This morning I made a start on reading ‘Madame Bovary’.
Later, in a successful bid to avoid the rain, I walked down to The Splash and back via the church footpath. The sunshine and showers nature of the day and the speed of the wind produced ever-changing skies, bright blue clouding over in white and grey, and vice versa, with the sun regularly emerging and lending everything still bearing raindrops a brilliant sparkle.
John was busy clearing the elder, that I had thought was a buddleia when I noticed it on 28th January.
Wherever you venture into the forest at the moment, you are likely to come across scatterings of what look to me like crab apples, 
like those on the bank of the stream flowing under Running Hill. Now I think about it, they are almost always near streams. I can only imagine someone is feeding the ponies in this manner when they pause their cropping to slake their thirst.
One stream the banks of which are not so bestrewn is that which runs beneath the concrete bridge of The Splash ford. 
There, the water flows fast enough for a build-up of spume that echoes the lichen on the surrounding trees.
Snowdrops have pierced the sward of All Saints Churchyard, and another riven yew rent in two has somehow spared the gravestones between which part of it has fallen.
In fact the rain held off for the rest of the day and Jackie drove us out to Hengistbury Head, making this a two walk day for me. I walked along the beach, up Warren Hill and back along the cliff top to the car park cafe where Jackie sat with her puzzles, cake, and coffee.
This was the roughest sea and fiercest wind I have yet experienced on the Dorset coast. Most exhilarating. Occasionally the incoming surges from the ocean clutched at my feet.
On the shingled edge of the beach I watched the frequent waves rolling towards the breakwaters and turning to cream as they careered up the sand and flung what my Japanese friend Rie Sug tells me her compatriots call sea flowers against the rocks, sending them furling and unfurling along the beach. Our word spume, for this foam, is rather less attractive than the oriental one. This version made the same phenomenon seen at The Splash this morning skimpy by comparison. Rather like comparing the power of a full symphonic orchestra with a piece of gentle chamber music.
The wintry sun that had seemed quite powerful on the occasions it peeped out this morning, when compared with the other elements in play in this wilder environment, seemed rather weak.
Walking along the cliff top I was intrigued by a woman’s voice berating what I assumed to be a recalcitrant child. Peering down I saw that the miscreants were a pair of red dogs.
They seemed to have got the message and were allowed to romp ahead.
After I joined Jackie she drove us along the coast road to Boscombe. We had a brief sojourn in a car park at Southbourne, where beach huts clung to the side of the cliff, as we watched the sun doing its best.
We turned round at Bournemouth and headed for home where we enjoyed another very tasty dinner. This consisted of roasted chicken thighs marinaded in lemon juice, coriander, parsley, and a chilli; accompanied by roasted red and orange peppers, onions and baby tomatoes; cauliflower cheese; mashed potato and swede; and broccoli. Jackie drank Hoegaarden whist I drank Lidl’s Bordeaux Superieur, so the drinks choice was back to normal.
Tag: yew
A Ring Of Truth
Early this morning Jackie, Don and I shopped in Acres Down Farm shop and went on to All Saints Church, first described on 24th December last year. While Jackie diverted to Minstead Village Shop, Don and I wandered around the churchyard in bright sunshine, before we all three explored the inside.
Particularly interesting to our friend was the ‘blasted’ yew, a seven hundred year old tree that fell apart some years ago and regenerated itself.
The wild flowers now in evidence include clover , dandelions, daisies, and buttercups.
When we returned, I decided to tackle the problem of a rejected e-mail password. This time I got BT’s representative on the telephone to reset a completely new code. As usual, Jackie being the primary account holder, he needed to speak to her first. Unfortunately he got the wrong end of the stick and changed her password. This required putting right and involved a box filled with ‘funny writing I can’t read’. All this took time and I had to interpret the ‘funny writing’, fortunately getting it right. The man kept having to put us on hold and check with his supervisor. Eventually he returned to me and reset the replacement password. It worked. For about an hour. Then the new one was rejected. I have now come to the conclusion that my BT Yahoo account has been well and truly hacked. I can’t face it any more at the moment. So don’t send me any e-mails.
My head still full of the computer problem, I sat in the garden watching the birds with Don, whilst Jackie prepared the evening’s barbecue. The company and avian interest helped calm me. Don is one of three friends I have who are pretty knowledgable about birds. He helped me distinguish between the various tits who visit the feeder. 
I observed that it was becoming possible to identify birds some distance away on the lawn by their outline shape, their posture, their gait, and how they hold their tail-feathers. Apart from the pied wagtails, the blackbirds brought me to this conclusion.
Talking birds with Don, it was natural for me to mention my friend bo Beolens, who has written a number of bird books and who, as Fatbirder, runs an international birding website. This turns out to be one of Don’s favourites on his computer. 
I proudly brought the site up on screen and showed him the Lesser Antillean Bullfinch which illustrates bo’s Barbados page. The photograph was taken by me in Barbados in 2004, when I was there to see Sam arrive at the end of his Atlantic row.
Late in the afternoon Becky, Ian, and Flo arrived with Scooby and Oddie. We then enjoyed the various sausages, chicken tikka masala and array of salads Jackie had produced in the kitchen. That seems to me to be the sensible way of preparing a barbecue.
On 28th March I described how Matthew’s dog, Oddie, always dives into my chair whenever he has the chance. Because Mat and Tess are on their way to visit Sam and Holly and their children in Croatia, Becky is looking after Oddie and therefore brought him with them today. Would you believe it? Even in the garden he nicks my seat.
