Life in Slow Motion

The snails live on the walls of my garden, hiding under the shrubs, or clustered together in the evenings on the living room window, where they gather under the edge of the sash frame. Are they watching the TV? On wet nights they can be found idly perambulating across the path, and in the morning as I go to work I see their silvery trails across the doormat, or on a plant pot or two. I don’t begrudge them the small amount of damage they do; for some reason I find snails quite appealing. Slugs, on the other hand, have little to recommend them; they lurk under the rims of the plant pots, lumps of slime and gristle that surprise your fingers when you go to move the pot. I find it odd that I regard them so differently. What difference does a shell make? The snails, I will admit, are great performers when, on occasion, I take them to schools. Set on the back of my hand, they soon come out of their shells and extend their long eyestalks, peering myopically at the children as if to say ‘What’s this? Who are you?’ The children, for their part, seem equally fascinated by their small alien visitors, and talk back to them.

Snails in this part of the world are usually found at the seaside. Most of the underlying native rock is granite, which doesn’t provide sufficient calcium for them to grow their shells; by the sea, they take advantage of the crushed shell in the sandy soil, taken up by the plants that they eat, and they grow to the size of golf balls. It must be a precarious existence in some ways, being close to the sea. After all, how many of us have gone out with the salt pot at night to put an end to crawling lettuce lovers?

The warm, damp weather has spiced up the lives of the snails on the walls. Yesterday Mum caught several of them flagrantly mating, moistly entwined amid the foliage. Snails love-lives are complex; they are hermaphrodite, so each fertilises the other. In courtship - for snails do choose their partners - they fire small ‘arrows’ at each other, reeling each other in on thin white thread until their bodies are pressed together. D-I-Y Cupid? Or have they been watching old westerns on the TV, in the evenings? Whichever, I wait for the eggs to appear, and a new generation of snails to make their slow way to the window pane.

Haar, Haar

So here I am, back home. While the rest of the UK has baked in record temperatures and relentless sunshine, my little corner of Scotland has remained cool and green. Driving north is like stepping back a few weeks in time; the tired greens of the trees perk up, the crisp brown lawns turn green, and the wildflowers rewind. The crops, being harvested at the beginning of my journey, are barely turning golden. Sometimes, if I travel up and down enough, I can end up with two springs, or two autumns.

Waking to cool grey daylight after two weeks of heat comes as a bit of a shock. Stepping out into a damp, foggy morning is like walking into middle of a pearl - a gentle luminescent glow as the sun tries to penetrate the mist. (Hmm - that image leaves me as the grit in the oyster - ah well!) As I drive inland to work the mist thins, becoming a fairly bright and sunny day.
It’s been a feature of this area as long as I can remember. Waking to the bull roar of the foghorn, leaving home in dank dimness, only to find that ten miles inland has been basking in sunshine. It’s the haar. The sea fog. It lies along this coast like a grey veil for most of the summer.

So why do we have the dubious privilege of this phenomenon?

When the air gets warmed up by the sun, as happens in the summer, it can hold a lot more moisture. When this is suddenly cooled, the moisture condenses out. Pass warm air over a cool surface such as the sea, and this happens; and the North Sea is cold. Believe me, I’ve been in it, it’s cold.
So fog forms. Add an on-shore breeze, and the fog is pushed inland, covering town and countryside indiscriminately. Now although the land is warmer, and this clears the fog, the breeze pushes more inland to take over - where I used to live, you could watch it ebbing and flowing like the tide, making its way up the fields, sneaking along the hedges until it was beaten back by the land’s warmth. So there’s a band of land along the coast that stays foggy. With a stronger breeze, or if the land is cooler, it can travel a long way inland, tracing cold clammy fingers up the rivers and glens.
Sometimes the sun is strong enough to warm the land; it burns through and the haar clears. Sometimes it doesn’t, and we spend our days in a strange shadowless brightness.

And the name? Haar - I’m not sure where it comes from. The word has a Scandinavian feel to it. South of the border, it’s called a sea fret, and locally in Yorkshire a sea roak. (Bird-watching one day at the seashore, someone commented that there was a sea roak. After a short while, a visiting birder enquired what was the difference between that and a normal rook….)

It’s a feature of the east coast, and is why the land stays greener, and the inhabitants paler, than elsewhere. And why we shout at the radio, when the newsreader talks of heat-waves.

