text:
The Common
Common or Garden in Suffolk
Mary Kirk
Now is the passage which leads to a new year, it is a blessed time of rest, and not a little indulgence. The earth sleeps. Midwinter. We look forward to a new beginning.
The signs are there already. The dawn is no longer silent. We go out, torch in hand, into the dark and cold, with Venus bright ahead in the south east if we are lucky. The owls are busy hunting, their eerie calls the first sound that greets us. On the Common we see the barn owl gliding low, pale and ghostly. Then the squawk and whirr of a pheasant disturbed; a blackbird's call of alarm as we pass by. Light comes late and slowly, and now there is a constant twittering of small birds in the hedges. They know the year is turning. In the garden the spring bulbs have already pushed their green tips through the earth. Is it possible that light is seeping back?
Signs of hope. Never were they more needed.
Reader, many commentators are reminding us of the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." The times are indeed so interesting, so darkly confused, so unlikely to yield certainties in this uncharted territory of pandemic, that any comment from me on them would be otiose.
However, in case some future archivist, fossicking through the internet offerings of 2020, chances upon these chronicles and requires some context, I will just say that December 2020 was the month when the pandemic just got a whole lot worse: a new strain (B117), virulent amongst the young particularly, has proved itself up to 70% more transmissible than its older cousin, the one which emerged a year ago and with which we were just beginning to feel familiar. It has hit us, with soaring rates of infection (as I write more than 53,000 in the past 24 hours), at a time when the United Kingdom is about to be dealt another grievous, but self-inflicted, wound: Brexit becomes a reality at 23h00 GMT on 31 December when the transition period ends. I weep bitter and angry tears of loss: the country I have called home for years, and whose literature, language and culture were more familiar to me than my own now regards me as an alien, a foreigner from a "third country."
It could (just) be worse for there is a trade deal of sorts, but the wound comes from the limitations to our children's future, to employment, to human rights, to freedom to work and travel, to security, to who we are in the eyes of the world, to our culture, to our heritage. And for what? For our "sovereignty" – which was never in question. We have become a small-minded island, inward-looking, xenophobic, mean, insular. Community always – always – trumps isolation.
I fear that lockdown and the Covid constraints of the highest level tier 4 produce an effect in microcosm on me – and doubtless on many others who live alone – similar to that of Brexit on our country. This year has taught me that community not isolation is essential if one is to be healthy, or 'whole' – a better word. Without this contact we are wounded, we do not flourish cut off and alone. For some this may be a mortal wound. Soon, I fear, going out 'normally' will be so abnormal that it will appear frightening for many; we shall have to learn again how to be social, how to behave without fear of infection, how to be in the company of others.
I find my Book of Common Prayer (1662) and look for the prayer "In the time of any common Plague or Sickness" (did they know how much worse it would be three years later?):
O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of King David, didst slay threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest; Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
We have already surpassed the three score and ten thousand deaths.
Of course most of us no longer believe that sickness is some sort of divine retribution visited upon mankind for sin (though I have met some loony Evangelicals who do), but we do know it is a consequence of our actions. Until we respect nature, no longer destroy the habitat of wildlife and cease to eat wild species, we shall continue to see these zoonoses develop, and some will be deadly. I fear this plague year will have taught us little.
Added to this grim picture here in East Anglia there have been serious floods. All along the river Waveney, which forms the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, unprecedented water levels have been recorded. The Shotford bridge on the road to Harleston (just in South Norfolk) was closed for fear of collapse as the river rose over it. I have never known that in the decades I have lived here. A friend at Bungay was evacuated from her home on Christmas Eve. Driving down to Fressingfield early that morning I was flagged down by a walker, warning me I should not get through the 300m-long flood where the beck had broken its banks.
On all counts I am among the lucky ones, truly blessed in that I can stay safe and warm in my home, with the company of a dog who keeps me laughing and an aged cat whose dementia drives me to distraction. Little need to go out except in my daily attempts to tire the dog, and I shall now start to consume the contents of my bulging "no-deal-Brexit" box, assembled over long months of apprehension. I am sitting pretty but alone, sovereign but solitary in my kingdom.
And so in these down days between Christmas and New Year, this liminal time of waiting while the earth sleeps in the depths and darkness of midwinter, I adopt my 'normal' practice and celebrate the feast. I do no work other than the necessary tasks of winter – carting logs, sweeping leaves, a bit of tidying up. We go for long walks, and although I think it wrong to drive in order to walk we go to the sea, the heath and the forest for a change of scene, to breathe different air, and to avoid…the mud.
The mud! Reader, I fully understand that sometimes I see my glass of blessings as half empty (a Facebook 'friend' chirpily reprimanded me recently), and I furthermore am conscious of the fact that any mud encountered on Suffolk walks is as nothing as compared to that of the trenches 1914-18. However, it begins to get one down. It comes in differing varieties: there is the liquid mud as slippery as ice, where keeping one's balance requires intense concentration and a strain on the knees and ankles; there is the deep glutinous mud which sucks at the boots, holding them fast, dragging them from the feet, often leaving them behind, necessitating a filthy hobble back to retrieve the one which has disappeared into the morass. There is the claggy mud of a ploughed field where the farmer has not reinstated the footpath, and which results in a kilo or two of weight dragged on each foot. And then there is just…mud…acres and acres of it, churned by the passage of many feet, paws and hooves. I put the dog in the shower. She is not impressed.
Reader, what can be said that has not been said? We must let the past, and in particular this year with its losses, its bereavements, its sickness and strangeness, go.
I apologise that I have really nothing of value to say, other than to wish you a happy, safe and healthy new year. The road goes on.
October & November 2020
November 30, 2020 December 1, 2020 by admin
So, hands up who noticed there was no October? I've heard of only one so far, which suggests to me that it probably is time to stop soon.
So what happened to October? The absence was mainly because I decided to spare my readers yet another month of complaints about rain. There are only so many ways one can describe wet, and the daily drenchings that dampen the spirits, the mud that mires the mood as well as the boots and paws. The times we live in are difficult enough without inflicting this moaning on others.
Another reason was that I write these chronicles at the end of the calendar month, and at that point in October I had deserted Suffolk, its fields and woods, and my garden for a week on the Northumberland coast, a week away from work, from bills and attendant anxieties, from routine – and, as it turned out – from rain.
The path to the beach
I had searched, with strict criteria, somewhere to stay: it must of course welcome my dog; it must be quiet with no noise of neighbours; and it must be within easy walking distance of those vast empty beaches of golden sand that stretch for solitary miles. And I found it – a small stone cottage, a mile from the sea, with its own track to the beach over farmland, and to the nearby village.
And so we spent a week, the dog and I, walking and walking and walking – across the expanses of sand shining silver in a low sun, over dunes and fields, to tiny fishing villages, to castles dominating the cold North Sea, proud on their promontories. And every day the sky was full of geese flying south, squadron upon squadron, their eerie creaking cry as the formations passed overhead the companion to all our walks.
Pink-footed and Brent geese
The skeins were high against the sky, and it was difficult to tell what breed they were, but I think from their pattern in flight that they were Brents. Brent geese migrate in family groups, flying in wavering lines or flocking loosely together. They seldom fly in V-formation. These groups stay together from one breeding season to the next. They search for marshland, coastal grassland or farmland to rest and feed on, before pushing onwards.
These Brents breed in northern Russia and spend the winter in southern and eastern England. They nest on the boggy Arctic tundra, where the severe climate allows them only about two months of good weather in which to raise a family. By mid-September, they have left their breeding grounds, and arrive in large flocks on our shores from early October. They spend the winter feeding on eelgrass in estuaries and on crops in adjoining fields. In April they leave and head north once more – east to Siberia. They stop off along the Baltic coast before reaching the Arctic in early June, just as the snow and ice is beginning to thaw.
