I hear it long before I see it. A high bubbling call, that loops up in pitch like a referee with one of those old-fashioned pea-whistles getting increasingly annoyed. It’s a song of desolation and loneliness, a haunting sound that I associate with moors and estuaries, with vast skies and open spaces. It’s the call of a curlew. It makes me pause. Seventy years before, Blakehill Farm would have throbbed to the sound of wartime Dakotas taking to the skies. …
Author: admin
The glade smells of baking ground and dried bracken, cut with the faint sweetness of end-of-year-sale bluebells. Their last few nodding heads are just visible between the unfurling green shepherd’s crooks of new ferns, and the squat purple flowers of bugle. Spindly birches cast ripples of dappled shade across the ground, but in this glade, surrounded on all sides by taller, more mature forest, the heat of this beautifully sunny day is trapped. It is uncomfortably warm. As I stand …
Finally, the smell has arrived. You know the moment, when you stand on your doorstep in the morning and breathe in, then breathe in a little further because the air smells so good. There’s something about a sunny morning after a long period of rain that makes the world seem full of promise, more hopeful somehow than the damp night before. And it’s not just imaginary. It turns out that you’re being turned on. In the soil around me, …
There’s a certain smugness involved when you can say that you’ve actively contributed to the recovery of a threatened species. Most conservation measures involve plain hard work – laying hedges, trimming encroaching bushes, digging out invasive plants. Mine involved finding a chair and a good book. It’s the easiest contribution to nature conservation I’ve ever made. There’s nothing like being stuck indoors much of the time to help you see the jobs you’ve been putting off for years. I’ve been …
“Biodiversity gain” is the latest buzzword in Government conservation policy. The new Environment Bill has the very laudable goal of trying to ensure that habitat loss is matched by habitat gain to excess elsewhere. It’s a clever idea, one that is aimed at helping to ensure the restoration of Britain’s deeply impoverished fauna and flora. But here’s the thing: it may not work. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the …
Whether or not rules of language matter is open to debate. Some, like lawyers, doctors and priests, will probably tell you that accuracy and stability in language is important. There’s some merit in that: you don’t want your surgeon whipping out this bit instead of that bit because someone forgot to update his textbook. But equally, language is a living thing, constantly evolving by adding new words(whoever heard of “lockdown” until recently?), re-assigning old ones, and sometimes making things become …
Social Profiles