Humber Mud

To the south and east, there is water.
South is the Humber Estuary, a slow brown ooze; East, the cold grey blue of the North Sea. Where these meet, a long crooked finger of almost-land juts out into the tide, an ever-changing desolation of sand and shingle and mud. Each winter brings a realignment, a chance to breaking away from the mainland, and is followed by the need to rebuild the road that straggles to the end of this impudent finger.

The road itself is a patchwork of concrete slabs, some inlaid with old railway lines, and odd strips of interlocking blocks which can be dug up and re-laid, at least where there is sufficient land to put them. A single track, with occasional passing places and lay-bys, it connects the isolated lifeboat station and coastguard to the rest of the world. To leave the road surface is to risk grounding, and becoming stuck in deep, soft sand. High banks, covered in bramble, leathery grey-green sea buckthorn and spiny marram grass both protect the roadway and threaten to engulf it. Convolvulus twines through the scrub, turning striped trumpet flowers towards today’s blue sky. It’s not always so welcoming. There are gaps, views of the estuary. Wide mudflats shimmer with mirages in the heat, dotted with distant birds wavering in the haze. Oystercatchers probe the mud deeply with carrot-coloured beaks, triumphantly hauling out ragworms, a lone grey plover potters about mournfully, poking a shorter beak into the semi-liquid ooze for small crustaceans and shellfish. No wonder it looks miserable.
Curlews, longest beaks of all, stalk the outer flats, searching the deepest mud. A distant line of black dots out on the water resolves itself through the binoculars into a flock of scoter, black seaducks gathered together to moult their spring feathers. Surprised by a seal, they take to the air in a flurry of dark wings, only to land with a barely controlled splash a few hundred metres away.
On the seaward side lies the beach, lined with scattered concrete blocks – tank barriers – like children’s toys left out and weathered in a forgotten corner.
A slick of muddy water spreads from the river mouth beyond sight of land. Container ships wait out beyond the channel for the tide to turn, bound for Hull and Grimsby, or up river to Goole. To reach there, they will pass under the span of the Humber Bridge, 25 years old today and only just visible on the horizon.
At the end of the land lies the small community of Spurn – houses, for the lifeboat men permanently stationed here; the road is too risky to rely on its being passable during a storm when they might be needed. The old lighthouse and landward tower now are home only to pigeons.

Wending our way back along the track, we come across a patch of sea holly, crisp silver grey-green, flowers tinged with electric blue. A survivor, like Spurn itself.

High Moor

Yorkshire is a big place. Not quite as vast as Texas, I grant you, but big enough to be diverse. My teenage years were spent exploring various parts of it, bird-watching along the muddy Humber estuary, hiking over the high expanses of the Moors; the rolling chalk of the Wolds and the boulder clay of Holderness are always a part of my childhood. Over the last couple of days, we’ve revisited some of these places.

North and west of Mum’s place lie the Wolds – a long ridge of chalk running from the bird-covered cliffs at Flamborough Head to the Humber Bridge, and stretching on south through Lincolnshire. To get almost anywhere outside East Yorkshire, you have to cross these uplands, once medieval sheep pasture and now covered with arable fields, barley and oats parched and ready for harvest under a bleach-blue sky. I wonder vaguely why there are no ancient chalk figures here, as there are on the Downs; perhaps the tribes that inhabited this area held to different gods, perhaps there were fewer regiments to carve out military memorials as they have around Salisbury, perhaps the land proved too fertile to use in this way. I don’t know. The chalk lies very close to the surface; some fields, overploughed, are nothing but pale rubble wastelands. This used to be an open expanse of prairie fields, a result of ‘big is best ‘ in farming, but more enlightened farmers have restored the hedgerows and shelter belts, there are trees again. Roadsides are billows of blue meadow cranesbill and violet scabious; candy-striped convolvulus makes intricate mosaic patches on close cut turf. Vast purple-blue fields of borage, a new crop for the new millennium, punctuate the pale gold of the cereals.

Coming down into the flatlands of the Vale of Pickering, (an old lake bed) we can see the moors rising to the north. A haze of purple-brown, lush green in the folds and gullies, they lack the homeliness of the chalk. From a gold-grey stone that makes for picturesque villages full of coaches and tourists, the land changes; harsh grey drystane dykes trace possession across the hillside, marking inbye from outbye, home farm from common land. Winding narrow roads lead up to the tops, through dales rich with greenery, flourishing oak and ash by the sides of the stony, brown-water becks; bracken, an unwelcome green invader, spreads from mooredge to roadside, and provides concealment for the sudden sheep that materialise in our path. We search for ring ousels amongst the tumbled stone walls, but find nothing but straggly rows of young rooks, dotted along the fence lines, waiting for food, and numerous woodpigeons. Pigeons have an odd, and annoying, ability to look interesting – disguising themselves briefly as falcons, cuckoos, anything – before revealing themselves with a mocking clap of their wings.

