“March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.”
– LM Montgomery
The gleam of chill sunshine on the dew-drenched field gives a surreal silvery glow.
A single crow stands sentry in the tree at the entrance to school.
I emerge from school into a peaceful pastel twilight of pink, blue and orange; birds chirp in muted tones from the trees, and even the sound of traffic feels hazy and distant.
Fat white buds are bursting into delicate white blossoms along the reaching fingers of blackthorn.
Fields along the roads edge have been ploughed into rich chocolate brown, velvety perfection.
Lexi giggles, “Miss, your voice is really cute. “
I currently have a sore throat and sound like a chipmunk … I’m not sure I’m feeling particularly cute!
Above the distant tractor, a cloud of white gulls wheel and dance; swirling down to the ground and then taking flight again.
Stately silvery-brown old beeches are wearing fuzzy, mossy slippers in bright green.
In the morning quiet, in that calm before the students arrive, I’m sure I hear a piercing whistle … the oystercatchers are back!
A woman in a padded coat walks her small, grey, curly-haired dog; her coat matches the colour of the ornamental cherry blossom above her.
Tiny diamonds sparkle on the velvet petals of a magnolia flower.
At the base of a fallen tree, a wolf struggles to stand from its mossy bed, gnarled wooden limbs enmeshed in roots and branches 🔽.
A heron flaps heavily overhead with a raucous screech.
Nestled in the flat, grey sky, a tiny patch of rainbow shimmers and glimmers.
Fat ivy stems, woven into intricate Celtic knots, crawl up the tree trunks along the path.
The pavement is littered with ash keys, as if some unknown entity has been rummaging through a drawer to find the correct one before trying to open an unexpectedly locked door.
It’s amazing how judgemental a pheasant can look when it feels that you are disturbing it.
In my seed trays, twenty seven tiny green sprouts have appeared … If they all make it to maturity, it’s going to be a very tomatoey summer!
Wind howls hungrily at the windows, battering and buffeting the glass to find a way in.
Along the branches of the pine trees, nestled amongst the needles, the ladybirds have come out to play.
“The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.”
– G.K. Chesterton, ‘Heretics’
I have a bit of a confession; I rather like fence posts. I recognise this piece of information probably makes me a bit weird, but it is, nevertheless, the truth. We have some great fences round here … gnarled, weatherworn, and deeply grooved. I mean, just look at that texture!
Sometimes it’s the post itself, but most of the time, it’s what’s growing on top that really makes my day. Atop these characterful posts, there are tiny little worlds just waiting to be explored. Lumps and bumps of vibrant green. Velvety cushions strewn across hardwood floors. There are red tipped lichenous spikes, an orchestra of grey-green trumpets and many slender, fragile columns holding aloft the foundations of the next generation.
On the day I took these photos, everything was sprinkled with a glitter of diamond bright droplets. Not from rain, but from mist. Or low-hanging cloud. Or mizzle. Or whatever name we were using for it that day. Somehow, it made the moss look alive. I mean, I know it is alive, but it started to seem sentient. Tentacles reached out from behind tuffets of green, each one topped with an eye and bejewelled along its length. Even the velvety cushions seemed to be small furry creatures, hunkered down against the rain.
As a kid, I read a book called ‘The Forest of Bowland Light Railway’, in which my favourite characters were called cowzies (Looking back, they form a very tiny part of the book, but they were the bit that stuck with me!). Small bundles of fluff, they lived deep in the forest alongside the gnomes, the leprechauns, and the wild animals;
A cowzie is about as high as a rabbit sitting up on its hind legs. It has no arms and no legs to speak of, and its eyes though small, are hidden under long hair like a toy terrier, the kind old ladies and old maids loaves to carry about and which are always yapping.
The cowzies’ teeth, though hidden in their long hair, were as sharp as needles and about the sane length.
– BB, ‘The Forest of Boland Light Railway’
To me, tiny lumps of moss always remind me of cowzies; there’s no telling what teeth, eyes and features might hide under their fluffy exterior; they’re incredibly resilient, surviving hot dry summers, soaking wet autumns and freezing winters; they huddle together for warmth, and look incredibly cute and whimsical throughout all of it.
I mean, this one basically has whiskers to sense the world around it.
“She left the hut and bright log fire at noon And walked outside on crisp white winter snow To find the iced slopes shadowed like the moon, The wild wood desolate and bare below; The red trees wet, adrift with icy flow, The evergreens with glassy needled leaves; A bloodstone veined red and white this view weaves.”