We probably saw pink-footed geese as well, for we were within sight of Lindisfarne, where they arrive from Iceland. Barnacle geese too can be seen in huge numbers with up to 30,000 passing through. There is something mysterious – primal – in these mass movements of birds, called by instinct, by forces within themselves to fly huge tracts of our planet, twice a year every year.
If a dog can be aware of the concept of 'holiday' I am sure mine was during that week. At home she has, as I frequently remind her, a pretty good life: daily long walks, freedom to gallop across fields in the dawn, a garden for interminable games of ball, food, warmth, and my abiding love which forgives all her sins. But here she is an only child, having social contact with few other dogs, and she longs for that. When I saw her bound onto the beach the first afternoon the joy was plain to see, and it was worth the 350 miles for that moment. Every day she ran, she chased whole packs of other dogs, and was chased in turn, she stole balls and obediently gave them up, she frolicked in the sea, jumping waves, rolling in the sand, racing up and down the dunes. I don't think it is anthropomorphising to say that this was a happy dog.
As we walked down to the village each morning we passed what must have been the results of an effort by the entire population to celebrate Hallowe'en, with 20 or so decorated grisly and ghoulish figures lining the grassy path. I offer three examples:
Our efforts in Suffolk are less scary, and more in the spirit of public service:
On our walks I often meet the elderly farmer who constructed Pumpkin Man (he who brought us "Hidden camaras" and "Greengageges"). He is the source of much local knowledge, history, and can tell stories about all the native residents of our two villages. One day in October before Hallowe'en he hailed me from afar:
Him: Do you believe in the paranormal?
I hurried towards him, and as soon as I was near enough the dialogue went like this:
Me (cautiously): Well, I think there are unexplained things…
Him: I'll tell you what happened to me last winter.
Me (thinks): We'll be here for a while.
Him: I was up here one morning last winter just as it was light, and I saw this man with a round head and waxy complexion. And, do you know, he was wearing little diddy swimming trunks and a white vest.
Me (politely): How strange! Did he say anything?
Him: "Rood!"
Me: Rude?
Him: Yes, He said "Rood! Where's the rood?"
[I should interject at this point for those unacquainted with the Suffolk accent that a long 'o' sound is pronounced 'oo' and conversely an 'oo' sound is pronounced 'o', so that if one went to school in Scole, it would be said "I went to skole in skool." When someone dies there is a fooneral.]
Me: Rood?
Him: The rood, that rood over there.
Me: Oh…the road!
Him: That's what I said. And I shooed him where the rood was.
Me: And then what happened?
Him: He disappeared. He just disappeared. I turned round and he was gone.
I must report that on none of our matutinal excursions have I ever seen a waxy round-faced man in diddy swimming trunks, and I suspect this was either an attempt at a Hallowe'en scare, or the old chap had seen a party-goer the morning after from a nearby venue. Who knows.
Now as I write we are coming into the true dark of the year. The days have been drear with fog, and scarce light all day. Fierce winds earlier in the month have whittled the trees bare, and their skeletal shapes loom out of the murk. We are condemned to solitude, and imprisoned alone in this darkness, in this second period of lockdown to control the virus which has ruled our lives for most of the year. And Covid Christmas forces a choice: loneliness or a potentially lethal togetherness.
We need light, any light; light from the sky, light at the end of this long, long tunnel. But it is Advent, and that points to a greater light, "And the darkness comprehended it not." For many it will be hard to glimpse.
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Michaelmas Day 2020
The raindrops roll relentlessly down my study window; it is raining so hard that the rods of water bounce off the ground; the cloud hangs low over the miserable fields.
Is it a feature of advancing age that my life is increasingly ruled by the weather? Its effects on both mind and body feel so dominant, more than merely that I live in a profoundly rural area where the seasons dictate work, and weather rules activity. It certainly forms the subject of this blog. Maybe one day some digital archivist will unearth it as proof of our changing climate.
We have had, give or take a few windy and rainy days, six months of summer. The constant rains of winter ceased a week or so before full lockdown began at the vernal equinox, and the good weather continued with meteorological precision till the day of the autumn equinox. It has been a blessing which has mitigated the effects of the restrictions imposed on us to limit the spread of Covid-19. Meetings have taken place out of doors; church services have been held with the doors wide open to air the interior; meals with friends could be eaten in the garden.
Bad weather coming
Everything now has changed. Here in the east bitter northerly gales swept down the coast to buffet us. Heavy rain such as we have not seen for half a year turned dust to mud within hours. It is cold. It is not, after all, that this is unexpected, but that the promise of winter arrives with the threat not only of wet and cold, but of more stringent regulations in the face of rapidly rising cases of the virus, more hospital admissions, and the beginning of an upturn in daily deaths.
The first three weeks of September were golden and warm, summer clinging on till the last moment with dreaming misty mornings and shimmering hot days. There is always a tinge of poignancy in the knowledge that these days are numbered, and for me a twinge of pain, for this perfect weather recalls that of another September, 34 years ago now, when our lives changed for ever.
Mid-month the heat was building, and the dog and I went on what must surely be the last of our dawn excursions to see the sun rise over the sea. The regular reader will say there is nothing remarkable in that, but there was something that morning which took me beyond the usual joy in the loveliness of Suffolk shore and fields. As the sun rose through the mist I was conscious that I was in one of those liminal moments, a profoundly spiritual time, when darkness is vanquished by the light, and the animal world with its crepuscular creatures once again gives way to human noise and activity.
We walked through the dew towards the shore, along a path diamond-spangled with spider webs. Out of the brume an inquisitive calf loomed into view.
In places in the hollows cold and lingering wisps of mist wrapped their chill around us. A slight rise in the path and the air was suddenly warm, a memory of the heat of yesterday clinging to the banks.
With no warning sound there was a crashing through the trees to our right parallel to the path, and red deer – five, six, maybe even seven, galloped alongside for a while. And then – then – we stopped stock still in our tracks. In front of us for one fleeting moment was a stag. He paused, his noble head with its many branched antlers held high and still, and then he was gone, leaping over the undergrowth to re-join his hinds. It was over in a second – no time for the camera on my phone for I was restraining the dog. But the encounter somehow signified more than this thrilling glimpse of one of the largest land mammals in the UK. It was the meeting of two worlds at the secret time of dawn, a timeless moment of mystery, an outward and visible sign of a special grace – of having witnessed something beyond my world, gone in a heart beat, but imprinted for ever in my mind's eye. I felt more moved than I can say, almost that I could happily cease then and there to live, so that nothing following could ever mar or taint the memory.
There is a passage in the childhood book "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame when the two animals, Rat and Mole, are searching through the night for a lost young otter. Rat hears the 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn,' and knows an intense longing which I think is akin to what I felt:
"It's gone!" sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. "So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever."
We continued into the rising sun, the sound of the sea gentle ahead of us. Across the dawn sky a skein of geese rose from the pools and flew south. And then we followed the shore north to the coastguards' cottages, and back across the purple heath, and through woods of birch, pine and beech, dappled now by a radiant September sun. I have walked many thousands of miles through Europe – over mountain ranges, arid high plains, endless forests, battlefields of long ago, and gentle pastures – but somehow this walk will never be surpassed in memory.
On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.
Not my photo, but could this be the group I saw?
In case, reader, you are disputing that I saw red deer, I should note that the herd around RSPB Minsmere is the largest in the British Isles outside Scotland. The gentleman I saw will soon be fighting for his position, for in late September through October the stags return to Minsmere for the annual rut.
I have mentioned Minsmere and Dunwich frequently in these chronicles. Readers outside the area may be less aware than those who live nearby of the threat posed by the proposed construction of Sizewell C and D to the north of the 'B' power station, bordering the RSPB reserve, with a "campus" by the beautiful hamlet of Eastbridge. Posters from local opposition groups proclaim a threatened 600 lorries a day on our narrow roads and lanes.
More than 5600 different animals, plants and fungi have been recorded at Minsmere – more than on any other RSPB reserve and amongst the highest number of any nature reserve in the UK. Minsmere's habitats include four of national conservation priority: reedbeds, lowland wet grassland, shingle vegetation and lowland heath. These habitats support a wide range of bird, plant and invertebrate populations of international conservation importance.