The high tops are wide open spaces, ablaze with magenta bell heather, patterned with the dark scars of muirburn. The lurking hummocks of heather-clad shooting butts mirror the rounded forms of the tumuli on the ridges, ancient burial mounds linked by the network of old tracks over the moors. Standing stones and old carved crosses mark the crossing of these ways, tracks used still by long-distance walkers. My feet remember long days and nights, hiking these dusty, peaty, muddy, stony trails.

We turn for home. Far away towards the sea, the distant carious tooth of the Fylingdales early warning radar rises above the heather, its truncated pyramid a degree more sinister than its three round forerunners. On Egton High Moor, we stop the car and listen. A contented buzzing of bees, the ever-disgruntled bleating of sheep, the haunting whistle of curlew building to a wild crescendo – does someone have to come out every morning and wind them up? (Sorry, dear, can’t stop, have to go and reset the curlews…)

You can go back.

Take Your Partner for the Hedgehog Waltz.

The hedgehog situation grows more complex.

Tonight, our small visitor turns up for her mealworms as usual, only to be joined after about ten minutes by another, larger, hedgehog.
He is slightly lighter coloured, and a bit scruffier - designer stubble? He feeds his face briefly, before his mind turns to other things.

He begins to snuffle at 'our' hedgehog, and they begin a long slow dance around the lawn. He snuffles his way towards her back end, she backs away, and they gradually go round in a series of small spirals, orbitting around the end of her nose. She sits down firmly, making a point; he snuffles along her side, she gets up and backs away, he changes direction - is he getting dizzy by now? - they swing like a small binary star across the lawn and under the azaleas. The bushes shake. The pair emerge, rotating back across to the rockery, and back once more to the azaleas. Is she really not interested or is she merely being coy? She certainly doesn't take the opportunity to escape when he briefly backs off.

They vanish again, and the bushes tremble. It's getting hard to see what's going on, and to be honest I'm beginning to feel a little voyeuristic. Mum peers out of the back door and comes in to report that they are sitting side by side under the arch that leads to the lawn, under a rainbow of clematis. Hmm. Has she succumbed to his rough charms? No - merely a brief break in the dance - they head off in front of the garage, still circling.

It's a long slow courtship, with hedgehogs. And a very careful one.

The Visitors

Hummingbird Hawk Moth – 3 Jul 06

Waiting for the bus, conveniently outside the house, we’re inspecting the shrubs that grow over the wall, debating how far they need to be trimmed back to prevent decapitation of passing pavement cyclists, and how high they need to be cut back off the ground to prevent dogs using the convenient cover as – well, a 'convenience' – when we notice something strange in the honeysuckle.

A hummingbird hawkmoth. Flashing subliminal terracotta red hindwings, soft beige and black-and-white-striped body, hovering beside the flowers, extending its long proboscis like a refuelling probe on a fighter aircraft connecting with the tanker, it moves with delicate precision.
Is this an indicator of warmer summers? We haven’t seen one here for over 20 years. We watch it working over the flowers, until it vanishes with speed somewhere over the garden wall, and the bus arrives.


Hedgehog – 4 Jul 06

Mum peers out of the back window, and whispers.
‘She’s here.’

It looks like someone has left an old coconut on the lawn. Snuffling about, minutely inspecting each blade of grass, each small patch of the lawn for the dried mealworms my mother leaves out. Heat and hard ground mean fewer worms and beetles, so every little helps. Almost every night she comes – Mrs Tiggywinkle in person - around 9.30 to 10 pm. Sometimes she lingers, but mostly she stays for about 20 minutes. Well, we don’t really know if she is really a ‘she’, but we make an educated guess. She’s small and neat, light brown fur edging a tidy bristle-cut hair-do, black-eyed and black-nosed. She has surprisingly long legs, moving with a rolling sailor’s gait. Trundling about like a small clockwork toy, leaving a trail through the grass, she disappears into the undergrowth of the flowerbeds, to reappear and cross the path before vanishing into the gathering darkness under the hawthorn tree at the bottom of the garden.