– Lynette Roberts, ‘Winter Walk’
A pied wagtail scurries across the garage forecourt, bobbing its head busily as it goes.
Tiny white flakes eddy and swirl in the air while snow is blown in dusty clouds from the top of the greenhouse. Pigeons jostle for a warmer position in the Leylandii.
Like a showgirl, the frosty pavement shimmers under the streetlights, silver lamé to brighten up my morning.
I discover that the French for pie chart is ‘camembert’ and resolve to use this at every opportunity!
Queues of golden raindrops glimmer along the washing line against a backdrop of red berries and grey skies.
A sudden flurry of wings outside the kitchen window draws my attention; a great tit pauses dramatically on the top of a garden cane, before fluttering away again.
Looking up, the tops of the Scots pines explode into the sky like fireworks.
Along the margins of the road, at all of the corners, is a thin line of squashed carrots, a timely reminder that this is Norfolk and it is winter.
The crescent moon sits like a jewel on the sumptuous blue velvet of the pre-dawn sky.
Pink smudges decorate the edges of the sky; the day clinging stubbornly to the last of its warmer temperatures.
Two kites circle vigilantly in the skies above us, their wings flicking and twisting to maintain their height.
Wind smashes against the building and periodic splatters of raindrops splash against the windows; it’s going to be a long day.
As I walk under the outspread branches of the maple tree, three pigeons take flight overhead; a sudden shower of raindrops pelts me. Stupid pigeons!
Revising Macbeth with my Year 11s, I left a quote on my board, “A little water clears us of this deed.” I come back later to find that someone has graffitied it with the words, “No, it doesn’t. Lol. ‘Out, damned spot'”
I am entertained.
Gulls scream raucously and enthusiastically from the roof of the Sports Hall during line-up, their voices drowning out the party line.
Thick mist wrapped tightly around the playing fields makes our building feel isolated; a small boat adrift in an endless sea of grey.
A song thrush trills and warbles derisively from the hedge as I hurry past.
“Late again,” he seems to say.
A squirrel bounds along, tail flying like a pennant behind it, sparrows flitter to and fro from the feeder to the hedgerow, and blackbirds splash in the puddles from last night’s rain. We’re all taking advantage of the bright morning sunshine.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
– George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’
I feel like I say this at the beginning of every term, but honestly it’s always true. The beginning of term is difficult. Ridiculously difficult. Not only are we trying to get readjusted to routine, but the students are too. An awful lot of them have spent the holiday period being disregulated and out of routine. They’ve stayed up late and got out of bed late. As have we. We’re all tired. None of us want to drag ourselves out of bed and go into school and concentrate and think. We’d all very much rather pick up a book (OK, that one might not relate to the students), get outside or turn on the TV.
When you get back to school and discover that, yet again, everything has been changed without warning, it’s not really a fun moment. So yes, if anyone is keeping track, it’s been a while since I managed to write anything down.
So here we are; new timetable ✅️, new groups ✅️, new curriculum ✅️, new homework policy ✅️, return to original homework policy (after a grand total of one week) ✅️, and new teaching pedagogy ✅️.
I’m not going to whinge.
What I am going to do is tell some stories. They’re stories about the students and they’re the reason that I still retain even a faint grasp on my sanity.
***
I am often called upon to mediate arguments between students at break and lunchtime. Not big arguments, I hasten to point out, just the little disagreements they’re having about what something means or what happened at a certain time. So when Ellie and Maisie womble over to my desk, it’s nothing new:
“Miss, what does shoe mean?”
Errm, what now? Why does this child not know what a shoe is? My thoughts must have made themselves, as they so often do, very clear on my face.
Ellie clarified, “No miss, not like that. Maisie said she shew me something, and that’s not a word, is it?”
“No, no it is not! She’s being particularly Norfolk about life.”
Maisie joins in at this point, “Yes miss, I shew her my work. I can say that.”
It really is a ongoing battle to get Norfolk folks to understand the fact that the past tense of ‘to show’ is ‘showed’. On moving to the county many years ago, I was utterly bewildered by their adamant use of what can only be described as an …. old fashioned/archaic/just plain weird* way of phrasing something so simple. As a teacher, it drives me insane.