Photos: RSPB
Among the diverse wildlife are nationally important populations of bittern, marsh harrier and avocet. Other wildlife in the wetlands include otter, water vole, kingfisher, specialist wetland plants and many rare dragonflies and other invertebrates. Across the heathland there are many rare species making a home, including nightjar, woodlark, Dartford warbler, adder, natterjack toad and silver-studded blue butterflies.
As well as its importance to today's wildlife, Minsmere has played a significant role in wildlife conservation throughout the years. The reserve was the springboard for the recovery of both bittern and marsh harrier in the UK and, alongside RSPB Havergate Island a few miles down the coast, Minsmere ensured the successful return of breeding avocet to the UK after an absence of more than 100 years.
Unexpected meetings bring hope and pleasure. Online friendships can bring strangers together. I learned that a fellow pilgrim, who walked the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome two years after I did, and who is a member of the pilgrim organisation for which I work, was walking between East Anglian Cathedrals – Peterborough, Ely, Bury St Edmunds and Norwich. He must surely pass through Diss and onto the Boudicca Way? Yes, he would, and accordingly the dog and I walked a stretch with him one hot afternoon, through the gentle south Norfolk countryside, along lanes that time forgot, across meadows, over a gurgling stream, to little churches standing alone in their landscape. As pilgrims do, we had a lot to talk about.
Who could have thought, when I was young, that there could be virtual friendships? Virtual meetings and video conference calls? We used to joke as we answered our old-fashioned landline telephones, anchored as they were by a cord to the wall, that it was a good thing we couldn't be seen the other end.
What else to say of September? We learn to live with uncertainty: everything changes and yet nothing does. Life goes on, but hedged around with questions – have I got my mask, my hand sanitiser, my vinyl gloves, with me? How many people can I meet at any one time? And where? Is the person behind me in the queue too close? Will we be locked down again? How will we get through a long winter without the comfort of friends and family?
The cycle of life in the country, the harvesting, the ploughing, the sowing, continues no matter what, and earths us, telling us – if we care to listen – that life goes on, and amid the pandemic gloom there will always be moments of transient grace – a bird that sings, a golden leaf that floats down in front of us, a noble stag at daybreak. I leave you with Sylvia Plath.
"Black Rook in Rainy Weather"
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent
Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then –
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honour,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical
Yet politic; ignorant
Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sort. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
August 31, 2020 September 1, 2020 by admin
But, you will say, she was going to stop; she said she had nothing more to say. She said July would be an end of Common or Garden in Suffolk. And she did mean it. However, dear reader, vanity has yielded to the flattering requests to continue, but I do so on the understanding there can be little new, and doubtless much repetition of previous years.
Cue a threnody to the departing glories of summer, to the hot days and stifling nights, to the dusty stubble fields, to a time of ease and bounty. I think that's what you have come to expect from me at this point in the year.
Little is "normal" about this year. The word itself is in too-constant currency since we all became aware of Covid-19 and its effects on our daily lives. There is much talk of "getting back to normal," or "the new normal," but maybe it is a word whose use should be curtailed, for when we says things are no longer "normal," we mean that they are not as they once were, familiar, and enshrined and defined as the status quo ante in our memory. In truth, there is no "normal" – normalcy – for life is perpetual change. It's just that this year the change has sprung out and whacked us in the face.
Our weather has certainly not been "normal" this month, producing extremes of heat, then exceptionally dark and humid days, then storms and gales. Yet extreme is what we must become accustomed to as the warming of the planet produces our new normal. And this "normal" we have inflicted on ourselves.
Bank Holiday weather
As I write, in the dying days of the month, meteorological summer is thrashing its tail here in the east, doing a good imitation of autumn. So that's a bit of "normal" – the security of the familiar, for the bank holiday here has produced weather we all recognise and are used to: lashing rain, wind, cold, and a weeping greyness that seeps into the soul. Normal August bank holiday. This, when all else is changing and passing, is how it is meant to be. We all grew up to expect it – the shivering seaside, the rain-soaked cricket pitches.
A hot day dawns
Hard then to remember the beginning of the month, when day after day – or so it seemed – we sweltered in scorching heat. Sleepless and sweating after a restless night, I went once again with the dog at sunrise to seek some breath of air at the sea. I thought that at 5.30am we should have Dunwich beach to ourselves.
Far from it: as we descended the steep shingle bank to the sea we had to dodge huddled human forms in their sleeping bags. Already families were swimming. We walked north as far as Walberswick and back, and then we both swam, the dog not leaving my side in the unusually balmy water of the North Sea.
This last idyllic taste of summer disappeared abruptly with violent storms. One night as we went out before bed we were surrounded 360° by constant flickering lightning. And after the storms came the wind, violent and destructive. Such is the exposed position of my house and garden that a gate was torn off its hinges, and yet again I lost a pane from my new greenhouse, despite its new more sheltered site. The old one was razed by storms Ciara and Dennis in February.
Heat and dust are now a memory, replaced by rain and cold, and the first log fire to cheer the chilly damp. Back to "normal."
Harvest is finished, a poor yield this year, especially of wheat, after the water-logged fields of the winter and the extreme drought of the spring and early summer. I was going to say all is safely gathered in, but one farmer over whose land we often walk in the early morning is notoriously slow to cut. Year after year the good weather comes and goes, while his crop waits to be flattened by downpours, laid, and beginning to sprout before he stirs himself and his combine.
An oatfield
This year I have noted several fields of oats, which had become a rarity. They are tolerant of the damp conditions which obtained till mid-March, can be planted with more flexibility of timing, and are good as a break crop to help control the dreaded black grass. An oat field is a beautiful and a graceful thing, the grains translucent and shimmering. That they were once more common is attested by the wild oats on nearly every field margin (the top-most picture this month shows an example).
Because we walk our two hours so early in the morning to avoid heat, the young dog requires some exercise later in the day. A ball suffices for endless and insatiable amusement. To stimulate her brain and make her work we have, in previous years, done several scent work courses, during which she graduated from finding a felt mouse stuffed with catnip (easy) to detecting a hidden £5 note (quite skilled), an activity which I feel should be encouraged. When we lose a ball she is relentless in her quest to find it. In October she will be introduced to mantrailing. Perhaps she will find me a man…
Dogged searching
After taking a visiting daughter to the station in nearby Diss (over the border in Norfolk) the dog and I once again walk part of the Boudicca Way, of which I wrote in June. We pass a lane leading to the village of Burston, and I am reminded that the first weekend of September usually sees the Burston School Strike Rally, habitually attended by the major Trades Unions, and addressed by the great and the good – and leaders – of the Labour Party. But not this year of course; this year there is no normal, and Covid has claimed another cancellation.
Many have not heard of the Burston School Strike, which lasted from 1914 to 1939, conferring an enduring fame on this tiny south Norfolk village, and making it a symbol of Socialism. I knew nothing of this before I worked on a local newspaper back in the 1980s. This is the story of the longest strike in UK history.
Tom Higdon and his wife Annie were appointed as teachers at the Burston and Shimpling Council School in 1911, but had previously worked as teachers at Wood Dalling School, also in Norfolk where – as Christian Socialists – they had objected to the poor conditions, and about the employment of children by local farmers, which interrupted their education. Many of these farmers were also school managers so the Higdons' activities created social tensions.
Eventually, the Norfolk Education Committee gave the Higdons the option of dismissal or employment at another school. They transferred to Burston where they found conditions for many labouring families were similar to those at Wood Dalling. Tom Higdon gained election to the parish council at Burston in the hope of making improvements, while Annie repeatedly made requests for better conditions at the school.
