Scrap Books - 1

Between about 1990 and the early 2000s I filled four scrap books with a miscellany of material which, looking back now, provide a good snapshot of my life over that period. What I kept was very haphazard, but the main things that were happening, such as....

....our interest in following Ipswich Town FC, are represented. I also kept a considerable amount of....

....the children's art work, much of it in the form of....

....birthday, Christmas and Father's Day card which we encouraged them to make rather than buy. These birthday cards from 1990 reflect the interest I had at the time in coarse fishing, a 'sport' which took me to various, often very pretty areas of Essex as well as to the Norfolk Broads, usually with very limited success.

However, when I look at the cards I realise that a not insignificant number relate to my work. While teaching had many positive sides, one very negative aspect was that the amount of time one could spend marking and preparing lessons, along with a host of less important things, was open-ended, so evenings and Sunday afternoons were spent at my desk and I had to be very firm that certain times were ring-fenced for the family.

The scrap books were buried at the bottom of a bookcase and came back into the light the other day. My initial reaction was to bin them: I'm now so very, very relieved I didn't.

The Reef - 2

The reef might be a mile out but, living almost on the beach as we did as boys at the Hoey house at Nyali (above), the sound of the ocean breaking across its coral rampart was a constant, distant roar, a reverberation, a sound which was part of the fabric of that beautiful, peaceful place.

As well as protecting the beaches from the worst of the waves, the reef acted as a barrier to sharks, so at high tide we could swim without worrying about them; and the pools exposed at low tide offered a wonderful playground for small boys. This picture is an unusual one: my father rarely came down to the beach as he did on this occasion at the Hoey House.

I like to think that I was born on a beach. This is the European Hospital in Dar-es-Salaam where I came into the world, and whoever took this picture....

....must have been almost standing on the beach - the yellow arrow points along the line of the photographer's view.

So I also like to think that one of the first sounds I heard was the Indian Ocean breaking on one of the coral reefs off Dar-es-Salaam.

Winter Lunchtime

We're plunging into winter, with the first hard ground frosts, increasingly short daylight hours, the leaves stripped from the deciduous trees, forecasts of snow to low levels, and the small birds desperate for a square meal - which is why, every lunchtime, we eat our meal in the sun room which overlooks the front garden, where we scatter a liberal helping of mixed seeds.

Our resident small birds know that this happens around 1pm each day and are lined up in the laburnum, redcurrant and other shrubs which overlook the patio, all ready to pounce almost before I'm out of the door. The house sparrows, along with the dunnocks, seem to be best at this timing, followed by the chaffinches and our resident robin, with the blackbirds way behind. The tits don't bother - they take advantage of the peanut feeders the sparrows have abandoned.

The dunnocks may be quick to arrive but they are given a hard time by all the others so are often to be seen looking for the scraps long after the mob has finished. They're easily recognised by their pink legs and the way they ruffle their wings as they move around. I have a soft spot for them: they're the most unassuming of birds until they get into an argument with their own species, when they can be quite forceful.

Most of these birds would probably get along quite well without the seeds we put out - with the exception of the sparrows: there are so many of them that the whole gang would struggle to survive if we stopped feeding them.

An Irruption

An irruption sounds medical and painful but this reference is to waxwings, their irruption describing a sudden and sometimes very large influx of the birds into our country. Apparently this happens when they have a population explosion in their native Scandinavia, forcing some to fly across the North Sea in search of food.

We've had two small flocks visit the garden, one on November 4th - link here - and one more recently. We'd like to see more as they are very attractive and, usually, quite tame birds, so it's possible to move close to them.

Other birds have similar irruptions. We've seen a very large flock of redwings on Ardnamurchan, and fieldfares can appear in large numbers, both species from Scandinavia, however they haven't appeared here at all so far this year.

Esvagt Alba

We're not enjoying the best of days today. We're under a nasty north-northwesterly airstream gusting well over gale force bringing frequent, hard rain showers. Despite this, I walked north along the coast path, with the wind hurrying me and the rain holding off long enough for me to....

....managed a shot of this ship anchored out in the Moray Firth perhaps a kilometre offshore. The Marine Traffic website tells me that she's the Esvagt Alba offshore support vessel built for the Danish Esvagt group in a Norwegian yard in 2021. She seems to have spent much of her time since then working on the Moray East offshore wind farm which will, when complete, have a hundred turbines.

It's rarely that we see a ship off this coast, and frustrating that we tend to see them, as today, when they come in to shelter from foul weather. This is the Esvagt Alba in calmer waters.

Walking back along the coast would have been almost impossible in the wind so I worked my way home through the woods where even the fungi seemed to have taken shelter. Other than a couple of blackbirds, some jackdaws and a wren, most wildlife had done the same, with the exception....

....of two pairs of mallard which had found the perfect pond on which to spend the day.

Omar Khayyam

We spent part of this morning going through our shelves of books trying to thin them out, an excruciatingly painful task since so many of those we have left - for we have been through this often enough before - hold many memories.  In amongst them I found this book bound in green leather and, judging from its state, fairly well used.

I know nothing of the poem it contains - it actually has the same poem twice over, the first and second editions of Edward Fitzgerald's translations of the original Arabic. What did interest me, however, was two inscriptions inside the front cover, one....