*Delete as applicable
***
As you may have noticed in my checklist of woes, homework is on there twice. Yes, that really happened. We spent the first week of term asking how homework was going to be be run. We spent the second week of term launching a new homework system wherein all students had to complete a large chunk of written work at home every week, based on a booklet of questions that were a) pointless b) inaccessible to most students and c) the exact opposite of everything we’ve been told we have to do in lessons. We complained to the leadership team, we explained why it was ridiculous, and then we capitulated handed out an entire new set of books and booklet and did our best to explain to the students that it was ‘a good thing’. The third week we spent collecting all the books back in after the leadership team decided that it was, in fact, not ‘a good thing’ at all. In the meantime, most of the students had been remarkably reasonable about the whole thing and loads of them had even completed their first week’s work.
Iris is one of those students who completed her homework. Iris is always one of those students. She’s brilliant; clever, funny, and eager to please. So when she hands me her book and tells me, with a mischievous smile, that she had rebelled against the whole system by completing the work in purple pen, instead of black or blue, I have to laugh. Rebellion, but not quite as we know it.
***
Logan is on a tracker*. To mirror the previous paragraph; Logan is always on a tracker. Despite the fact that to me, he’s funny, personable, and polite, he has a bit of a habit of winding other people up. We’ve talked about it until I’m blue in the face. Sadly, with no success. He can be a proper little monster when he feels like it.
*In our school, when placed on a tracker, the student is given three targets and they have to have the piece of paper signed off in every lesson to show that they met their targets. As a form tutor, I then have to check it in the morning and grump about any missed targets.
Logan is terrible at remembering (or bothering) to get his tracker signed, which frequently leads to conversations that go a bit like this:
“Where’s your tracker, Logan?”
… fishes around in ALL his blazer pockets, locates said tracker, opens it, looks at it, and gives me a sheepish look …
“You don’t really want to see it, miss”
“And yet, I’m still holding my hand out hopefully. Hand it over!”
… long pause …
“Why is your tracker not signed, Logan?”
“I just forgot, miss.”
“Why did you forget?”
“Well, it’s just not that important, miss. It’s not food.”
… I think about that statement for a second, walk to my desk for the PostIts, write a quick note and stick it on the report, before handing it back …
“Go and get all the blank spaces signed.”
He glances down and reads the note that clearly says, “I am a cookie.”
He slowly grins and admits, “That was pretty good, miss.”
We’ll no doubt have the same conversation tomorrow. And the next day. And the one after that. But we started today with a smile.
***
Eimutis looks at the pictures of Meteora monastery, the first shows it bathed in golden sunshine against a backdrop of cerulean mountains, the second huddling under darkening clouds, ribbons of light flowing down its flanks. I’m not expecting particularly great things; this is our first attempt at creative writing, it’s Friday (morning no less), this is our second lesson of the day, this is the bottom set, and he’s trying to do this in his second language.
He thinks hard, face screwed up in concentration …
“Miss, that second one is like Zeus is mad at the monastery. With the lightning and stuff.”
Jayden looks up from the back corner of the room. Surprising me, and by the look on his face, surprising himself as well, he joins in …
“The sky is the same colour as the flag, miss. The Greek one flying over the monastery.”
Maisie, one of the quieter, and least confident, members of the group, calls out …
“It’s like the mountains are cuddling the monastery.”
You could knock me down with a feather. We might have the beginnings of something good here.
“There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”
– Vincent Van Gogh
Another quick one … life is busy at this point in the year (and the term) what with Christmas and its inevitable celebrations, birthdays, parents evenings, garage appointments (My car has decided that it’s not satisfied with any of its tyres or the oil it currently has!!) and baking.
I did manage to carve out a couple of hours for a wander at Wretham yesterday though. It had been cold overnight with a light frost, but the morning was fresh, clear and very sunny (I’m pretty sure I still have small purple dazzles in front of my eyes as I’m writing this!).
As I walked down through the first section of forest, sun rays shining through the trees were illuminating the wisps of mist that remained and punctuating them with thousands of tiny starbursts emanating from the dew drops that hung from every twig. It was like walking through a magical land … or at least it would have been, if not for the many, many, dirt bikers that had chosen to make it their playground for the morning.
As I walked, I was convinced my eyes were playing tricks on me; I kept catching flashes of movement in my peripheral vision but when I turned, there was nothing there. Was I seeing the movement of birds in the undergrowth? Faeries dancing in the mist? Animals scurrying for cover?
