The Mango Tree

This is a picture of a contented small boy until a moment ago deeply immersed in his own little world, looking up as he realises that his mother is taking a photo. The small boy is me, perhaps aged three, underneath the big mango tree that stood outside the old bungalow in Upanga Road, Dar-es-Salaam.

The little boy is holding a watering can, early evidence of a life-long interest in growing things.

The tree is an important part of his life. Each day his ayah, along with other ayahs from the area, sits under the tree looking after him while his parents go to work. His ayah is called Fatuma, and she is chubby and cheerful and very good with him. Amongst other things, because she doesn't speak much English he learns KiSwahili at her knee.

The area under the mango tree is popular with the ayahs because, throughout the year, it throws a deep shade, so it's cool beneath it even on the hottest and most humid of days. It also, in its season, produces a delicious fruit.

Mango trees feature in other gardens later in the small boy's life. There was one in this garden in Kingston, Jamaica, and the picture also shows a well-tended vegetable bed which that watering can promised.

Perhaps unsurprisingly mangos remained the small boy's favourite fruit, a messy fruit to eat so he always maintained that the best place to enjoy a good mango was in the bath.

Sorrento

In May of 2008 we took a short holiday by rail to Italy, to Sorrento, a city which we hardly visited as we discovered that the local tourist board sold a map which showed....

....a network of well-marked and very accessible, if sometimes steep, footpaths which criss-crossed the peninsula. We walked miles, often through....

....small farms where the main hazard was dogs - one sneaked up behind me and delivered a very painful nip to my bottom. We also....

....found secluded beaches where Mrs MW could enjoy a swim, at this particular beach until the jellyfish found her, and we visited Pompeii, which was interesting, and took a local bus ride to the Amalfi coast which I detested. However, the walks and the swimming and the visits and a very pleasant....

....little hotel were not the memories which stick in my mind from that holiday. They are are, of course, of the....

....food. I like Italian food anyway, but all the ristorantes we visited were staffed by people whose main purpose in life seemed to be to make their customers as happy as possible. At this one we had a gentle and very pleasant lunch looking out across a serene bay, but the top prize for food and service must go to....

....a little restaurant in the hills above Sorrento where we went for an evening meal. We were cared for as if we were members of the family to the extent that, when we'd finished and asked them to 'phone a taxi, they would have nothing of it and insisted on driving us back to our hotel, and then adamantly refused to accept payment for their trouble.

Falling Leaves

Two large and noisy skeins of pink-footed geese were passing over, heading north, as we set off in the car for a walk through....

....Ferry Woods to Littleferry beach. As at Balblair Woods on Friday, the main interest in this largely pine woodland is....

....the few fungi that are out at this time of year, including this rather fine little group of common puffballs and....

....this one, possibly the rufous milkcap, Lactarius rufus.

The mile or so of Littleferry beach we walked was as devoid of wildlife as it was of humans: we met five people, all exercising dogs, and saw oystercatchers, cormorants and gulls as well as a glimpse of what might have been a lone grebe.

We came back along the links enjoying the gently changing cloudscapes and some more fungi, including....

....lines of this one, a species we've seen in previous years in the same place and have tentatively identified as field blewits. However, the best finds of the day were....

....a few scarlet waxcaps, the species which, only a few days ago, I had given up hope of seeing this year.

As we walked back through the woods we noticed this tree. The light breeze was stripping the last of the leaves from its branches, and they rustled as they fell to the ground. It seemed rather appropriate on this Remembrance Sunday to stand for a minute and listen to their fall.

Balblair Dark Woods

At this time of year, and particularly in today's steady rain, one has to hunt for interest in those parts of Balblair Woods which are dominated by close-packed, regimented stands of Scots pines. They're dark, silent trees, almost watchful, and monotonous, so one of the welcome contrasts occurs when, for no apparent logical reason, one comes across....

....the occasional beech which, in the last throes of its autumn finery, burns like a bright candle amidst its shadowed companions.

In the grasses and mosses at the base of the pines there is little to be found except some fungi, noticeably fewer than a month ago. It doesn't help that they're camouflaged or covered by needles and leaves, or that they tend to dress themselves in unassuming shades of ochre and brown. However, there are occasional gems to be found, like....

