Hello

Blackcaps, stinkhorns, newts

I lie in bed idly listening to a chattering beyond the window, a reverie of sound, enjoying being back home. Eventually the slow accumulation of consciousness brings the song into focus; and it dawns on me the blackcaps are back, with their endless burbling of local gossip - the background noise to summer.

The blackcaps are back, and the swallows and the chiff-chaffs. The garden is full of summer birds and behind it though the field seems to lie bare, tinged with the first flush of new wheat shoots, it resounds with the sounds of skylark and I know that beyond the crest of the hill there are lapwings. I thought maybe they had left when the field was - what’s the opposite of ploughing, when they smooth it out? Tilling maybe. I thought they’d been scared off, until a pair of scavenging red kites were mobbed by a seemingly endless supply of lapwings. The lapwings are there, but when the mating displays die down you can’t tell unless the lapwings are threatened. And if the red kites are interested, that means that tiny wobbly lapwing babies are there, little balls of fluff on stilts resembling those little fuzzy toy Easter chickies that sat on top of the cornflake nests my son would by from the bakery as a small child. Not because cornflake nests are the best, despite the chocolate mini eggs they are still a mediocre cake, but because that dishevelled slightly wonky day glo chick was a treasure that lasted long after the cake was disposed of, albeit in an increasingly wonky and dishevelled form.

The weather has been curious through the holidays, by which I mean, good. Sunny. Hot. The sort of holiday that you have to walk into to the sea to get wet. The sea was very cold, but I’m pretty sure I got hypothermia walking on Dartmoor a couple of years ago during a heavy rainstorm and an incident when I assumed that the walk would take place on a recognised pathway not ad-lib through an actual bog. My boots have never been the same.

I’m not sure of the swallows arrived back later this year or it just seems like they are late because it’d been summer two weeks by the time they got here and I have distinct memories of hard frosts happening after they’d arrived. They graciously arrived the day after I declared my concern to Jim. He fetched me when he saw one with suitable urgency. Everything is very confusing but at least the weather is nice.

Workings

As is traditional I started the holiday with high hopes of maintaining productivity which was absolutely deluded of me as I have produced absolutely eff all all year so far, and that was under the optimal conditions of being alone in the house with no disturbances. I’m thinking of easing myself back in with a small botanical piece:

I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want this sort of delight on their wall. Some sort of deviant neurotypical non-witch, I’d assume. Once my mother in law asked me to identify a mushroom which she couldn’t bear to describe other than it started as a ball and grew to smell really bad. Did I know to answer? Oh my, yes, that would be Phallus Impudicus or, in common parlance, the stinkhorn- one of the few species where the Latin name is more offensive than the common name. Absolutely delighted with every aspect of the whole interaction, I was.

Anyway. My finances (and lack thereof) have driven me to once again embrace work culture (if a bit of colouring in can be called work). Buy things.

Findings

They have newts at Avebury manor, great crested newts, which was exciting news to me. I was only there as an adjunct to the main course of looking for sacred springs and exploring Neolithic tombs; I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a visit to a stately home. As soon as I saw the pond my first instinct was to sit down to get a better view. The newts are swimming at the bottom of the pond; the males are splendid things in their breeding finery. It wasn’t long before I was lying like I did as a child, like my son did, with my nose as close to the surface of the water as possible to allow the best view of their underwater domain that had transfixed me. The whole time I was there- and I am me, so that was quite a while- not one other person sat down to get a better view. Well, one other person lay down, it’s one of the reasons I married him, so it doesn’t count. But even the people that were obviously interested in the rare and precious newts (great crested newts are endangered and not often spotted) did so only from a great height.

When I was a child, I found a completely orange newt, the most spectacular and ground breaking discovery which obviously no adult believed. There is no such thing as an orange newt, they would say. I didn’t find a solution to the conundrum until I was at university (basically, until the internet was invented). It was probably an albino newt.

You can see the orange in the bellies of the great crested newts; they are quite colourful. Worth seeing. Observe closely the enlarged rear foot, the way they swim. Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with people, holding themselves so far from the world they inhabit. I’m sure it’s got worse, though maybe I’m just getting old and shouting at clouds. Not even the children came close, though that was probably for the best. ‘Newts are baby axolotls’ said one small boy to another with astounding confidence before running away.

‘Is that right?’ asks my husband

‘It is so wrong it actually hurts’ I say, proud that I have managed not to make corrections, or a five minute monologue on newts, salamanders and the unique breeding habits of axolotls. For my husband, to know that newts are not axolotls is sufficient. He does not ask for the details. I contemplate Gussie Fink-Nottle, from Jeeves and Wooster and whether we would be friends. He’d lie down close enough to fully appreciate the breeding colours of the great crested newt.