It was only when I reached a more open area that I realised that it was the condensation from the melting frost boiling off in the sunlight. Curls of smoke lifted from the bright embers of the bracken, twisting and dancing in the air before dissipating into sunbeams. I watched, entranced by the sight and lulled into immobility by the movement.
Shaking myself from my trance, I continued on down the path to see what other treasures I could find.
“November–with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes–days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines.”
– LM Montgomery
The branches of a weeping willow flutter gracefully in the breeze like a row of pennants at a medieval joust.
In the deepening twilight, a female pheasant scurries almost invisibly across the road.
Underneath the bronzed woodland canopy, a pine tree’s spiked skeleton lies, dark and bare.
Silhouetted trees and buildings overlay an eerie orange Halloween sky; it’s only a week late for decorations.
Having decided I’m a witch, one of the Year 7s says I must have a house full of spellbooks. I’m agreeing (just for giggles), when from the other side of the room comes the comment, “And they’ll all be in Latin!”
Their expectations of me are high!
A shower of sycamore leaves from above heralds the progress of a grey squirrel skittering through the branches in search of snacks.
Above me, in the flat grey sky, a single swan passes by, wings creaking rustily through the air.
A peacock butterfly flutters to the ground in front of me, its rich red reminiscent of the beech leaves it’s surrounded by.
Pink and silver skies glitter over fields and hedgerows as I set off on the drive to work.
The day dawns bright and clear; a promise that today will be a good day.
One of the Year 7s tells me her mum has synesthesia: I’ve never even peripherally met someone with it; I have so many questions.
Two geese fly low over the road, their wings moving in complete harmony, white patches shining in the early morning light against black feathers.
I’m distracted from my marking by the sight of a pigeon that is trying to alight on the slender branch of an ash tree outside. It wobbles backwards and forwards on its springy perch … aren’t we all just trying to find our balance?
Juliette stops at the end of the lesson to tell me that she is part of a singing group outside of school that is performing a Christmas concert in Ely cathedral at the end of December. I’m almost as excited as she is.
The morning arrives in a flurry of lemon yellow skies and brownish-grey clouds. A whisper thin crescent of radiant silver glows above the trees.
Laden tractors, orange lights flashing, crawl backwards and forwards along the darkening road, each with a long trail of cars following like ducklings behind their mother.
A thick, sullen grey fog lies over the town, cradling in the cold. As I leave, I emerge into another world where golden sunshine floods over the road and the skies are blue.
Sparrows twitter companionably as they forage amid orange berries in the top of the close cropped hedge.
“I’m so glad you’re back, miss,” are the first words I hear from Rosy, “Now I can rant again!”
Yes Rosy, yes you can. And I’m so glad to be back listening to your endlessly entertaining rants.
In the hedgerow, a crop of crab apples glow golden yellow in the sunshine; fitting prizes for some mythological hero.
The beech leaves have quietly turned to tarnished copper and slipped from the branches into thick drifts at the base of trunks.
The air is cold and silver gilt, nipping at my face and pinching my fingers.
Last week, part way through a week that was shaping up to be at least a decade long, I got a message from my sister:
In case it wasn’t clear, my sister does not work in education and can book her holidays whenever she wants to … she is continuously frustrated that I can’t do the same. I was however, intrigued by her brainwave. Sometimes, I’m much better at bringing ideas into reality than she is. What did she have in mind, and did I want to make it happen?
It turned out her brainwave was that we could head over to Angers and catch the second round of the Continental Cup, thereby ticking off a new rink on our list, supporting a coach that used to be part of the Nottingham Panthers organisation, and getting away from our responsibilities for the weekend. So many wins! I set to work and very soon had a set of flights, tickets for the Saturday games, an Airbnb booking, a hire car, and a parking place at Gatwick. It’s amazing what can be achieved in a short space of time when you’re properly motivated. It had been a very long Tuesday and some escapism was much needed. Our plans did involve a couple of stupidly early mornings, but it felt like it was worth it.
