The Advice

I wonder what I would have suggested if this eight-year old had asked me for one bit of advice which would help him navigate the decades he was to live.

The photo was taken in a studio in Mombasa in 1953, and it was to go into his new passport. Previously, he hadn't had a passport even though he travelled widely both within East Africa and on the routes from Mombasa to England. He hadn't needed one: as a minor, he was included on both his mother and father's passports.

Some of the most difficult years of his life came immediately after that visit to the studio, for the separate passport had been needed so he could travel back and forth to England alone, this necessitated after his parents had decided to sent him to school in England, returning to his East African home for two months each (English) summer. This regime would continue until he was sixteen, after which his parents retired from East Africa and his holidays were centred on wherever they were living in England.

So, what advice would I have given myself? Perhaps it should have been something simple, like "Never tell a lie," because it has always seemed to me that lies are too often uncovered, at great cost. Yet something like that seems far too simple to be of much use.  I think I would rather have urged the small boy to be true to himself, that is, to trust, in all the complex decisions in the life that stretched before him, in the small voice that is within all of us, the voice of, at the same time, one's conscience, one's gut instinct, one's guide.

Wildlife Visitors

It's always good to see the local wildlfie when we go out on our daily walk but there's something even more special about the wildlife coming to us. This is our current resident rabbit who, while it has done some damage to our garden flowers - the pansies have suffered the most - is generally very good at sticking to the things that need mowing, like the grass and the white clover.

It's becoming increasingly tame, running away less and less fast when we bump into it in the garden. It has now reached the point where it cheerfully raids the small birds' food.

Another fairly regular visitor to the garden is the female sparrowhawk which spoils the small birds' day by perching on the fence overlooking their feeders. Every now and again we come across a pathetic pile of feathers, the price we and the sad small bird pay for the wonder of having this splendid visitor.

If the female sparrowhawk is a fairly frequent visitor....

....we see the male more infrequently. This picture was taken from the kitchen window this morning: just to be horrible, the hawk is standing underneath the three peanut feeders.

We are fortunate to live in a house with a sitting room which has a large expanse of glass overlooking the back garden so we can sit and sip our drinks while we watch the wildlife come and go.

Autumn Gentians

One of the plants which is coming in to flower in discrete colonies on the grassland of the Littleferry links is the....

....autumn gentian. It's a plant which, ever since we first found it in 2020, seems to be having a hard time. In some years hardly any of them actually flowered but this year they seem to be having a little more success.

The local gentians come in two colours. The above picture shows the white variety which seems to be prevalent at Littleferry, while the purple variety is less common. The fact that the white variety has....

....purplish outer petals has led me to think that this is the purple variety: it isn't.

While the bell heather - the darker one in this picture - is already beginning to die back the lighter-coloured ling is coming in to its own.

With so many flowers in bloom and some bright sunshine while we were there this morning, there were - for. welcome change - a good number of butterflies on the wing, including this small copper, plenty of common blues, and perhaps even more small heaths, but what we noticed was that there was, for whatever reason, a total absence of larger butterflies.

The Rock

Yes, I know, it's only a boring rock sitting beside the track and minding its own business but to people like me it has great importance.

You see, when one gets a bit old, a rock like the one on the left in this picture is precious: it's somewhere to sit and rest and do what older people should be good at: nothing.

The trouble is that, for reasons which are probably to do with the ice age, there are precious few well-placed, comfortable rocks beside Golspie's tracks. This one happens to be ideally located, just under a mile from home and on a track which is frequented by few people.

So, today, I walked to the rock and sat down for a well-earned rest. The hills are very quiet now, with little bird song, but a pair of buzzards began calling high above me and, being very aware that creatures often call when they aren't very happy about something they're seeing, I searched the skies and found....

....what was agitating them - an eagle, I think, probably a golden eagle, at the extreme range of my camera.

We see buzzards, red kites and sparrowhawks fairly frequently but an eagle is a bit special, so I sat for some time to watch it wheel across they sky with the agitated buzzards in close pursuit.

