, meaning horse. In spite of its appearance, it’s a normal flowering plant, its tiny blooms appearing in June and July.

Mare's-tail, a flowering water plant

Horsetail
The land plant (the one on the bank) however is something extraordinary. It’s Horsetail, scientific name Equisetum from the Latin for horse-hair, and like Ferns it’s one of the oldest plants in existence with its origins 300 million years ago – way before the dinosaurs (who were around 230-65 mya).

    Once it was much much bigger and great forests of tree-like Horsetails covered the land. Scientists know this from fossils, and most coal is the fossilised remains of Ferns and Horsetails.
    The names, both common and scientific, of both plants (Mare's-tail and Horsetail) relate to the way their leaves grow which reminds those in the know of the way horse-hair grows.

    And even though Horsetails don't grow in water, they do like boggy ground - something else to add to the confusion.

Horsetail, an ancient damp-loving land plant

Horsetails don’t have flowers, since flowering plants weren't yet invented that long ago. Instead they reproduce by spores, like fungi (and Ferns).

And now, from pictures I encountered while researching, I had the answer to another mystery – these extraordinary things which Frog and I encountered in a boggy field near the sea in March (a few days before lockdown). We’d never seen anything like them before and we wondered if they’d dropped from outer space like triffids.

What are these weird things that Frog and I saw in mid-March?

They - it turned out - were the spore-bearing cones of this extraordinary plant called Horsetail. These cones appear in spring, before the main stems and leaves which were what I'd seen on the canal bank.

Now I find all that absolutely fascinating and I hope you do too. And I wish I could find a picture of a primeval Horsetail forest to show you, but not even Google can produce one. We'll just have to use our imaginations.

Here instead - and just to remind you yet again which plant is which as I know it's confusing and it took me a long time to get things straight in my mind - is a picture I took yesterday of some Horsetail (the ancient non-flowering land plant) in a field near the house. Yes, it's everywhere, now I look.

Ancient Horsetail, still here after 300 million years

NB1 Horsetails are poisonous to horses, considered Pest Plants in New Zealand, and sometimes invasive in UK gardens - so not everyone loves them.

NB2  Even more confusingly, there's a plant called Horsetail Restio which is no relation (or at least not closely related - if I find out more, I'll let you know). Its scientific name is Elegia capensis and it's much younger (dating to only 145-100 mya) than the Horsetails I'm talking about above. They have it at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

What's going on?

I hadn't seen a song thrush in Devon since the arctic winter of 2010 but last week when I was in my secret wood I heard a gentle tap-tap-tap. I wonder if that’s a thrush I thought. I kept as quiet as I could so that the creatures of the wood got used to me but nothing emerged that I could see. Then a few days ago I thought I saw a thrush in our garden. Unfortunately I didn’t have binoculars to hand so couldn’t be sure. Yesterday evening however, I saw the thrush-like bird again and was able to grab binoculars and verify that, yes, it was a thrush. And not one but TWO, feeding busily on our unkempt lawn. I was thrilled.

    Here’s a (not very good) picture I managed to take of one of them through glass.

And here, just for fun, is another not-very-good picture (again through glass) which I took at the same time of one of our great spotted woodpeckers, the female I think. They eat us out of house and home, which is why we put the cage around the feeder. As you can see, it hasn’t deterred them. The pair has been around for years, and in the summer they bring their scruffy youngsters to show them the foodbank.

Their latest trick is to hammer at the base of the aerial on the roof just above the bedroom – usually at about five in the morning. (We know it's them because Frog's seen them at it.) The noise is quite extraordinary – loud and metallic and reverberating - and we think they must be signalling as there can’t be much nourishment in a metal pole. I’m trying to persuade Frog to record it so that I can include it on the blog.

Incidentally, we’ve also had a green woodpecker in the garden recently – something I've only seen in August up until now, when they peck the lawn (for ants, says my bird book).

And when I walked into the village yesterday with Ellie there were more anomalies, one bird I haven’t seen since I was a child and another I did see in the winter in the field behind the house but have never noticed over the village before.

    We have to go that way at the moment as there’s bird-scarer somewhere near home and Ellie refuses to leave the garden except in the car, so I drive a mile or so and park next to the road. Ellie then heads off at speed in a westerly direction away from the noise, up a footpath which takes us towards the village. It’s a very pretty walk, but a lot of people use the paths so normally I avoid them.
    Here's a view of the village I took yesterday as we walked.

    Anyway, as we walked around the edge of the village - which was utterly peaceful, more so than the countryside - I noticed flocks of unfamiliar birds in the air. They were shaped like crows but smaller, and fluttered like skylarks but were bigger. One of them landed on the roof of a cottage I was passing and ducked into a nest under the eaves. As I watched, a lovely old lady came out of the cottage.

    ‘I see you’m looking at my jackdaw nest,’ she said.

    ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s what it is. I was wondering what all those birds were.’
    I waved at the air.