We arrived in Nantes a good half an hour earlier than expected, thanks to a lead-footed pilot and an enthusiastic tailwind. As we flew in over the city, I was looking at the traffic with a slightly nervous feeling; I knew that very shortly I had to wrestle, not only with a left hand drive car, but also with an automatic. I hadn’t driven an automatic in twenty odd years and I hate them. Give me a manual car every time! But car hire firms seem to be increasingly moving towards automatic only, especially in Europe, so it seems that I shall also have to move with the times. *sigh*
It turned out that driving an automatic was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be. More terrifying was the fact that, if I was driving, Ali was in charge of navigation. Anyone who knows her, knows that her sense of direction is fundamentally flawed. She’s the only person I know who regularly goes round roundabouts twice, “just to see what her options are,” trusts her SatNav implicitly, and once turned up at my house via “a road with a ford”. I’m still looking for that ford, even though she found it about six years ago.
We managed to find our way into Angers, which on a Saturday morning was absolutely hotching. We even managed to find the Airbnb with no issues … apart from my sanity being a little tested by French driving! Unfortunately, while the Airbnb host had not lied about the copious amount of parking next to the apartments, it had slightly slipped his mind to mention the copious numbers of cars parked in the copious number of spaces. We drove round in circles (literally) for quite some time before somebody finally left and I could manoeuvre into a space with a sigh of relief.
Apparently, even when planning and booking in a hurry, I am reasonably good at sourcing convenient* accommodation for our adventures. The rink was a mere five minutes walk in a straight line from the flat. Excellent news when you’re with the world’s most geographically challenged person. We went straight down to the IceParc to do a quick recce before heading out to explore the city centre.
*Let’s never mention the stay in Rouen where our Airbnb was about three hundred yards from the rink … as the crow flies. It nevertheless took us twenty five minutes solid walking to reach it, due to an inconveniently placed river and a lack of pedestrian access on the nearest bridge!
Angers is a very strange mix of modern and ancient and is very, very sporty. There was a cycle race taking place while we were there, so many rowers on the river that we briefly wondered whether that was an event as well, an international ice hockey tournament and, I believe, a football match as well. All the way through the city, there was signage for something called ‘Le Trail de L’Apocalypse’, along with countless road closures. This was slightly perturbing; it’s never good to discover that you’ve arrived somewhere just in time for the apocalypse, and even less good when they seem to have planned for it. Some quick investigation revealed that this was actually a nighttime running event that takes place in the city every year. On top of all this, there was also a huge fairground set up along both sides of the river … Angers was clearly the place to be that weekend!
When we finally worked out the time difference and figured out the timings of the games, we headed back in that direction. The rink had an amazing atmosphere. I know the French like a good son et lumière exhibition, and this was a really good one. A full blown light show was projected onto the ice at the start of the home team’s match, the music was loud and the fans were outstanding.
The Ducs d’Angers were playing Gyergyoi HK in the evening match. We were there to support Angers. It might seem weird … I mean, after all, they were playing for a place in a tournament that Nottingham are both a part of and hosting in January. We knew that we would conceivably be playing them in that tournament. But Angers almost feels like an extension of our club; its Head Coach, Jonathan Parades, was our Head Coach during one of the worst times in our club’s history and we all still feel a great connection to him. After all, ‘Once a Panther, always a Panther’. It really didn’t take long for us to get swept up in the emotions of the game. There’s nothing better than a hockey match when you have skin in the game and really care about the outcome. We jumped up and down, shouted a lot, held our breath when the Romanians got a bit too close, and exhaled when our netminder stood firm.
The Ducs won that game, along with all their others and will be joining us in Nottingham in January, along with the victors of the afternoon game HK Mogo. Because they won, they’ll be in a different group to us, but it’s entirely possible that we’ll face each other in one of the final games. I haven’t entirely worked out how I’m going to cheer for that one, but it will no doubt be a memorable event!!
Despite what the name sounds like (I mean, both my sister and I refer to them every day as the Ducks 🦆), it actually means ‘Dukes’, referencing the historical lineage of the Dukes of Anjou who are associated with the region and city of Angers, ruling both in the middle ages. They were also the forerunners of the Plantagenet line who went on to become kings of England between 1154 and 1485. However, the logo and mascot of les Ducs are based on the French name for an eagle owl which is ‘grand-duc’.
All in all, a very good weekend.
This was one of the buildings in a sprawling hospital campus.I’ve never seen such a fancy health care building.I rather liked the silhouette of these seeds against this old building.This medieval shrine was beautifully juxtaposed against its modern surroundings.The Cathédrale Saint-Maurice d’Angers isbeing renovatedat the moment, but even that added to the effect of the city.Église Notre-Dame des Victoires de Angers, next to an absolutely fabulous organic cooperative.The Palais Episcopal adjoining the cathedral.The Pont de Verdun crossing the river with some gloriously yellow foliage as accent colours.