Local farmers objected, as did the Revd Charles Tucker Eland, the local rector and chairman of the school managers, a man of plentiful income and considerably less compassion. Allegations of pupil abuse were made against the Higdons in 1914 and they were subsequently dismissed. Many of the children and their parents believed the allegations to be fabricated, and on 1 April 1914 Violet Potter led her fellow pupils out on strike to show their support for the Higdons.
A separate Burston Strike School was established on the village green for those pupils and parents who refused to send them to the official council school. Many labour organisations supported the Strike School and eventually enough money was raised to build a permanent schoolhouse. It opened in 1917. The strike ended in 1939 when Tom Higdon died.
And so tomorrow autumn starts. There is much work still to be done, harvesting, picking, processing. We hear little of the Brexit talks, buried in news of a rising tide of Covid cases, of holidaymakers quarantined, of schools returning to an uncertain future. But what seems certain is that we may be in for a very rough time soon, if the talks yield no good trade deal and the end of the Transition Period coincides with a wave of Covid and winter 'flu. Out to the garden, then; off to the hedgerows…
You see strange and wonderful sights when you walk, and particularly when you walk early in the day. Some of these encounters bring us to within touching distance of those animals who live so close to us, but who for the most part remain unseen. We see signs of their existence, but – as with neighbours in cities – we rarely meet. Sometimes, however, it is the eccentricity of our human nature that stops me in my tracks.
I offer this photo as an example of the latter, glimpsed one morning in a Suffolk wood. Unless, of course, this is not human whimsy, and I have stumbled unknowingly on the Little Folk…
As for the former, the dog and I – walking down a track around 6am – came face to face with a badger. This was a marvellous encounter, for in my three score years and thirteen I have seen only one badger, a shabby and mangy specimen late at night on the outskirts of a southern French town. British Brock however was a splendid creature – sleek, fat and groomed. We glimpsed him at the same moment, the dog and I. She stiffened, and quivered, straining forward. I stood absolutely still.
Badgers are extremely short-sighted for they are nocturnal and live mostly underground in their setts. Brock trotted on towards us, unconscious of our presence, and then – at the correct social distance of two meters – halted, peered myopically at us, saw a wolf-like hairy dog in front of his face, realised the full horror of his situation, did a swift U-turn, and disappeared back down the track at a shambling canter. Such encounters make my day.
What of July? It has been what my father would have called a mouldy month. After the Mediterranean spring has come a British summer: dark, gloomy, windy and often wet. On the dry days harvest is in full swing. First the oilseed rape, and early in the month the combine turned in to the field beside the house – a great lumbering roaring mastodon that sent straw and dust flying and the earth shaking. I am glad the rape has been cut for once it has flowered it then smells of rotting cabbage until harvest. Rape stubble though is vicious: sharp calf-height stalks prevent walking over the field, unless you want bleeding legs. Even the dog declines to chase a hare far through it.
After the rape, the barley and the wheat, and the fields of gold disappear into the monstrous jaws of the combine . The distant rumble of the engine accompanies me to sleep, and the clatter and roar of the tractors hauling grain through the small hours then wake me again. The air smells of straw, a scent I love, a smell of summer – and of adolescent holidays spent at stables.
My own harvest is abundant: every day I pick and process, pick and process. The early days of lockdown this year have taught us that food security is vital, and the Brexit negotiations don't seem to be going too well. We are not surprised. It seems both right and somehow sacred to work my small parcel of land, and – insofar as possible – live from it.
A hill of beans
These final few days of July have seen a return to sun and heat.
Once again the dog and I go and walk by the sea in the brief hours of cool before the sun is high. Between the tiny hamlet of Eastbridge and the beach we see the ponies often – but wrongly – called Tarpan horses, a name which comes from the Kasakh or Kyrgyz for wild horse.. They certainly have the look of the horses in cave paintings: dun with the characteristic dark eel stripe down the back, stocky, a thick neck and a thick, often standing, mane.
Strictly speaking, these are not Tarpans, but Koniks, a breed created by Polish horse-breeders to resemble, as closely as possible, this extinct wild horse of Europe. Although they look and behave much like Tarpans, they are a separate breed, since it is impossible to re-create an extinct species/breed.
They were brought to these marshes by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, for they are at home in wetlands, where they graze the reed-edge and fen vegetation and create tussocky areas that are favoured by birds such as snipe and teal.
Nearer to home the horses on the Common managed somehow to bridge the cattle grid, and one misty morning I saw four of them walk in procession, led by the dominating white mule, up the lane to disappear down a grassy headland behind a hedge. They were too far off for me to do anything about it, and besides that mule is not to be messed with. Have they returned? The Common looked strangely empty, with only a few mares grazing. I return to painting them over and over. I could draw a horse with my eyes shut, and they have been my subject since childhood. A meagre claim to fame aged 11 was to have a painting of the rumps of two heavy horses ploughing tour the country as the result of some long-forgotten competition.
High summer segues into late summer, and there is a hint of autumn in the chill of dewy mornings. The long grasses are dying back, and when cut for hay smell sometimes inexplicably of liquorice. Leaves have long since lost their freshness. Despite the sporadic dampness of the month the paths and fields are dusty. The year is past its youth, past even its middle age, and the poignancy of August is that it is the beginning of the end, the year slips into old age, and soon we shall descend once more into the darkness.
It is now three years since I started these chronicles. Each year the same flowers grow, the same birds sing, the same crops are cultivated. Each year the weather is either good, bad or indifferent. I feel – as witnessed by the above – that I have little to say, and last month there was an accusation of trying too hard to write poetic prose. "You really went for it," said a friend. And so I think it is time to stop.
Five forty-five on a morning already hot, the hottest of the year so far. The dog and I walk south along the shore, by a gentle sea whose soothing suck and drag over shingle induces a sense of peace, and of rightness with the world. The sun, still close to the horizon, makes a silver pathway across the water.
The dog (I can no longer say "the young dog" for she is now nearer four than three) has till now never cared for water – apart from standing hock-deep in slimy and stinking ponds. It is odd, considering each of her parents is from a race of water dogs. Today, though, is different: she discovers the joy of swimming. Taken by surprise by the sudden shelving of the shore, she has no choice but to swim. She is surprised; she likes it: "Look, mummy! Look at me! I'm swimming!" And then I cannot get her out of the water – she frolics, she cavorts, she plunges, and …she swims.
We had driven towards the sunrise to Dunwich – a staccato journey, braking constantly to avoid hares zig-zagging, small rabbits playing, pigeons lumbering into flight, a muntjac, and two cock pheasants fighting, oblivious to the motorised danger. On our way back, driving with car windows down, through the shade of Dunwich Forest we hear nightingales.
Midsummer… The scents of midsummer: mown grass, honeysuckle, privet, roses, young barley on the breeze, the delicate perfume of field beans in flower. Midsummer…. The winter barley has turned and soon Suffolk will be a sea of gold. Midsummer…nights never truly dark.
Midsummer. On cue comes the St John's Wort for the Nativity of St John the Baptist, a quarter day which signals that the year is half over. It is always a poignant moment when the solstice is past, the point of sunrise ceases its slow drift northwards, and nights begin to lengthen. More perhaps than at New Year we look both forward and back; this year more than most.
A gardener, of course, is always – Janus-like – looking forward and back, learning from the successes and failures of past sowings; looking forward to harvesting the result of hard physical toil. A gardener's job today is always to create tomorrow out of yesterday.
Midsummer is that moment of transition, and now at this tipping point of the year I can start to eat the result of past labour – broad beans, peas, chard, courgettes, potatoes, beetroot, lettuce, onions, herbs, artichokes. The "front" garden, too, is at its best. For two or three weeks each year (as I never fail to note in this chronicle), my flower beds give a passable imitation of a real cottage garden, the abundance of flowers hiding and disguising the weeds.
At the beginning of the month, with the first tentative steps out of total lockdown, the glorious sun and warmth which had lasted all spring deserted us. New month, new weather once more. The sky became grey again and rain could be smelled on the wind before it came. It was cold as only June in England can be. A fire was lit.
