“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.
“Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest.”
– William Sharp, ‘Where the Forest Murmurs’
On the screen, chilly blue fingers of shadow point the way down snowy slopes under azure skies; outside, the fingers are damp, grey digits, sliding under collars, pinching fingers, and smearing moisture across cheeks.
Black beans bubble in the crockpot, their steam redolent of spices from warmer climes: cumin, coriander and chilli … almost as good as foreign travel.
As the wind rises, the leylandii shakes out its branches; a flamenco dancer settling her ruffles as she gets ready to dazzle a crowd.
Despite the Merlin app telling me that their presence is ‘unlikely in Norfolk’, four cranes trumpet loudly across a wet field. It sounds like elephants roaming the county.
A hunched dark shape perched on one of the thinner branches of a tree turns out, on closer inspection, to be a buzzard, and not a vulture or a gargoyle.
In the flowerbed on my way to work, under the deep shadowy edge of an evergreen hedge, a single purple muscari has appeared overnight.
The quick, flittering movements outside the kitchen window resolve themselves into two robins, busily feeding in the winter flowerbeds.
Packets of mock standardisation material have arrived on my desk; February is the start of an extended exam season that begins with Year 11 mocks, continues with Year 10 mocks and culminates in the GCSEs.
Wish me luck …
Like small children playing hide and seek, arms and legs sticking out all over the place, two trees peer over the top of the privet hedge, their blossoms pale and messy in the grey morning light.
“My cat fell downstairs!” announces Erin; an attempt to distract me from the fact that she has managed to leave her glasses at home again and can’t actually see.
It almost works … why would her cat not have the balance its species is known for?
A tiny sunshine star is buried in the grass by my car.
The lonely ‘kee’ of a buzzard echoes through the sky as I hang my washing out; the world feels like it’s waking up again.
Gazing out of the window while the photocopier does its thing, I notice that the untidy gaggle of seagulls on the field bears more than a passing resemblance to the students at lunchtime.
Scarlet elfcups scattered across the woodland floor fool me into the belief that someone has discarded small pieces of plastic. Reality is so much better than my fear.
Freya comes to show off the creative writing book she’s decorated following our inaugural Writers’ Group session on Tuesday. She shyly shows me the beautiful poem she worked on at home.
Buds are appearing on the fruit trees; it won’t be long until they burst into flower and leaf.
I tuck seeds into their beds of compost, dreaming of long summer days, a glut of Cosse de Violette beans and tomatoes, and the things I can cook with them.
Crabapple blossom has appeared along the hedgerows; delicately crumpled scraps of blush pink, offering hope for the coming year.
“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.
“A book can be loved to death and not die. Look at how this one refuses to close. Place the weight of the world on it and it may stop demanding attention.”
– Z R Ghani, ‘The Art of Cloying’
So, in case you hadn’t already noticed, I’m a bit of a book nerd. I was not one of those kids that was taught to read at school, I’d already figured it out by then. Mostly because I couldn’t get other people to read enough stories to me and I was forced to take matters into my own hands. If people wouldn’t read to me often enough to suit my whims, then clearly the only thing to be done was to do it for myself!
Irritatingly, when I got to school, they insisted on “teaching” me to read all over again. And then they put me on a programme of scaled reading books. We moved a fair bit and I went to three different primary schools. And in each one I had to read the exact same books. Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat and Johnny Yellow Hat were the worst form of torture for a child that was happily reading paperbacks at home. By the time I was doing this for the third time, I had whinged enough for mum to intervene. She stomped into school and told them they needed to let me free read because I was way beyond the limits of their (very limited) reading programme. Having reluctantly agreed, they were somewhat miffed when on the first day I rocked up with a battered copy of The Lord of the Rings that I was reading for the second time. My teacher at the time told me I couldn’t possibly be reading it and insisted that I read out loud to him to prove I could. It took two pages of fluent reading for him to finally back down and accept that I really didn’t need to know about children in coloured hats!
From that point forwards, there were no limits. Our house was full of books and I was both allowed and encouraged to read whatever I wanted. There were never limits of what I could choose; if it was on the shelves, I was welcome to give it a go. There were some mistakes along the way; in hindsight, Fahrenheit 451 at age 11 ish was probably a mistake. I never finished it, and haven’t ever gone back to it since.
Now I have my own house, there are just as many books in it. If I’m being completely honest, there might even be more! I have a towering TBR pile and about six books on the go at any given time. And that’s just the paper ones; my Kindle is also stuffed full of titles. Not that any of this stops me shopping for more … if anything, it just gives me an incentive to read more (such a hardship!).
A while ago, I heard about a place I was sure I wanted to visit. Just outside London, there’s a magical* book warehouse that opens to the public on two weekends a month. Called 66 Books, it sells everything at 70% off retail value. I visited for the very first time on my way back from Angers in November and it was the stuff that dreams are made on. A giant, two storey warehouse, packed with towering shelves, stuffed with books of every size, shape, colour, and genre you can imagine. Fiction. Non-fiction. Classics. Modern fiction. Cookbooks**. Sci-Fi. Crime. Fantasy. Nature Writing. You name it, they have it. The downside was the two hour queue in the freezing temperatures to get through the door, but the result was absolutely worth the pain.