“The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.”
– Ray Bradbury, ‘The Halloween Tree’
Pigeons scatter across the car park like unruly children.
Amongst the fiery oranges and reds of autumn, a single pink rose blooms on a tall stem.
Huddled in a corner, above a doorway, a bat slumbers deeply, oblivious to the mobs of children that pass beneath it all day.
Two geese gossip their way across the leaden skies.
As I turn on the Angers match, a raging torrent of French is unleashed; tumbling and bouncing between consonants, my brain frantically tries to make sense of at least some of the words.
Man, French people talk FAST!!
Crouched beneath an oak tree, photographing fungi, I am brutally bombarded with acorns.
I look up at line-up to see Dylan holding a piece of card from which a gigantic orb-weaver spider dangles. For one brief moment, I believe it to be a Halloween figurine …. until it wriggles. He grins as I order him to put it on the grass and leave it there.
Fog lies heavy across the field, illuminated from above by golden sunlight.
Ivy stems, mottled brown and grey, slither like serpents along the trunks of the fallen trees.
Autumn snowflakes fall in flurries, forming gold drifts in the darkness of the forest floor.
Above the chaos of the M62, a kestrel hangs, adjusting the angle of its wings in minute increments; an oasis of calm in an increasingly frantic space.
Beech leaves glow like banked embers against the ashy-grey skies above.
Long skeins of geese unravel untidily across the evening sky, their noise flapping along behind them.
The house is surrounded by a blank curtain of grey, as if someone pulled down a blind to cover the view.
Startled by what sounds like the barking of an irritated dog, I look up, only to see two black grouse whirring away across the hillside.
Larch needles lie in thick drifts along the edges of the road; sunshine cushions against the encroaching cold.
A startlingly bright rainbow arches across the charcoal sky, echoed faintly by a second inverted arch to one side.
In the thermals above the A1, a buzzard soars in lazy circles to gain height.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
– William Blake
This is a new acquaintance of mine; I’d like you to meet Cyrus.
(Of course he’s called Cyrus. After all, his name in Latin is Pyrus pyrasta and we all know about the joys of alliteration. What other name could he claim half so well?)
It’s an illustrious name, associated with Persian kings, most notably Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire in 550BC. It’s thought the name comes from the Old Persian Kūruš, meaning, depending on who you ask, ‘the Sun’, ‘like Sun’, ‘young’, ‘hero’, and ‘humiliator of the enemy in verbal contest’. I rather like that last one; it feels like the kind of name a person (or tree) could be proud of.
Cyrus is a wild pear … and his very being sparked a vivid memory of my own idiocy. Earlier this year, when mum and I were walking in Fife, we found a huge community woodland full of apple and pear trees. Because of a complete and utter lack of any signage, it took us a while to realise that they were planted trees; we initially thought they were naturalised, until the sheer number of them made that theory distinctly unlikely. It suddenly occurred to me that, to the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen a wild pear. Wild apples, yes; crab-apple trees are ten a penny in the UK and Norfolk has more than its fair share. But wild pear, not so much. When I wondered out loud whether pear trees grew wild in Britain, mum scoffed, “Where do you think the cultivated ones came from??” Okay, so in hindsight, it was a daft question, but seriously, I’d never seen one!
Last weekend, when I was walking down Procession Lane, a Roman road just outside North Pickenham that forms part of the Peddar’s Way, I happened to spot this tree. Cyrus jumped out at me (not literally, it isn’t Halloween yet!) primarily because of that gloriously twisted trunk, looking like he’d just turned around to glance over a shoulder at something behind him, arms flung dramatically wide to protest some perceived insult. There’s something very dynamic about him, a sense of movement that’s been frozen only momentarily.
At first I thought he was an apple tree. There were, after all, small spherical-ish green fruits scattered amongst the leaf litter all around it. It was only when I poked around a little bit closer that I realised the fruits I was seeing were rather more pear-shaped* than spherical. They weren’t large, only about five or six centimetres in length and were forming the basis of a solid meal for many small squidgy things and a very dapper stripy millipede. (Mental note: I really must get back a little earlier next year to see if they’re edible to humans as well.) So, maybe that’s why I’ve ‘never seen’ a wild pear; maybe I’ve just been writing them off as apple trees and never looking close enough to realise I’m wrong.