‘Think I’d better get some more mealworms,’ says Mum.

Sneeze or Freeze...

The colours are changing again - yellow hangs on tenaciously in the form of fields thick with buttercups, and in the vast, almost indefineable range of dandeliony-things (OK, I know I'm supposed to know what they all are but a summer idleness creeps in - hawkweeds, cat's ears, hawksbits, coltfoot, and dandelions are just some of the range to select from), the white is there in the form of ox-eye daisies, but is slowly changing; the 'palest-maiden's-blush-to-hot-flush' pinks of dog roses, tall spikes of foxgloves in every shade from white to carmine, red campion, vibrant scarlet of field poppies, the red haze of grasses... it's glorious, but somewhere in it all is a lurking hay-fever trigger.

Driving whilst sneezing is a hazardous occupation. And driving for over 400 miles whilst sneezing is not conducive to road safety. Fortunately, the car has air conditioning, which comes complete with - fanfare - pollen filters! Which saved the day, but revealed a slight downside - you need to keep it switched on. Which is all very well when the sun is shining and its 20 degrees or so, but when it starts to rain and the temperature drops, being in the car becomes rather like stepping inside one of those big freezers in the supermarket. There is a likelihood of frostbite. But what is the alternative?

So this summer, if you see someone, on the hottest of days, driving around with the windows closed, wearing woolly gloves, hat and scarf... it could be me, avoiding hayfever.

All the Fun of the (School) Fair

Did you know it is practically impossible to paint the face of a child who is eating popcorn?

Or that rubber ducks can fly higher that teddies when indulging in 'Extreme Sports for Soft Toys'?

And why is it that middle-aged men always think they know the best way to put a tent up - and almost invariably get it wrong?

All these interesting facts and questions were demonstrated yesterday, when I was inveigled into helping out at a friend's PTA fair. Strange how people believe implicitly that, if you can paint on paper or canvas, the wriggling surface of a child's face should be no trouble at all! So there I was, bespoke butterflies and gruesome monsters to order, as the rain pelted down outside the tent. The bouncy castle was awash, the 'How far can you throw a Welly Boot' stall was utilising the missiles as they had been originally intended, and the aforesaid airborne ducks and bears needed umbrellas rather than parachutes!

Still, everybody seemed to have a good time (well, we're in Scotland - nothing stops for the weather!) and we raised a decent amount for school funds.

...and of course, as soon as the packing-up began, the sun came out!

SPLAT!

splat. a fat raindrop
falls from wet honeysuckle
down dry back of neck.


Hmm. I guess I should trim the greenery round the front door, but it's growing so well!

Yesterday was a splatty sort of day. The song says 'sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug' - but why, with around one-and-a-half square metres of windshield, does the bug always splat right where I look out of it most of the time? And why, if there are a lot of bugs, is it always the biggest, juiciest, most messy bug that splats in this position?
Why is it that if I am behind a lorry, it's nearly always one carrying wet gravel (splat - dirty wet mud all over the front of the car) or a refrigerated fish wagon (splat - salty fishy water all over the front of the car)??
And this is the point where I discover that the washer bottle has now run dry, after bug removal. Deep joy.

And then there was the gull that whitewashed my windscreen on a roundabout in Great Yarmouth...but that's another story.

Summer is definitely here - that harbinger of the season, 'unfeasibly extensive roadworks', is seen in the land.......


Red light. More roadworks.
Lots of men doing nothing.
A two mile tail-back.

No safety in numbers

So I blearily stumbled out of my door this morning to take out the trash and thought - where the heck's the bowl of flowers? Some b*stard's nicked some of my plant pots!

Now I know my garden's overgrown - (but it's intentionally like that, the owner squeaked) - but nicking my plant pots is a bit much! By the look of it, there's three gone. It's difficult to tell, as I have a lot of them - it's a small garden with a chunk of concrete -hence pots on the hardstanding - but it looks like the ones that are currently out (like - flowering with a vengeance, looking great, cost a lot!) are among the vanished. Rhodohypoxis, I mourn thee - ten years I've had these, and they've dutifully flowered every spring/summer, they have been the subject of mystery - why did I plant half red bulbs, half white, and they all end up white? - they have cheered me up every year. Gone, now, probably to some a**hole's stall at a car-boot sale. It's not as if it would be awfully easy - walking down the road with a pot of plants would be a bit obvious, let alone several - has to be a car heist. And they'd have to be looking closely - the garden ain't that self-evident.