    ‘Them’s starlings,’ she said. ‘I watches them more’n I watches the television.’

What is going on? Is it the lockdown, and if so what is it about the lockdown? Is it us, noticing more, or is it the wildlife? And whatever it is, can we hang on to it as the lockdown lifts?

Time to grieve

Among the professional organisations to which I belong is the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. This, as you might expect, reimburses authors for the use and copying of their work. Last week’s email circular from the society included a link to advice from six writers (of television dramas) about staying sane during the lockdown.

You might think that lockdown is nothing new for writers. As Phil Ford says, for instance:

We’re used to isolation, and apart from the most fabulously fortunate, many of us are used to periods of not getting paid.

And Daisy Coulam:

You’d think writers would be in their element in these times. After all, we were working from home, wearing lounge wear and feeling anxious about work and our next pay cheque long before COVID-19.

Writers are suffering, however, just like everyone else, with the addition of writerly problems like working with children in the house and a short attention span because of anxiety. As one says, ‘Writing a couple of pages a day right now is a victory.’

Their advice includes the sorts of strategies we’re all using – routine, exercise, time outside, technology, comfort viewing – but the one piece that leaped out at me was this, from Paul Powell:

Allow yourself time to grieve the people/places/things you’re missing.

Some blogs – like I live, I love, I craft, I am me and Autumn Cottage Diarist – cheer you up. Others – like qualia and other wildlife and What’s cooking? – delve into both dark and light. And I’m going to admit here and now that I belong, I think, to the latter category. I see my blog as a place where I tell the truth, the whole truth (well, nearly), however difficult I find it to do so.

    I do try not to be depressing though, I do try to stop at a happy ending, but I can’t pretend that everything in my life is rosy all the time. I spend too much of my other life, my non-writing life, the one other people call real life, doing that (although I probably needn’t).

And when I read Paul Powell’s advice I realised that I could at last put a word to this heavy feeling I’ve been dragging around. It’s grief. And the thing I’m grieving most, I realised, is my novel. (See my post ‘Untethered’ for more on this, and maybe I’ll write in the future about why the end of a novel is a bereavement and why the lockdown makes it hard to move on emotionally.)

There’s a lot of pressure at the moment to be cheerful and make the best of things. After all, the people who are really suffering are the front-line workers. But, as someone brought up to believe that all emotions are wrong, just giving a name to my feelings, and giving myself time and permission to feel them, is helpful. And you can do it too if you want to. I give you permission.

It doesn’t mean I don’t count my blessings as well, or feel grateful for the work that’s being done by the few to save us all. I do so all the time.

Which is what we hope our new flag conveys, even though it’s different from the current norm.

Our new flag

Pointing and shooting

Hello to all new followers. You are very welcome. (I'm trying to track down your blog, if you have one, but it's not always easy. Do let me know by commenting.)

I’ve always taken photographs, ever since I received a Box Brownie one Christmas when I was about eight. I stopped in my forties because films were no longer available for my ancient camera but then started again around ten years ago, about the time I started this blog, because Frog managed to repair a broken digital camera that one of my brothers had thrown out.

I loved the simplicity of it. All you had to do was point and shoot and there was none of that traipsing to the chemist to have your films developed. I rediscovered my love of photography.

Four years ago my brother’s camera failed for the last time and I bought myself a new one. It had a few features but I’ve yet to investigate any of them. I still point and shoot.

I used only to snap people because pictures were in black and white but now I almost exclusively photograph nature. I take my camera with me whenever I go out for a walk as it helps me concentrate on my surroundings. Instead of being lost in my own head, I notice things.

And here are some of the things I’ve noticed over the last few days.

On Friday the bluebells in my secret wood were at their most beautiful. I wish I could convey to you their delicate hyacinth scent. Somehow Ellie has managed to get into nearly every picture.

Contrasting so well with the blue was this Yellow Archangel with its gorgeous custardy flowers. The plant is a sign of ancient woodland, so it's always thrilling to see it.

On Sunday, with the weather still balmy,  I was astonished to see this elder blossom in the field behind the house since the tree doesn't usually bloom until June.

On Monday in gentle drizzle, my neighbour's tumbledown shed captured my attention. I think they've been trying to remove the ivy, only to reveal the appalling state of the shed's roof and cob (mud) walls no longer protected by render. Those ivy stalks - like something out of a fairy tale - made me want to be a painter.

On Tuesday in the rain, these luminous newly-hatched oak leaves leapt out of the hedgerow at me.

This morning on my way up the hill, I stood underneath this battered Scots pine. I always do that because it lines up with a neighbour's old farmhouse and another Scots pine on top of another hill. I imagine it's on a ley, and that some of the power of that line might pass through me and help me be a stronger, braver, wiser person. (Well, I can keep on hoping can't I.)

And on my way home down another track I passed this froth of cowparsley, quivering in the wind and gleaming ultra-violet white in the sun.