I set off home as soon as the buzzards fell silent, and had just realised that I hadn't seen a single butterfly when....

....this beautiful common blue took flight right in front of me, landing shortly thereafter on a convenient leaf.

By the time I reached home I had been out for about an hour and seen just two butterflies; and this is the beginning of August.

A Walk to the Village

We found the first signs of the approach of autumn when we walked through the woods to the village this morning, including the first....

....rowan berries ripening on the trees.

Although we have had some rain - a rather miserable total of 10mm over the last few days....

....there are very few fungi in evidence. This may be one of the brittlegills, the slugs having taken advantage of the rain to have have a meal off it.

There continue to be very few butterflies around. Those on the wing include a few whites - that this one looks so battered is testament to its determination to cross the busy A9 - some painted ladies, a tortoiseshell, a couple of common blues, a handful of fritillaries, and....

....the first red admiral for some weeks, this one enjoying sipping at a very cheerful pink buddleia, one of several colours which are in full flower in our garden and busy with bees, if not butterflies.

On each of the last three days Mrs MW has walked down to the village through the woods and seen a roe doe, but today this deer was accompanied by....

....her young.

'Little Black Quasha'

A few days ago one of our daughters found this little book stored away in her attic. We remember it well for it was given to us....

....by our very dear friends Bibi ad David Witt at Christmas 1967, when we had been teaching for only a few months in what was then Ian Smith's breakaway state of Rhodesia.

Why Bibi Witt, for it is her handwriting on the title page, should have chosen this particular book as a Christmas present for a couple who were, at that time, childless, I have no idea.

In 1967 David and Bibi had three children, Pom-Pom, Jo-Jo and Faldi, and were working at a tiny secondary school way out in the bush, and we had been invited to spend Christmas in their home. I don't remember anything particular about that Christmas - we spent a great deal of time in their company during our three years in Rhodesia - but we loved being with them and the children, and a happier family you could not imagine.

So when I opened the book the other day for the first time in many, many years, I did so with some trepidation, for its contents probably do not sit easily with present cultural tensions, but I found, as the book progressed, nothing that would upset any broad-minded person, particularly when they look at this book from the perspectives of the 1960s.

In fact the book is very much a morality tale, with Little Black Quasha doing all the things a good girl should do, and being....

....suitably rewarded.

Like so many children's books, this one has a fair amount of graphic violence in it, but by the end all the good things have been done and the world left in a better state than when Quasha found it.

I'm very grateful to our daughter for keeping the book so carefully for it brings back a flood of joyous memories of Mrs MW and my early lives together, and of some of the beautiful people we met in our travels.

The Crossing

I walked up the adder track this morning in the vague hope that one of these rare beasts might be out sunning itself but realistically this seemed unlikely as the temperature was struggling to reach 16C and, to our considerable relief, we have had some rain in the last few days - though the total was a disappointing 7mm.

However, there were some insects to enjoy, including three fritillaries feeding on the ragwort, a dragonfly which refused to settle for a picture, and a scattering of bees, flies and hoverflies.

A family of warblers - I have no idea which variety - has taken up residence in the undergrowth along the edge of the fields and seem to enjoy scolding me each time I pass, fields....

....in which the sheep seem quite certain, from the way they were all lying down, that more rain was approaching.

However the main recollection I hold of this gentle walk into the hills was when, on my way home, a deer suddenly crossed the road about fifty metres in front of me - sadly, far too quickly for me to take its picture but slow enough for me to think it was a red deer; and red deer are supposed to have been shot out of this area.

That momentary sighting transported me back to Tanzania, to the small game reserve of Saadani, a reserve which is unusual in that it is on the coast, and of seeing....

....a single antelope running across the road in front of our vehicle.

I was fortunate to get this picture, particularly as the animal here is one that is fairly common in Saadani but less so elsewhere in Tanzania. It's a kongoni, also known as a hartebeest, a largish antelope with an unusual arrangement of horns.

A kongoni hasn't come to mind in years. It was a good memory.