....this cauliflower fungus, also known as a wood cauliflower, Sparassis crispa. We've only found the species once before, a couple of hundred metres from this one, also growing in the moss at the bottom of a pine.

Charity Shop

I may have been part owner of a general store on the remote Ardnamuchan peninsula for nine years, and I enjoyed the challenge of running it as a business upon which our income depended, but it didn't help me to like shops. I have always avoided shopping and, when I do have to venture inside a shop, like to complete my purchase and be out again as quickly as possible.

So it might be a surprise that I have now joined Mrs MW in giving a few hours of my time twice a week to working in a small charity shop in the village's Main Street. It's good to feel that one is contributing to a worthy cause - particularly one upon which one may, at some future date, to some extent have to depend - and it's good once again to have the discipline of working with other people. However, the greatest challenge is in understanding how this trade works.

Pricing goods is one aspect of this. None of us working there is an expert on fashion or antiques or hobbies such as stamp collecting but we are constantly required to put a price on items about which we are often woefully ignorant. The internet helps: for example, today we put out an artificial Christmas tree which was relatively easy to price because its brand-new equivalent was found using Google. However, we sometimes put a price on an item which is almost immediately snapped up, perhaps by one of those people who buy items from ignorant charity shops like ours to sell at a profit on Ebay; and then one feels a bit sick.

The down-side of these few hours in the shop is how exhausted I feel at the end of them, particularly when I recall that, when we had our own shop, a day's work was at least twice as long and we were doing six of those days on the trot. However, while I wish it wasn't quite so tiring, it is rewarding.

Small Bird News

Our small birds are frightened, very, very frightened. Despite the quantity and variety of food that's available to them, they've been conspicuously absent, so at some moments we've looked into the garden and seen not a sign of a bird, or....

....if there are any, they've been buried deep in the increasingly bare and revealing trees.

For the blackbirds this isn't too much of a problem as they've been busy eating the last of the berries in the rowans but for....

....the others it's been a matter of sitting, waiting, watching, plucking up courage and then....

....making a quick dash for the food and an equally rapid retreat back into the trees.

We know what the problem is as we found a small, sad pile of feathers on the lawn the other day, a sure sign that our sparrowhawk is back, though we have yet to see him. The victim was probably a tit, either a coal or a blue tit as we haven't seen a great tit in some time.

This crisis has meant that the number of birds coming into the garden is seriously down. Even the sparrows are suffering to the extent that we only see half-a-dozen or so at one time. Some species we've not seen in ages, such as goldfinch, greenfinch, siskin and woodpecker, but perhaps as the weather gets colder they'll be driven back into the garden to find food - and become food.

Etendeka

If I ever returned to Namibia I would spend most if not all of my holiday at a small camp way out in the bush called Etendeka. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that Dennis, the man with the binoculars who had the concession, took his customers out on a three-hour walk every morning, usually setting off from the camp itself as there was no need to drive to find game - they were all around us. On the occasion shown in this picture we were no distance from the camp when he pointed to some faint tracks. Tracking that leopard for the next half hour or so was wonderful, partly because I was very frightened but mostly because having that fear, and controlling it, made me feel supremely alive.

Although Dennis took us miles into the bush he never carried a gun. It was utterly against his conservation principles to shoot an animal, any more than he allowed me to pick up a mineral, of which there was no shortage; if I did I had to put it back exactly where I had found it.

Even though Dennis was responsible for upward of six people on a typical walk, I never felt that he was worried except on this occasion, when we were watching....

....a small herd of elephants which was passing through the concession. I don't know why elephant bothered him so much but perhaps he had had a nasty experience with one. Certainly his wife had: one day while she was massaging a customer in one of the camp's tents an elephant stuck its head through the tent flap to see what was going on.

Dennis didn't seem too bothered by rhino - one morning we tracked a pair for some distance - but I never discovered what he felt about buffalo as this was the one species of large animal which was missing from the area. To many of the old 'white hunters', it was the most dangerous of the big game.

I also loved Etendeka for its simplicity, for its remoteness, for the stunning scenery that surrounded it, and for its peace.  I would love to return though I fear time has run out on me.

The camp is still in business, though perhaps a little more sophisticated than when we were there in 2009. Its website is here.