First Swallow

We saw our first swallow of the year this morning, on a bright day marred by a cold northerly wind. The lone traveller was heading into the wind, and very intent on getting to its summer home, so it was only visible for a few moments.

Despite the wind we spotted the first comma of the year sunning himself in the lea of a hedge while....

....in the little wood called The Wilderness I finally caught up with the resident chiffchaff. He's a migrant too but has been singing for some days, along with a willow warbler.

A Day at the Races

Elizabeth's chosen sport while she was an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex college in Cambridge was rowing, so in the summer of 1991 we drove up to watch her ladies eight participate in the annual 'bumps'. It was a miserable day with rain hammering down so the first thing we had to do was buy waterproofs - wax coats which we finally disposed of in 2017.

The idea of the 'bumps' seems to be that the boat behind you has to try to catch you up and touch your boat. Despite the weather it was all taken very seriously but great fun to watch.

However, for some people it seemed that the rowing wasn't the highlight of the day.

Stamps 2

Amongst the stamp collecting materials - see earlier post here - there are two albums. This one has pages organised according to groups of animals, so, for example, there is....

....a page for 'Fresh Water Birds'. The handwriting is mine, and I think the album was started by David and I. We didn't get far: most of the pages, like this one, have very few stamps on them.

One of the fiddliest things about stamp collecting used to be handling the small, sticky mounts. This album attempted to get round the problem by....

....mounting the stamps in small, semi-transparent pockets. It might have been a good idea but it doesn't work very well.

It too was organised by natural history, though I have no recollection as to which member of the family did it. This double-page spread is flowers.

Finally, there are two envelopes, this one containing, amongst other things, a number of stamps relating to rocks and minerals. It also has a registered envelope with my handwriting on it sent from Jamaica to my parents in England. It must have enclosed something important, though I cannot remember what it was, and my father probably kept it with a view to floating off the stamps for his collection - which, incidentally, had a very good for Jamaica section as Gill and I actively looked for stamps for him while we lived there.

The other envelope has a jumble of stamps in it - which reflects the problem with stamp collecting, that there are now so many stamps that a collector has to specialise in a very narrow field.

Landscape

As, day after day, I walk through this landscape of slow moving waterways and....

....manicured fields, where the farmer drives his tractor across his newly-ploughed land to mark the footpaths to which we must adhere, and where....

....even the few places that remain uncultivated are planted and controlled, I do wonder whether I will ever come to feel any deep affection for it, but then....

....I realise that the only way I will is if I can seek out and celebrate wilderness' survivors in its hidden corners.

Rachael 1991

It seems very unfair on the other three children that the camera and colour film were coming in to their own when Rachael was small, so the family albums are full of pictures of her. I like this one, taken in the conservatory, reminding us what fashionable small girls were wearing in those days.

Here she is with her Mum on the steps of the Lodge Road conservatory. In the background is the yellow plastic box which held her many toys.

This is her a little later the same day wearing her tired look.

The important person in this picture is the little hand puppet, who was called Jacko. He, along with a second hand puppet called Rabbit, dates back to the 1950s. My brother also had two puppets, another Jacko - which was confusing - and one called Mrs Haylett.

So my Jacko must have been over 40 in 1991, a ripe old age for a well-used and well-travelled monkey. He had by this time lost an eye but was otherwise wearing remarkably well. He was still with us in Kilchoan but I have now lost track of him. Perhaps Rachael has him.

Stamps 1

We keep finding odd things which we brought with us from Scotland but which have been hiding in cupboards and drawers. Today we found a small pile of materials which recall the time, largely at Lodge Road, when some members of the family had an interest in stamp collecting.

This is a single page torn from an album which probably belonged to Gill or I: we both collected stamps when we were young. It has many of the stamps which I remember as a small boy in Mombasa, particularly....

 ....the sets with the Queen's head and African animals - I think the one on the left is part of an older series.

There are also older stamps from the reign of George VI and....

....a single stamp from George V's time. In those days colours on the stamps seemed to be very pale, and I note that the postmark is Mombasa.

This stamp is different in that it was issued for use in Kenya and Uganda. Tanganyika didn't become British until after the end of the First World War, and George V reigned from 1910 to 1936, so the series is pre-1922 when it was mandated to Britain. After that, sets of stamps were issued to cover the three British East African territories, the colonies of Kenya and Uganda, and the UN Trust Territory of Tanganyika.

Lying loose in an envelope we found these stamps, which are unused. My father was a keen stamp collector of 'British & Commonwealth' stamps, which he kept in beautifully-tended albums, and he used to say that unused stamps had less value than used - which surprised me.

Newbourne Walk Wildlife

We are continually surprised that, in this ordered landscape, wildlife manages to cling on and, in some cases, seems to thrive. On our Newbourne safari the other day we saw a muntjac deer in this field, a single animal which seemed completely unconcerned by the large tractor and plough working close by.

Each field appears to be owned by a pair of red-legged partridge which prefer to lower their heads and scurry away when we pass and will only take off if we stop to watch them.

Approaching Newbourne, someone was sufficiently caring for their local wildlife to have climbed a tree and fixed a nesting box to its trunk, a box with a superb view across the fields. We had assumed its likely inhabitants to be owls but, while we watched, a pair of kestrels proved that it belonged to them.

These plants were crowded along the ditches on either side of a one hundred-metre stretch of farm track. They are field horsetails, a rapidly-spreading weed much hated by gardeners, and by livestock farmers as it is poisonous to grazers. This is the only place we've seen this species among open fields.

Butterflies are now out in good numbers. Peacocks, tortoiseshells and whites are common but we were thrilled to see an orange tip - only the males have these brighly-coloured wingtips - and....

....the first speckled wood of the year.