*As an aside, following a quick google sparked by that last sentence, the word for pear-shaped is pyriform. So when something ‘goes pear-shaped’, one could in fact say it’s gone pyriform!
Most of the lower leaves had fallen, beautifully coloured in autumnal shades of yellow, orange, red, and bronze. A thick layer of them carpeted the area around Cyrus’ feet; the most glorious Persian rug.
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
– Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walden or, Life in the Woods’
Last week, I went a Sunday wander through Thompson Water. Not literally, before you giggle too much! The reserve is lovely at this time of year, with large areas of deciduous woodland turning golden and copper in the sunshine, seasonal ponds surrounded by phragmites and hemp agrimony. It was somewhat spoiled by the absolute buffoon of a man, friend in tow, who had three dogs with them, all off their leads (despite copious signage to the contrary), all with large bells on their collars and one of them actually chasing a deer around. I may not like muntjac very much, but that was so far beyond the pale as to not even be able to see the pale! Unfortunately, I didn’t feel able to remonstrate the way I wanted to … even I’m not daft enough to challenge two idiots that are considerably bigger than me and three dogs in an area with no witnesses.
Anyway, having poked around in the leaf litter next to the water for a while … and found no sign of the pipe clubs, although I did find some rather lovely Russula spp … I took the longer path through to the other end of the reserve. The path winds under the canopies of beech and hazel trees, and what sounded like a horde of invading barbarians rustled busily in the undergrowth. It always amazes me quite how much noise squirrels can make, despite being barely bigger than my hand.
As I walked, I was trying to remember how long it had been since I went that way. Oddly, I always seem to take the other path; irritatingly, it’s the one more travelled by, so I couldn’t even quote Frost at myself. It’s been a while, but as I followed a particularly twisty bit of path through a holly thicket, I had a vivid memory of one year when it had rained enough to make the path unnavigable.
***
Some enterprising (and apparently optimistic) soul had laid down a thick mat of branches in the mud, but they’d sunk just enough to make the way even more slippery. Weighing up my options, I chose to follow an elephant path through a couple of holly bushes rather than risking the normal route.
As I climbed over a fallen log, I noticed a small cluster of almost colourless fungus cups with furry exterior surfaces nestled into the rotting wood. I’m still not entirely sure what exactly they were, it’s possible they were the wonderfully named Hairy Fairy Cup (Humaria hemisphaerica) but as with all my fungal identifications, this needs to be taken with a very large spoonful of salt.
I looked it up … it was apparently 2017 when I saw it first! This is my original photo.
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Every time I pass by this way, I feel the need to stop and look at the same log, just to see whether it’s there again. I’ve actually found it a couple of times, but this was not one of them. Instead, I was briefly sidetracked by some pleasingly bulbous mushrooms (possibly some kind of Honey Fungus) growing from underneath the log.
But then, as I was giving in to the demands of my knees to not stay crouched down, I noticed this tiny little chip of wood that seemed to have some tiny passengers. This whole piece of wood was about an inch long, and the fungus cups were about 3mm across*. It took me a while to organise my knees into a comfortable and stable position in order to get close enough to take photos.
*Yes, I just mixed metric and imperial measurements …. no, I’m not even sorry. Too many years working with, and translating for, builders mean that my brain bounces between both systems indiscriminately.
On closer inspection, the amorphous blobs of black turned out to be defined discs of black rubber, each with a short stem and what looks like a slightly fuzzy external surface. These are, I think (the usual provisos apply), Black Jelly Drops (Bulgariainquinans), otherwise known as Poor Man’s Liquorice, Black Bulgar, Gum Mushroom, Bachelor Buttons, or Rubber Buttons.
Despite the liquorice based name, they’re not classed as edible. I mean, even if they were a liquorice substitute, I would absolutely declare their inedibility given that as far as I’m concerned, liquorice is the food of the devil!!
This fungus grows on dead or dying hardwoods, often sweet chestnut, oak or ash, breaking it down and recycling nutrients. If you touch them, they can stain your fingers and cause skin irritation, especially in the sunshine. Glad I didn’t poke around too much! The Latin species name ‘inquinans‘ means polluting, befouling, or staining to honour this characteristic.
absolutelynotnormal 