With the partial liberation we learn to place the words "socially distanced" in front of any activity involving another person or persons. On a grey windy day I met a friend for a socially-distanced walk, and we explored part of the Boudicca Way, a walking trail which links Norwich station southward to Diss, meandering – seemingly back in time to the 1950s – through the gentle South Norfolk countryside, sometimes on lanes innocent of traffic; sometimes by a river, across a ford, through pastures and meadows. We sat a while outside the tiny isolated church of St Andrew, Thelveton. No sign in the lane proclaimed its presence to passers-by; no notice told us to which saint it was dedicated. The only company was a meadow of cows and calves, guarded by a bull; the only sound was birdsong. And yet the churchyard was neatly mown, the graves tended, the headstones upright and clean.
Boudicca, or Boadicea, was of course the legendary flame-haired warrior queen of the Celtic Iceni people. Boudicca's husband, Prasutagus, was king of the Iceni (in what is now Norfolk) as a client under Roman suzerainty. When Prasutagus died in 60 CE with no male heir, he left his private wealth to his two daughters and to the emperor Nero, trusting thereby to win imperial protection for his family. Instead, the Romans annexed his kingdom, humiliated his family, and plundered the chief tribesmen. While the provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus was absent in 60 or 61, Boudicca raised a rebellion throughout East Anglia. The insurgents burned Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St. Albans), the mart of Londinium (London), and several military posts. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Boudicca's rebels massacred 70,000 Romans and pro-Roman Britons, and cut to pieces the Roman Ninth Legion. Paulinus met the Britons at a point thought to be near present-day Fenny Stratford on Watling Street and regained the province in a desperate battle. Defeated, Boudicca either took poison or died of shock or illness.
Statue of Boudicca and her daughters at Westminster Bridge
Hard to think of all that slaughter as we walked the irenic green lanes.
In a few days the major part of our Covid incarceration and enforced inactivity will come to an end. Only hindsight will tell us whether we are unlocking too soon for safety, too late for the stricken economy; whether there will be spikes, second waves, more deaths, more disaster. Three months, which at the beginning might have seemed to some too long a sentence, have for me flown past. And now, reviewing, the question forces itself upon me: "What have I done with them? What have I actually achieved in this unprecedented period?"
And the best answer I can give is that of the Abbé Sieyès, priest and political theorist under the French Revolution, who – when asked what he did during the Reign of Terror – replied "J'ai vécu." I survived. Maybe it seems obvious, looking back, that the majority of us would survive, but three months ago we looked on appalled at the Four Horsemen riding over the land. The Grim Reaper stalked us, and any careless contact, a touch, a cough could spell sickness and death. He may yet come back to get us.
What have we done with it? Have we re-evaluated? re-assessed? Have we promised that things will be different? that we shall live simply, travel less, save the planet, enjoy our loved ones, eat local produce, grow our own food, reduce stress, change our priorities? I hope so, but I am pessimistic, for I know that real behaviour change takes at least six months to become rooted in our lives.
We can now, cautiously, breathe again – for a while at least, and the existential questions recede. Time now for other worries to take over: a dear friend anxious about her octogenarian husband's memory lapses; another who lives in a marriage of coercive control. "For better for worse…in sickness and in health." Today we hear of a likely spike in the number of divorces after couples in three months of lockdown were forced to confront realities often evaded by long hours at work. Happy are those who can say "J'ai vécu" after years of marriage.
A friend has called these chronicles "melancholy." Maybe that is because I am pessimistic about human nature; maybe because I am all too aware of the swift passing of the seasons, and thus that there are few remaining years for me. I don't feel sad, only occasionally wistful for the chances missed, the graces resisted.
But hey! Who could be melancholy with the prospect of a haircut in a few days!
Time passes. The days merge. My hair grows.
And there I could end my record of the month of May 2020. A torpor has descended; tasks are postponed – a Covid procrastination, for why do them today when tomorrow will be the same, and the day after? I feel fixed and unmoving in a no man's land where time – though it passes both pleasantly and all too rapidly – also seems immobile.
My world has shrunk. Lockdown has confined me to those very places of which I set out to write: my garden, the Common, and the fields and woods beyond. Outings are rare in the extreme – a slow puncture to be mended; chicken feed to be collected. I watch, distantly, the easing of restrictions, and neither want nor need to join in the emerging of the herd.
It would be wrong but easy to think that life was passing by unlived, that this year – one of the perforce few remaining – was being wasted, devoid as it is of the usual rush and bustle. The lived moment is life, and the value we put upon it – good or bad, pleasurable or painful, solitary or social – is just that, our subjective take.
Nonetheless, we are human and we experience pleasure and pain, however small our world has become. For me, blessed as I am, May has brought great pleasure…and a little pain. It has been the sunniest May since meteorological records began in 1929, and the driest in 124 years. Day after day the sky has been a Mediterranean blue and the sun has beaten down upon an increasingly parched earth with a dazzling intensity. From time to time there have been violent and rough winds to shake the darling buds, and these have served to dry the land still more. I have never seen grass burned brown in May before.
The old country proverb once again holds good:
Oak (on the left) in leaf before the ash (on right)
Oak before ash, we shall have a splash.
Ash before oak, we're in for a soak.
Even a splash would be good….
In fact this year the darling buds of May had all opened and burgeoned well before the month began, for at an estimate most vegetation seems four or five weeks ahead of where it would have been a few decades back. The chestnut candles are long since dimmed; the hawthorn had dropped its blossom by mid-month – the indecent smell of it gone now.
The barley has "eared up," as we say round here, and the million filaments shimmer in the morning light. The wheat begins to grow tall, blue-green. The uncut roadside verges frothed briefly with bridal cow parsley, and the starry white flowers of the pungent wild garlic have faded. The elderflower is out; dogroses cascade in the hedgerows; ox-eye daisies dance in the breeze. Summer races ahead, outstripping spring.
This early flowering and seeding brings with it another sort of lockdown for me: the grasses are seeding and hay fever limits the time I can spend out of doors. On our morning walks I set out, duly medicated and sprayed and eye-dropped, in dark glasses, and my eyes and nose smeared with Vaseline. The dog precedes me through the long grass me sending up golden clouds of pollen dancing in the low sun.
Summer has come early; the electric lime green of spring matured too quickly. Soon the glory of morning birdsong will fade, little by little, unnoticed, till suddenly one morning we hear… silence. The lark may still sing high on the wing, and a yellowhammer may still announce "Little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeeese," but that exuberance and joy (how we love to anthropomorphise the aggressive avian macho mating defence of territory!) will be gone till next spring. And thoughts come unbidden – shall I live to hear it? Live in the moment. Live in the moment.
The continuing pandemic, and the feckless floundering of our government, have sent me to my bookshelves for my ancient copy of Camus' "La Peste" (The Plague), gathering dust since university more than half a century ago. The plague in the novel is generally taken to be a metaphor for the rise of Fascism, though some read it as a diatribe against capitalism and materialism. Given the current situation, especially in the United Kingdom, it can equally well be read as a literal account.
The infection comes to a town that is obsessed with business, a place where the sole object seems to be the pursuit of wealth. The authorities are slow off the mark, reluctant to act because of the economic consequences and the reputational damage to the town. Mitigation measures are mired in bureaucracy, until, as fevers spike and bedsheets are soaked from night-sweats, there is no choice but to quarantine the town: "We should not act as though half the town were not threatened with death, because then it would be….We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the [virus]. All the rest—health, integrity, purity—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter."
Businesses complain about being closed down. Social distancing is not properly observed. There are hoarders and profiteers. Before long, hospitals are overwhelmed; medical supplies are scarce; a makeshift quarantine camp is established; and the police do their best but are sometimes heavy-handed. The cast of characters is eerily familiar: the Prefect who begins in denial ("There are no rats in the building," as the rats die all around them), but then has no choice but to bow to the expertise of his medical advisers once the exponential spread of disease becomes apparent; the chap who tries to escape the lockdown, heedless of the risk of spreading infection beyond the walls. It could have been written in the past two or three months as we witnessed the Cummings and Goings of our masters.