....by a Marie Willingdon to a Mrs Stanley Reed, in 1915 in Bombay, and the second by....

....my mother, written when she passed the book on to me. In it she explained how her Aunt Lil, her mother's sister, came by the book. Lil was married to Sir Stanley Reed who was editor and owner of The Times of India, which position brought him, and Lil, into the social orbit of the Bombay governor, Lord Willingdon.

I did try to read some of the poem but it's very hard going. However, a few minutes' leafing through the book was well worth it for....

....the illustrations by Edmund Dulac, each individually stuck in to the book with a cover of semi-transparent paper. They're beautifully done but what one notices is the lack of any sign of happiness, from what I take to be the angry sultan to....

....the wistful lovers.

Coming to think of it, perhaps I really ought to persist with the poem.

The Reef - 1

A fringing reef runs along much of the coast of East Africa - this satellite picture shows it about a mile off the beach at Nyali, just to the north of Mombasa. While the sea floor drops steeply away on the ocean side of the reef, on the land side a shallow lagoon separates it from white-sand beaches formed of the pulverised remains of the shelled creatures that inhabit it.

This picture, taken from a beach on the east coast of Zanzibar, looks across the lagoon to the line of white surf along the horizon where the ocean breaks on the whaleback of the reef.

At low tide, particularly at springs, it's possible to walk out across the coral bottom of the lagoon searching for....

....the many inhabitants of the reef, not all of them friendly.

When we knew this reef back in the '50s and 60s, the marine life on it was prolific and we thought nothing of collecting as many shells as we could find, a few of which I've kept as mementoes of those long-lost days, but it leaves me in no position to criticise those local people who have since stripped the reef of anything that can be sold to tourists. So, when we visited the reefs of Tanzania a few years ago, we were shocked at the change.

Signs of Recovery

A grey day today, with a brisk northerly breeze and ten-tenths overcast but only occasional rain, perfect for a brisk walk along the coast to the north of us to see how Nature is fighting back after the recent storms - and she is, for beyond the jetty that sticks out into this small bay with its, usually sandy, beach is what must be called Cormorant Point, for it's where the local cormorants gather when the tide is low. Recently, with....

....so many of them killed in recent storms, we've been seeing fewer than ten gathered but today....

....there were at least twenty-six. Not that there's any sign of recovery in other species. I didn't see....

....a single living diver offshore though more and more of their sad corpses are being exposed as the kelp on the beach rots down. I think this one is a juvenile razorbill.

One species is back in unprecedented numbers - the rock doves we saw along here for the first time last year. They now form a huge flock, at least three hundred, which moves from the foreshore to the  harvested barley field at the back of the beach each time it feels a need for some sustenance.

These rock doves are the cousins of the urban pigeon and, like their cousin, seem to be one of the few species here which is really thriving.

Unexpected Sunshine

Sometimes the best weather is the most unexpected, like today when we walked along the shores of Loch Fleet after a forecast of low cloud and haar but the sun broke through and we enjoyed a glorious morning, as did....

....the seals basking on the sandbanks in the middle of the loch. It may have been that the tide was rising but there seemed many fewer of them than last time we passed, which may have been a consequence of storm Babet, another of which.....

....was the extensive damage in the plantation around the loch.

By the time we reached the beach the haar was doing its best to push inland, happily without much success.

Ground Frost

In amongst the pansies, lobelia, snapdragons, lavender and other plants that are still in flower in our garden, and with the air temperature at just over 1C, to our considerable surprise we found a bumblebee busy on the fuchsia. It was only just about functioning: it allowed the camera to come very close without reacting and, at one point, it fell off its flower and lay dazed on the ground.

The bee and the garden flowers aren't the only things defying the coldest morning so far this winter, one which has brought the first extensive ground frost. In the hedgerows we found plenty of blooms, including campion, which must have one of the longest flowering periods of our local wildflowers.

We walked up Golspie Glen on our way to Backies, where we hoped to buy some eggs from a local croft, finding the burn much calmer after the recent rains and....

....the trees still in glorious, though much browner, colours. This beech is on a corner of the Backies road which is a classic frost pocket, where cold air that has formed on ground on the sides of the glen has slipped downhill to accumulate along the road on either side of the bridge.

Some fungi seem quite impervious to the coldest conditions. This witches' butter is growing on dead gorse and seems to drip from the branch.

It was a walk in glorious conditions, which was just as well as, when we opened the cupboard where the crofter leaves his eggs, we found it bare. Presumably the chickens aren't as hardy as some of the insects, flowers and fungi.

Littleferry

The shingle bank at Littleferry which is usually crowded with waders was deserted this morning but another, nearer the mouth of the loch, had.... 

....a small group of cormorants and, carefully segregated, a much larger group of....

....oystercatchers with a few redshanks mixed in. The most notable absentees were the rafts of eider which, according to....

....the young man from NatureScot who was collecting the litter blown in from the beach by the recent storms, have taken a battering with large numbers of casualties.

The dunes at the back of the main beach which runs north to Golspie have been severely undermined by the sea with most of the sand taken out to sea, leaving the shingle. In amongst the wreckage along the top of the beach we found....

....this young dolphin, about a metre long, to add to the casualties of storms Babet and Debi.