It was natural that with Becky and Don together, we should tell some Lindum House stories. One of today’s was of the intruder. One balmy evening as we sat in the snug watching television, about twenty years ago, we heard someone coming down the stairs. As usual in the summer, we had left open the double doors at the front of the house. A young man was then seen to walk past the window, making his way to the bottom of the garden. I set off in pursuit. He started running. So did I. After him. He began to climb the fence between us and the Parletts in Lindum Street. I grabbed him, pulled him down, and frogmarched him into the house. Calling out to Jessica to telephone the police, I sat on him at the foot of the stairs.
I soon realised he was drunk. He kept going on about a fishing contest with the Working Men’s Club. After the event, he and his friends from Grimsby had gone off drinking in Newark. He was making his way back to the Club. His team coach was parked outside in the road. It dawned on me that all this had a ring of truth. It would be easy enough for me to take him out to check on the coach. I asked Jessica to cancel the emergency call. She attempted to do so, but it was not possible. It stands to reason, really. The uninvited guest could have been standing with a gun to my head. Actually he was lying between the bottom step and my embrace. For the whole forty five minutes it took for the officers to arrive.
As, after satisfactory explanations, I took him up the drive to the open gates, down the path towards us walked about five of his mates. They had made the same mistake. And sure enough, there, on the road between us and the Club, was a coach. Lindum House, you see, was a Victorian reproduction of the former grand Georgian house next door that now hosted social activities of the town’s working men.
‘That’s Not A Yew Tree’
On the forest strip alongside our Upper Drive, as I set off to walk via Furzey Gardens road; the ford; and the footpath to All Saints church, I met the unusual sight of four foraging ponies. 
Their sunlit-dappled coats blended in so well with the trees that it was only the swish of a rebounding, suddenly released, holly breakfast branch that alerted me to the presence of a brown one that could have been a trunk or a shrub, or both. Because the church footpath would require the use of wellies I was suitably attired to venture into the mud and heaps of soggy leaves to wander among the animals who actively ignored me, simply getting on with their meal. 
Just as the ponies’ camouflaged coats reflected the strong sunshine, the steaming swirls of their breath were demonstrative of the temperature. It is amazing to me that three rain-free, sunny, days have been enough to dry their fur and enable them to shake off the mud that matted it. Some pools nevertheless still contained cracked ice.
At the top of its hill the churchyard basked in sunshine, although its carpet of spring flowers was frosted. I wandered among the memorial stones, noticing that many were now so worn as to be illegible. The more recent ones told a story. 
It took Sarah Woodhouse, for example, exactly twenty years, to lie again alongside the contemporary husband, James, who had accompanied her in life. Long widowhoods seems the lot of so many women. 
A rosary is reflected in the brass plate attached to the wooden cross still marking the grave of Louisa Wells who died just four months ago. A sheet of paper attached to the reverse asks that the myriad of pots of flowers should not be removed as the writer will keep it tidy. A well-stocked vase on the recent grave alongside this one had toppled over. I picked it up, rearranged it for balance, and wedged it in the loose soil. I was struck by the number of vases of flowers that marked this cemetery.
As I approached the lych gate to let myself out of the churchyard, I noticed a gentleman down the lane leading up to it, photographing something directly into the sun. Rather intrigued by this I walked to his viewpoint. Silhouetted against the bright blue sky, with the sun providing a glaring corona, was a familiar skeletal arboreal creature displaying long nobbly fingers, and signs of amputation of large lower limbs. I greeted the very friendly and cheerful elderly photographer. Despite his hearing aid it was clear that he needed to lip-read me. He and his wife, who remained in the car, had spent weekends and worshipped here for many years. They had now to attend services in another church which had a Loop system for people who are hard of hearing. Without that benefit he cannot hear what is going on.
It soon became clear why he was photographing the oak tree. ‘Do you know that tree is 700 years old?’, he asked. The penny then dropped, for I too had read the descriptive brochure supplied in the porch. ‘Is this the one mentioned in the leaflet?’, I tactfully enquired. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘the one by the lych gate.’ Pointing out that there was another tree the other side of the gate, which I thought was more likely to be the correct one, I asked what information the leaflet had provided. ‘It is a yew tree’, was the answer. ‘Well, that is a yew tree and it has fallen down and been regenerated’, said I, helpfully. ‘Do you know?, he responded, indicating the oak, ‘I thought that wasn’t a yew tree’. We both went back into the churchyard and photographed the correct tree, in context. My companion, who certainly had all his marbles even if he didn’t know his trees, was most grateful. He said I had saved him much embarrassment from family and friends, who, when shown the original picture, would have said: ‘That’s not a yew tree’.
Rounding the Trusty Servant Inn I returned home and accompanied Jackie back to the pub, where we enjoyed the monthly village lunch. My choice was fish and chips and Doom Bar ale; Jackie’s was lasagne and Peroni. Given that we are told that this sunshine will soon come to an end, we decided to make hay and took a trip across the sun-streaked forest and hazy heathland to Fordingbridge. We had a mooch around there, bought a few books, and a top for Jackie, and returned the way we had come. Lots of donkeys joined the ponies in shaving the forest floor.
For our evening meal Jackie produced an all-in-one pie of left over beef stew and mashed potato including some fresh vegetables. As long as no-one is going to imagine the meat is pony, I think this should be called verderer’s pie. It was jolly good whatever it is called. This was followed by mini Co-op syrup puddings which were perfectly acceptable. The drink distribution was the usual Hoegaarden and red wine, in this instance Carta Roja gran reserva 2005.
We finished the day by watching, on BBC i-Player, episode 1 of the second series of ‘Call the Midwife’. This is intriguing, exciting, and nostalgic entertainment.