Aristotle argued that, thanks to the gift of language, man is destined to be a social and therefore a political animal. Today I, and many, live in the paradox of an enforced solitude whose window on society is perforce through a screen, mediated by a cacophony of voices – politicians, pundits, scientists. We see the world through a television screen; we see our friends and families through a computer screen. Through a glass darkly to a world where we can look, but we cannot touch.
Can I end this month's chronicle on a note of optimism? I can say that the number of cases in this country has fallen, that death rates are down, that the first tentative steps of a return to previous existence are being taken by some. I can say that some of the seeds I sowed in early spring are already providing food, that the rest will soon follow; that baby birds are fledging; that there is a foal on the Common.
The year rushes on, but down a path no-one in living memory has travelled. Where it goes nobody knows. There is no road map.
I do not wish, in a blog of my privileged life in rural Suffolk, to make this into some latter-day journal of a plague year, and those who know me will guess at my feelings about mistakes our leaders may have made in facing this crisis. History alone will give us a clear perspective. Moreover, it feels indecent this month to write of glorying in the beauties of this most lovely of all springs when all around there is illness, death, suffering, poverty, domestic violence. Unseemly indeed, when we read of – for example – a young NHS worker stabbed to death, just before the funeral of his father, who died from Covid, by a gang wearing medical-type masks.
It seems so distant from this paradise where we are untouched by it all, isolated from the realities of pandemic Britain, and yet not far away there is a hotspot of Covid deaths and hospitalisations. Despite these, there seems to have been a shift from a month ago, when fear stalked every outing, when the slightest slip – a door carelessly touched, a cough from someone in a queue – could spell sickness and maybe death. Lockdown in deep Suffolk has bred a potentially dangerous sense of immunity from it all, insulated from the intensive care units with their exhausted and ill-equipped staff, from the full mortuaries, from the breeding grounds of disease and death that are our old people' homes. Here I am cocooned and cared for – a supposedly vulnerable septuagenarian. The drawbridge is up; the portcullis down.
And, as such, I live in a world which has shrunk to the confines of my garden and to the Common, and walks beyond far over the fields, long walks beginning with the sun which rises ever earlier on what has been an idyllic world. Those solitary miles with the dog have seen the transition from early spring with trees still skeletal to full leaf, from bare earth to greens which no artist's palette could ever capture, filtering the early light. The primroses are now drowning in the rising lushness of new grass, the cowslips abundant on banks and in meadows after a winter of rain, the orchids on the Common bright magenta among the yellow of buttercups. Now the blackthorn in the hedges has given way to the may, with its sweet sickly smell of death. A barn owl glides silently before me along the field edge. A buzzard hunts. And all around the birdsong of the morning is uncorrupted by man-made sound.
These pure days of dawning blue and gold were like Eden before the Fall.
April was a month of virtually no rain, a month which marked a transition from waterlogged fields and paths of mud to iron-hard, bone-dry cracked earth. The garden turned to dust and needed watering every day. The garden…always a preoccupation, but in this month of isolation it became a daily ritual, a guardian of sanity, a saving grace, and a promise of the future. The present circumstances convince me more than ever of the necessity of growing my own food.
The beauty of the spring garden lifts the heart and soul when the news is grim:
It is of course impossible not to reflect on what is happening beyond the bounds of my eremitical existence. Although nobody living has experienced anything like this pandemic, it seems there is little new under the sun. Daniel Defoe, who was only five during the Great Plague of 1665, wrote his "Journal of a Plague Year", based on contemporaneous accounts. It sounds so familiar: "The infection was propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by."
" And finding that I ventured so often out into the streets, he (a friend) earnestly persuaded me to lock myself up and my family and not to suffer any of us to go out of doors that we could keep within doors entirely…And here I must observe again, that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another."
The face of London, Defoe tells us, was "strangely altered," and Pepys, who was an eye-witness, marvels at how empty the streets were, before deciding it might be more prudent to stay at home:
"But now, how few people I see, and those walking like people that have taken leave of the world…. I to the Exchange, and I think there was not 50 people upon it and but few more like to be, as they told me, Sir G Smith and others. Thus I think to take Adieu today of London streets …."
Pandemic London (photo Sophie Raworth)
I myself have been out very little. I have no need. But on the rare occasions I have driven anywhere (out of necessity to the vets for the quarterly flea and worm treatment) I marvel at the empty roads. I drove six or seven miles and saw one car. Spooky, weird, disquieting, the end of days.
I have no need to move from the confines of house and garden because I have kind friends who bring shopping. I don't need much. I am so blessed: I have a well-stocked larder, home-grown produce still in my freezer, and I am still working my way through a big No-Deal-Brexit Box amassed at the end of last year when it looked as though there could be shortages. There could still be, for in the focus on the present pandemic we edge, blindly and seemingly inexorably, to a situation where no trade deal with the EU can be secured before the end of the year.
And friends have brought cake and chocolate, exchanged at the gate – two metres apart – for eggs and plants. There were Easter eggs, too. I grow tubby, and there is no-one to see. Hard to have the grace always to receive and accept, and not to be out and doing. I think of Calais where refugees now go without hot meals or the means to keep themselves safe, and where the clearances and brutality continue. Watch and pray, send money. It is so passive.
The fragrance of the rape field beside the house swirls round the garden, vying with the lilac. It has been the most poignant and beautiful of springs.
April 2020 will be remembered by us all. I can do nothing to alleviate the suffering that surrounds us, save to stay – obediently – at home, protect the NHS and save lives. Watch and pray.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
"The only traffic I hear is ambulances," said my daughter in London. In rural isolation here that stark sentence brings home the threat.
Writing anything at this time seems redundant, but life continues. The cycle of the year keeps turning.
A month of two halves. The first, a phoney war situation when nothing had changed, but a creeping awareness of menace coming closer, and with it that the scenes of deserted streets and overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins in makeshift mortuaries in Italy and Spain – then France -might soon be our own normality. The second, when suddenly it was upon us, with hundreds of new deaths reported every 24 hours, the populace confined to their homes, the elderly told to stay put for four months, and a government scurrying to catch up with what should have been done so much sooner.
New phrases are on everyone's lips: lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing. "C19" is no longer a shortened form for the nineteenth century, but something deadly which stalks us, waiting for one careless moment, one slip of our guard.
It seems somehow irrelevant to write of the 'old' normal. The recent past, the beginning of March, seems long distant, as alien to our present way of being as that of a previous century. But maybe recording life and times is still important.
The old normal
In like a lion came March, with tempests of wind and even more rain – a continuation of our dark and drenched winter. Work took me to France the first weekend of the month. As Eurostar sped me to Paris, and another sleek and smooth TGV raced me to Reims, I saw fields under water and trees down as they were in England, the similarities smoothing out the shock of the speed of travel.
France, ahead of the UK in its number of Covid-19 infections, was definitely nervous. No-one shook hands; no-one kissed; Friday night restaurants and bars were nearly empty; hand sanitiser was much in use. I felt compelled rather self-consciously to wipe down the seat tray and arm rest of the trains.
Despite the advancing virus, the meeting in Reims went ahead. I was there as an observer, representing my organisation, and made a brief speech presenting it, with many expressions of fraternity in this post-Brexit age. I was treated royally, which was quite humbling – and surprising, given the usual French jibes of "Who burned Joan of Arc?" when faced with the English. Champagne apéritifs, dinner, lunch, a private tour of the cathedral and Art Deco Carnegie Library. Walking along a street past the Archbishop's former residence I caught sight of a knocker on the main door…I wonder if some frustrated former archbishop commissioned it specially…
The Archbishop's knocker
That same week I went to a talk in a neighbouring village about owls. Owls, I learned, are now big business, farmed like puppies as must-have accessories and pets, thanks to the popularity of Harry Potter and Hedwig, his snowy owl. The tame talking owl Archimedes, belonging to Merlin in T.H. White's "The Sword in the Stone," is surely a prefiguring of Hedwig.