What, or who, can profit in plant-pot heists?

How does it know?

Barbecue. It rains.
We have a secret weapon -
Mike's polytunnel!


Which kinda sums up Sunday. The rest of the week has been lovely, (apart from a damp Saturday, but as that's 'domestics day' it made little difference.
Naturally, for the barbecue on Sunday, the weather decided to be as helpful as possible, and proceeded to chuck it down, grey and overcast, for most of the day.

However - friend Mike had a cunning plan to deal with the problem - he is a resourceful lad - so set up the barbecue in his big polytunnel (he grows organic veg - for our Antipodean readers, he's known as VeggieMike) and we sat amongst the courgettes, warm and dry - if a little kippered from the smoke.

Driving home at about 9.30 last night (still broad daylight - you gotta love Scottish 'summer' evenings!) noticed a hedgerow consisting almost exclusively of laburnum - about 500 metres just dripping with golden chandeliers. It's definitely a yellow and white time of year. Flower colours seem to come in waves - first the white of snowdrops, then yellow primroses, then the blackthorn kicks in, white again. Daffodils are followed by hawthorn, and gorse, broom and laburnum are hard on the tail of that. Occasional punctuation by bluebells and red campion...... and this morning I noticed that the tiny dune pansies are showing along the roadside, blue-violet and palest yellow.

I still haven't put batteries in the camera....

Life's little mysteries (2)

Why is it that the hair on your head - however long - when it dangles down your back or brushes across your shoulder - doesn't tickle, but as soon as one itty-bitty hair gets detached from your head, and goes down your back or across your shoulder - it itches like hell?????

What is the evolutionary advantage of this?

Surfing the Season

Drove inland today. Felt more like being back on the beach - great waves of greenery crested with white foam breaking over the road, tumbling down in billows of creamy blossom to break just above the car, smaller waves of cow parsley in foamy clouds on the roadsides, yellow Gondor-beacons of gorse bushes and broom blazing warning - summer's almost here!

One of these days I'll get the camera out.

OK - consider yourselves warned - poems happen here. I started writing 'sort-of-haiku' a while back; my Mum didn't quite catch what I'd said and asked 'OK so what are these hoboes?'
It stuck.
Peripatetic poems.
Bum un-verse.
They'll happen, given time.

Be afraid. Be very afaid.

Clout Casting

As the saying goes - 'Never cast a clout 'til May is out'.

Apparently, it means 'may blossom', not the month of May - up here in the North-East of Scotland, it isn't too confusing in this year of weird weather, as the may blossom ( aka hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna unless someone has changed its name while I wasn't looking) didn't appear until last weekend, so both May the month was out and so was the blossom - all at once.

And oh boy, is it out - I wondered for a moment if there had been a major whitewash explosion over one hedgerow - the trees are absolutely covered with thick white blossom, and the bumblebees are loving it.
Butterflies seem to have emerged at last - there have been a few painted ladies and this morning a red admiral flew over the beach and (rather appropriately) headed out to sea...

This morning saw the last beach session of the summer term, and with the tide well out, we found a lot of stranded jellyfish, both moon jelly (Aurita aurita) and the metallic blue Cyanea lamarki, which caused excitement amongst the kids (0nce they'd finished digging holes, of course). Bucketloads of wobbly jelly were brought for identification - 'can it sting?' 'can I pick it up?' and of course 'can I keep it?' (The brief panic that passes over the teacher-in-charge's face at this point is priceless!)

As to clout casting - well, it's the first day I could leave my jacket in the car, so I guess it counts!

Riddle of the Sand

OK - I take it back - working outside AND a beautiful day! Doesn't often happen.

What I want to know is - what is the deal with kids and sand? All that space on the beach, all the interesting stuff to beachcomb, and what do they do?

Dig holes.

Huge holes. It's as if there's a primeval urge to get to Australia. And then when the holes fill up with water, it's the most exciting thing that ever happened. But why is it that, with this crazy love for sand, they want to take bucketloads home but hate it in their wellies?

Kids. Go figure.

Life's little mysteries (1)

Why is it that when the weather is fine, the sun is shining and everything is hunky-dory, I am stuck indoors in the office?

Naturally, when the wind blows a northerly gale, the rain lashes down and icicles hang from my nose, I am destined to be working outside..........

Mother Nature has a warped sense of humour.