*I mean, it must be magic, right?
**A definite weakness of mine – is there anything better than travel writing mixed with recipes?
I went again this past weekend with my friends … they might have been slightly miffed that I went without them the first time 🤷♀️. To avoid the queues, we stayed in Chigwell on Friday night and set off at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. It worked … a ten minute queue (because we arrived before the doors opened) and we were in! The stock was different this time and filling my basket was not a difficult process. Last time, I had concentrated primarily on an aisle of non-fiction titles that could have been put together just for me. This time, I was determined to give myself some fiction to read … I need some slightly easier to read content at the moment. My brain is so fried from work, that anything complicated goes in one ear and out the other in seconds.
One large basket of books and a grand total of £48 later, my TBR pile has doubled and my anticipation levels are through the roof.
Hilariously, when we went into Hemel Hempstead for brunch, we walked past a Waterstones and just had to stop for a look. Ah well, if this is the worst I’m ever addicted to, I’ll take it as a win!
“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.
“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.
“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.”
– Charles De Lint
There’s something about trees that appeals to my imagination. And there’s something about trees in autumn and winter that leads me straight into folkloric tales. Trees have such personality, so many individual characteristics that when you meet them in the forest you can’t help but see them as people.
In Scandinavian folklore, they tell tales of a forest maiden who, from the front, is the most beautiful creature ever seen but whose back is hollow and resembles the bark of a tree. She lures men into the forest with her beauty and then, once they have lost their way, abandons them to their fate.
On a quick Saturday wander at Didlington a couple of weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I met her. I was following a path that was somewhat less … pathy … than it could have been. The track had been subsumed by drifts of mostly bronzed bracken that was almost as tall as I am. I was meandering along next to a small stream, aiming to circle round to meet up with another track that led back to the car. Occasional thuds and rustling in the undergrowth told me there were deer in the vicinity, even if I never laid eyes on them. On every step, I had to raise my knees right up and kind of jump over the leaves. After what felt like about four miles of this heavy going but was probably closer to five hundred yards, the trees thickened and the bracken thinned.
The trees were mostly conifers, with the occasional hardwood thrown in. Here, the ground felt spongy,; thick layers of pine needles have built up over time. Suddenly, amongst the trees I spied the large, sturdy trunk of an oak. Solid and gnarled, she stood firmly planted in the woodland. The scar where a branch has fallen from the tree stands out like the all-seeing eye of a cyclops and whiskery growths sprout from all around the trunk.
I continue circling the trunk, taking photos, and when I reach the far side, I discover that she’s mostly hollow; gnarled and lined bark giving way to the cleaner lines of bare wood. Her wood is patterned with several series of holes, probably formed by Andricus quercuscorticis. The asexual galls of this wasp are embedded in the wood of the tree and when the insect eats its way out, it leaves behind these ovoid holes. Tiny, sequin-like spangle galls litter the floor and trunk, the larvae inside them developing slowly, ready to emerge as adults in the spring.
I reluctantly drag myself away, very conscious that the weather is worsening and if I’m not careful, I’m going to get very wet. Skogsrå may not have lured me to my doom, but I certainly lost considerable time as I circled and re-circled her huge trunk, exploring her quirks and characteristics.
“Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.”
– Daphne du Maurier, ‘Jamaica Inn’
You know how this goes … as soon as I see an annotation on a map that looks interesting, there’s nothing else to be done until I’ve been to have a look in real life. It’s a rule. And if I’m honest, it’s never steered me wrong! I mean, sure, sometimes what I find is a bit underwhelming, but the journey to look has always been a good experience. Who was it that said, “it’s not the destination, its the journey”? Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think. And he was right; the experience of going somewhere is the best bit. The bit when you’ve arrived is just icing on the cake.
This time, the annotation read ‘Nine Stones Stone Circle’ … in that weird, slightly illegible Gothic script the Ordnance Survey uses for such annotations. Nearby, there was a note of ‘Crow Stones’ and a ‘Cairn’. Was there any doubt? Of course we were going to explore.
We set off on a sunny-ish day. Honestly, that’s really the best you can hope for in Scotland at this time of year. It isn’t actively hammering down so we count it as a good day and head on out. We drive up in to the Lammermuirs, along roads covered in drifts of sunshine yellow larch needles and flanked by gloriously autumnal beeches. The roads in the Borders are frequently lined with both beech trees and beech hedges, and at this end of the year, they are showing at their absolute best. When the sun hits the leaves, they glow fiercely like banked embers about to burst into fresh flames. I constantly want to stop and take photos, but am categorically told that this is not the road to stop on! I’ll admit that there are some elements of left and right, up and down that might render such actions more dangerous than sensible, but there’s hardly any traffic ….
Meandering past Whiteadder reservoir, I marvel at how low the water level is. Last time I remember coming up this way, the water levels were much higher, with the road going over a wide stretch of water as it rounded the final bend. Today, there’s barely a trickle running beneath us as we round the same bend, testament to exactly how warm and dry the summer was this year. Even in Scotland.
