Regular readers will have noted my dilemma a couple of weeks ago about pub names. Well, I know what my (purely hypothetical) pub will be called now, after a visit to my local nature reserve. I’d taken my friend Rob on the promise that we might, just might, see an otter. I’ve seen them on this reserve before, but they are fickle creatures. There have been times when I’ve seen them every day, and others when I’ve spent long hours …
Category: mammals
When I was a child there was a pub near our home called the “Fox and Elm”. It had an elm tree outside, with a rather unconvincing plastic fox in it. Dutch Elm disease did for the tree, and I never found out what happened to the fox, but both were gone after a few years. But the practice of naming pubs after animals is common. ‘The Swan’ is England’s fifth most popular pub name, while ‘The Fox’ comes in …
The topsy-turvy weather of late is reflected all around me. In some places the blackthorn is still flowering, in others drift of soft pink petals look like the late snowfalls that keep happening. Yesterday I took my coat off, put my coat on, took my coat off in a regular cycle as we veered from warm and sunny, to frigid winds and sleety showers. At one point hail lay sparkling on roads turned to sugar. Today feels like more of …
Sometimes I set out to see things, and sometimes things just turn up. Today was a bit of both. The thing I’d set out to see was a Garganey. A what? A Garganey. Which despite sounding like something you’d do at the dentist is actually a type of duck. We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous mallard, a bird that doesn’t get the credit it deserves for its brilliant, iridescent colouring simply because it is so well-known. But Britain has (whisper …
My memory could be charitably described as ‘shocking’. So like many people, I rely on mnemonics to help me. But mine are always, for some reason, the opposite way around to the way you’d expect. On wiring plugs, I remember that Brown has got an “n” in it for neutral – so it isn’t, it’s live. It works really well – as long as you remember the last bit. My mnemonic for telling weasel and stoats apart is that a …
I didn’t find them: they found me. Driving across the Somerset levels, two black silhouettes crossed the road a dozen yards in front of me, a humped scurry like two small hump-backed bridges on legs that moved with power and purpose. The landscape here is scarred by water, open wounds criss-cross the landscape which seems forever as though it could at any moment hold its breath and sink slowly beneath the surface like a child at bath-time. I drove …
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