My childhood reading of this book gave me a love of owls, and hence I went to this talk. Alas, children discover that the owl their parents were persuaded to purchase is no Hedwig, and must be cared for. Thus many end up in sanctuaries, and cannot be released into the wild. A barn owl and a tawny owl were present to illustrate the talk. On my walks I see many barn owls hunting silently in the twilight of dawn and dusk, and I hear tawny owls most nights, but I had never come so close.
I was allowed to hold the barn owl, and stroke her softly with the back of my finger. My reaction to her beauty and to her proximity surprised me. I had to fight back tears.
On one of the last days of our freedom (oh, if only we had known it was about to be so curtailed) the dog and I went to Dunwich, and walked along the shingle shore towards Walberswick. Hard to think of it as once a busy port, with its many churches now long sunk in the invasive sea. Dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, Dunwich once stood proud as the capital of the kingdom of the Eastern Angles, at its mightiest in the 14th-century matching London for size. It was a seat of power for the Anglo-Saxon bishops for centuries, an international port, and the Domesday book of 1086 puts the population at over 3000.
That day the sun shone. And with the sun came rapidly that wonderful opening up to life which is the spring. The land dried, winter mud and mire soon just a memory.
The mildness of the winter meant the greening came early. There were primroses and violets and cowslips and oxlips and birdsong and blue skies. The land rejoiced. My heart rejoiced.
And then came lockdown.
It would not be unfair to say that earlier in this crisis the government (still cock-a-hoop no doubt with its resounding new majority and having "got Brexit done") did not respond in any way commensurate with the situation, with what had been apparent to anyone who could see the straws in the wind. Covid-19 appeared in December in China. We have long known a pandemic was overdue; and the Cygnus crisis simulation three years ago proved the NHS – underfunded for years – would be unable to cope.
Government messages started to come thick and fast. First we heard that we must all be exposed to the virus to confer "herd immunity," though it meant many elderly and vulnerable would die. This survival of the fittest policy made economic sense – no burden of care for the elderly, no blocking of beds in the NHS, no pensions to pay out….but it was fairly quickly dropped, for it showed a shocking disregard for the sanctity of life, and I – as a septuagenarian – didn't feel quite ready to take one for the team. Besides, herd immunity is conferred by vaccination not widespread contagion.
Then we oldies were told we must isolate ourselves for four months to save our lives – the very lives which a few days before were to be recklessly dispensed with – and to prevent our health service being overwhelmed. This was swiftly followed by a general lockdown.
The lane is silent. A car is a rarity. There is a background drone of tractors finally able to get on the land and drill spring crops and the regular reports of the bird scarers. But otherwise all is silent . The builders on the site next to my property along the lane have gone, and it is mercifully quiet now the pile drivers and excavators have stopped, and machinery stilled. The dominant sound now is the high note of the skylark.
I choose to live isolated, surrounded by fields and fresh air, and in general I am happy with my own company, and that of a cheerful and enthusiastic dog. I grow much of my own food, and I am busy with work and many projects. I am thus blessed more than most in our current circumstances, but the prospect of being cut off from all community for months is daunting. No-one knows what will happen; what the future will be for ourselves, for our loved ones.
As I start to wake the garden up and sow seeds these symbolise tiny expressions of hope: when this germinates and grows and bears fruit the plague may have passed us by.
Growing anything, but specially food crops, earths us and roots us. It declares a continuity from the past to the future. We are performing the same actions, the same gestures on the same days of the year as our ancestors did, and future generations also will. It shows us our place in the scheme of things, in the cycle of birth and death, and it helps, at this time when grief or death may come suddenly and surprise us, to understand this.
Dark times ahead?
The reader will, I trust, forgive me. I updated this particular software and have been rather unsatisfactorily and unaesthetically getting to grips with it.
The lull before the storms
Three days off the beginning of meteorological spring. Damp snow – the first of the winter – is pouring from the sky, adding more wetness to the spongy saturated ground. Much more rain is forecast.
At this point it would be ungracious and ungrateful not to point out that I am writing from the flood-free "heights" of East Anglia. Nightly our TV screens show towns and cities in the west and north of the country with flood water rising to the upper storeys of houses and shops. We see it so often, our hearts go out to those affected, we say "I can't imagine how awful it must be," and then – for those of us in dry dwellings – it becomes normalised, submerged beneath panicky reports of killer viruses coming ever closer, killer riots in Delhi, killer bombings in Idlib.
Nature has decided that spring is already here. The mean temperature in the UK this winter has been 5.2°C, around 1.5° warmer than average. One by one the primroses have appeared on the steep banks like stars in the summer dusk. The grass is growing, daffodils are blooming, I have even seen a cowslip. The birds are singing and the ducks are pairing off. These are sights to lift the spirits, but it is hard to maintain a rejoicing heart in perpetual deluge.
More so when the deluges have been borne in on storm-force winds. Storm Ciara first, then Dennis battered the British Isles, with gales every day in between, and then some. So many trees came down, and walking became perilous with flying branches and brambles whipping into my face. I was thankful that the house suffered no real damage, and that the chicken run and shed stayed upright, and the birds themselves unharmed and still laying, but…my poor greenhouse! It had stood, exposed to the predominant winds, for 15 years, with only the occasional pane broken. Ciara swooped in, shattered glass, and sent the whole structure into the neighbouring ditch. Do I give up and just buy my vegetables? It would be much cheaper in the long run.
Morning after morning staccato salvoes of rain hammer against the panes of my bedroom window, engendering a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness: another long drenching walk with a dog who is undaunted by wind and weather. The wind does not howl or moan or whistle, or any of the words we associate with its power. Sometimes it sounds like heavy machinery, or an aircraft coming in to land, or an express steam train, the gusts whomping and shaking the house.
Often on walks I observe the miracle of small birds flying in this chaotic turbulence. A skylark weighs just 33-45g, a nothing in the power of the storm. And yet the male lark rises vertically from the open fields, and hovers seemingly effortlessly, singing, singing, singing.
Another is the beautiful kestrel, the windhover, and we see them regularly over road verges, ditches and field margins. They can, apparently, spot a beetle at 50m. They need several voles or other small mammals a day to survive, and so there they are riding the storm, absolutely still before they plummet down to get their prey. A kestrel flies into, and at the same speed as, the oncoming wind. It extends its wing tips and fans its tail feathers, and in high wind may not even flap the wings at all – just kiting and gliding.
The construction of the Grand Design in the field next door continues, despite the weather. The demolition of the old house is complete, and heavy machinery moved in to start digging the footings.
They dug deep down into yellow Suffolk clay, and the trenches promptly filled with water. But work goes on with an army of builders, and much noise of diggers and banging and shouting and the beep-beep-beep of reversing vehicles. The lane is full of parked vans and cars, and huge lorries ply to and fro bringing loads of hard core. Mud is everywhere.
I last wrote on 31 January, and despite all efforts and demonstrations and fervent prayer, we have left the European Union. For the moment, during the transition period, nothing concrete has changed – a phoney war – except there is the taste of defeat. On the day itself and for several after there was the affront of the triumphalism of the Brexiteers – the jubilant bunting which appeared locally, the flying of the Union Flag (to my glee, often hung upside down in ignorance).
And so, as February closes, Lent begins. To Mass last night, with its repeated insistent intimation of mortality "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," the funereal black smudge of ash marking us so we cannot forget that with every passing Ash Wednesday that fate comes nearer. Turn, repent, turn again, before it is too late.
Is not Protestantism so much the poorer without this? The repeated rite, the ritual of imposition, the intoning of the sonorous Miserere:
Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence,
O wash me more and more from my guilt
And cleanse me from my sin.
My offences truly I know them;
My sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned:
What is evil in your sight I have done.