The road climbs further up in to the hills. Despite the multitude of signs that tell us to drive carefully because of the wildlife on the road, the most we see are pigeons, rooks, pheasants, and partridges. All of which eventually remove themselves from the road, but do it in very different ways at totally different speeds. The rooks launch skywards lazily at the first sight of us rounding the bend. The pigeons lurk in the corners, almost perfectly camouflaged against the tarmac until the very last second when they explosively flap up across the road in front of the car. I jump every time and mutter curses. The pheasants, as they always do, dither indecisively on the verges, never knowing if they’ve made the right choice of direction. Sometimes, they make a last second sprint for the other side; risking life and limb because they can’t make up their minds. The partridges panic as the car approaches and fly, en masse, along the road in front of us before settling back in the carriageway and looking relieved … until they notice that we’re still there and repeat the whole process. Idiot things.
We follow the road up and down as it traverses hills and crosses burns. Or at least the spaces where burns will be in a couple of weeks of slightly soggy weather conditions. The signposted ford is conspicuous in its absence for the moment though. Probably for the best. We drive upwards until we reach Johnscleugh and a convenient pull-in at the bottom of a grassy track that leads even more upwards onto the moor. The bracken up here has faded to a burnished bronze, the heather is a deep chocolate brown and the shaggy grass is tipped with gold. The sky above us is mostly grey, with occasional patches of a pale, watery blue. It’s eyewateringly cold (at least to me, who may have developed some slightly soft southerner tendencies) and I fasten myself into my big coat while giving thanks for the thermal undershirt I actually remembered to wear.
As we stomp briskly up the hill, hands buried deep in our pockets, and shoulders hunched to keep our collars up round our ears, I’m startled by an odd sound. Glancing up quickly, I see a black grouse whirring away over the hill. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grouse before (Scotch whisky ads excluded), and I certainly haven’t ever heard their call. Who knew they sounded like small, angry dogs?!
Its blowing a hoolie up here, the wind finding every tiny gap in my clothing, and making it much harder to get up the hill than it really needs to be. Some of the lower clouds bring a spattering of rain that beats against our faces and makes the temperature feel much colder than it really is. We’re not entirely sure which path will get us to the circle, so we’re working on instinct now. We know that it’s supposed to be just down from the summit so we follow a right hand fork that runs upwards. I’m assuming that the circle should be fairly obvious. I mean, they’re standing stones … how hard can they be to find?
Turns out that the answer to that question is “very, very difficult”. We quarter the hillside, wading through hip high heather and scanning in all directions for any sign of stone. Who knew that heather grew that tall?* It’s incredibly springy and tries to throw you on the floor if you step on it wrong. I’m also having a dawning realisation that it could quite happily swallow up quite sizeable stones without noticeable effort. Maybe this is a fools errand. There are cleared patches (I’m assuming grouse management) filled with the twisted, bleached skeletons of heather plants. They’re oddly stone coloured from a distance, and trick us more than once. We find some pictures on a website describing the site and resort to lining up pylons and coverts of conifers on the far hillside. Left a bit. Right a bit. Uphill. Downhill.
*Even looking at my photos, it’s difficult to believe that it’s so deep, but I promise you, looks can be very deceiving!!
After almost forty five minutes of searching, we finally get a tiny glimpse of stone. We gallop downhill towards it, and find our goal just a few feet away from a track. If we’d only stayed on the original path instead of forking off and climbing to higher ground, we’d have found the stones within minutes. Oops!
The circle is more of a jagged oval of nine stones that are fifty to sixty centimetres high. There are a couple of larger ones that may have fallen and are now lying on their sides in the rough grass. We can’t work out why the circle is sited here; it’s not on the top of the hill where I expected it to be. It’s tucked into the lee of the slope and apparently not particularly visible from any distance. Why was it here? Who put it here? What was it for? When was it placed?
Most of these questions remain unanswered; the best I can do on dates is that Trove.scot has it listed as prehistoric, possibly Neolithic or Bronze Age. An index card from Historic Environment Scotland (dated to 1958) records evidence of uneven digging in the centre of the circle, while another references a historic source (from 1853) which states that “it is believed that some treasure is hidden beneath these stones and various attempts, all unsuccessful, have been made to find it.” Sadly, that’s the sum of the information I can find. Nothing further about the nature of the treasure and from where the story originated. Just enough to make it interesting, but not enough to clarify. In my head, ghostly processions of people wend their way slowly up the slope, bundled in cloaks, to celebrate the turning of the seasons and to watch the stars turning above the hillside.
Having spent so long searching for the circle, we decide not to go looking for the Crow Stones today; they’re supposed to be much closer to Kingside Burn and we aren’t sure we wanted our feet to get any wetter. They’re also supposed to be even shorter stones and the heather isn’t getting any shorter towards the bottom of the hill! We decide to quit while we’re ahead and turn our faces back towards the car. Somehow, we’re still walking into the wind. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s certainly true. Grouse are still barking at intervals, starting up furiously from the undergrowth as we pass.
We reach the car with chilled faces and hands. Have we got time for one more exploration before we head home? There’s an annotation on the map just up the road that looks like it might be fun ….
absolutelynotnormal 