Those who read the Daily Office will know the psalm by heart, for every Friday morning comes the same reminder. Maybe Protestants with their "personal relationship with their Saviour" are in no need of such admonitions, for that relationship, they say, is sufficient to get them to heaven. I am happy for them.
Like the effects of Brexit, only time will tell, and no-one can know. Justification by faith or works is beyond the scope of this blog.
The Common and the Garden


text:
Tag Archives: Countrywide
DOJ again rebuked in effort to enforce massive BofA 'Hustle' mortgage fine
Billion-dollar settlement for Countrywide home loans denied
Needless to say, the federal government probably isn't too happy with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit right now.
That's because for the second time in three months, the Second Circuit rebuked an effort by the government to extract one of the largest fines to come out of the housing crisis.
In May, the Second Circuit overturned a $1.27 billion penalty against Bank of America in a fraud case over defective mortgages sold by Countrywide in the run-up to the housing crisis.
And Monday, the Second Circuit denied the government's request to reconsider its decision, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
Tagged Bank of America, Countrywide, DOJ
2nd Circ. Won't Rethink Tossing BofA $1.3B Mortgage Fine
Law360, New York (August 22, 2016, 7:20 PM ET) — The Second Circuit on Monday refused to rehear its decision tossing a roughly $1.3 billion penalty against Bank of America for a financial crisis-era mortgage program, rejecting a request by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, which said the ruling overlooked important evidence.
The appeals court rejected the government's request for a rehearing pushing back against a three-judge panel's May finding that it hadn't presented enough evidence that Bank of America subsidiary Countrywide Financial and a former executive had defrauded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Credit:…
Source: Law360
Tagged Bank of America, Countrywide, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Mortgage
U.S. Appeals Ruling That Throws Out Crisis-Era Bank of America Case
Justice Department aims to salvage high-profile mortgage-fraud case
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling throwing out a civil mortgage-fraud case against Bank of America Corp., in an uphill effort to rescue one of its highest-profile cases tied to the financial crisis.
The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said in a Thursday filing the court had "overlooked a wealth of evidence" in reaching a May decision that found the government hadn't proven fraud by Bank of America's Countrywide unit over a program dubbed "Hustle."
The court said at the time the case amounted only to breaches of a contract, a stunning setback for the government's efforts to levy tough fines on corporations and executives. The court also threw out a related penalty against a Countrywide executive, one of the few individuals fined for alleged misdeeds during the crisis.
Tagged Bank of America, Countrywide, financial crisis
Mortgage bond investors finally get paid $8.5 billion Countrywide settlement
Last month, mortgage bond investors moved one step closer to ending their five-year wait for their money from an $8.5 billion settlement involving Bank of America, mortgages originated by its Countrywide unit, and the Bank of New York Mellon, which acted as the trustee for the mortgage bond investors.
The parties originally agreed to the $8.5 billion settlement five years ago, but in the years since then, the sides battled in court over whether Bank of New York Mellon had the authority to settle.
Tagged Bank of America, Countrywide, investors, Mortgage
Chicken Little was right – "the sky IS falling"!
Remember Chicken Little and her warning, the sky is falling? I sometimes feel like a Chicken Little, with my repeated warnings that the sky is indeed falling and here's another example.
Just last week I posted about my fellow Bank Whistlebowers United colleague Michael Winston's interview with Gretchen Morgenson on the New York Times Facebook venue.
I'm still chilled by Michael's description of Countrywide's co-founder, former chairman of the board/CEO Angelo Mozilo's funding strategy which Michael inadvertently stumbled upon after they had hired him to take their company to new heights. "Fund 'em" was the policy, regardless of their income (did they have any?), even if they had no assets. "Fund 'em" if they can fog a mirror.
Countrywide Financial Corp. wanted to be the "Goldman Sachs of the Pacific." Instead their shoddy practices led to our 2008 financial meltdown and instead they became the face of risky lending practices, with Mozilo becoming the poster child for Wall Street greed.
Richard M. Bowen III
richard@richardmbowen.com
www.richardmbowen.com/
Tagged Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide, Wall Street, whistleblowers
Breaking news: Countrywide's Mozilo reportedly off the hook for all those subprime mortgages
Oh, wow! Crime does pay! A big slap in the face to Countrywide whistleblower, Michael Winston. Unbelievable!!!
One of most notorious people at the center of the housing crisis is reportedly off the hook for any supposed malfeasance, as Bloomberg is reporting that the Department of Justice is abandoning its attempt to sue Angelo Mozilo, the founder ofCountrywide, for his company's lending practices in the run-up to the housing crisis.
Countrywide originated more mortgages in this country from 2004 to 2007 than any other lender. During that time, Countrywide closed so many subprime mortgages it remained a top-5 producer for that home loan product. The same goes for other loans, such as Alt-A.
The DOJ first began seeking a civil suit against Mozilo two years ago, after the statute of limitations expired for any criminal charges that could have been filed against Countrywide's founder.
Mozilo long held that Countrywide "didn't do anything wrong" when it came to the lender's underwriting and origination practices.
In 2014, Mozilo told Bloomberg that he felt his company was not to blame for the subprime mortgage crisis.
"You'll have to ask those people, 'What do you have against Mozilo, what did he do?'" Mozilo said in 2014.
"Countrywide didn't change. I didn't change. The world changed," he continued. "No, no, no, we didn't do anything wrong," he said, adding that a real estate collapse was the root of the crisis. "Countrywide or Mozilo didn't cause any of that."
And now, it appears that the DOJ is unable or unwilling to proceed with its case against Mozilo.
From Bloomberg:
U.S. prosecutors have abandoned their case against Angelo Mozilo, a pioneer of the risky subprime mortgages that fueled the financial crisis, after a two-year quest to bring a civil suit against him.
The Justice Department has decided not to sue Mozilo, the co-founder of Countrywide Financial Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. That effectively ends nearly a decade of U.S. scrutiny of a man who became a face of risky lending practices and later an emblem of the government's mixed success in holding individuals accountable.
Tagged Angelo R. Mozilo, Countrywide, DOJ, subprime
Michael Winston, "Wall Street's Greatest Enemy," tells all
Whistleblowers come in all shapes and sizes and my friend and fellow Bank Whistleblowers United colleague is certainly not one that fits most descriptions of a whistleblower.
Former Countrywide Financial executive Michael G. Winston, PhD, was at the pinnacle of establishment success. He'd held C-suite positions at Motorola, Lockheed, and Merrill Lynch before being enticed by Countrywide's potential.
The company was one of the fastest growing in the country, with a 15,000% growth rate and one of the fastest growing stocks on Wall Street. It's founder, Andrew Mozilo had been named CEO of the year just the year prior. They wanted Michael to help them build the "Goldman Sachs on the Pacific."
Michael was interviewed this last week by Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times on their new whistleblower series on the Times' Facebook channel, which I'd had the opportunity to help initiate just the month before. In his interview, Michael talked about the signs he saw at Countrywide that led him to the choice he made.
Tagged Countrywide, Wall Street, whistleblowers

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Semtech Corporation(Nasdaq:SMTC), a leading supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors, today announced its LoRa® Devices and Wireless RF Technology will headline a webinar hosted by Mobile World Live, a leading B2B mobile industry news site, on Feb. 20 at 4 p.m. GMT. Semtech and two other Internet of Things (IoT) influencers will participate in a panel discussion focused on LoRa Technology's native geolocation feature and its use cases.
The webinar will include an overview of Semtech's LoRa Wireless RF Technology for the IoT, an analysis of its geolocation feature, and a discussion about its various applications, such as smart city, logistics and supply chain management, and asset tracking.
LoRa Technology features native, GPS-free geolocation capability using a hybrid mix of time stamping techniques to determine the location of sensors relative to their base stations. This allows LoRa RF Technology to offer added functionality for a variety of applications without requiring extra processing capability, increased footprint, more battery power, or expensive add-ons to the sensors.
David Pringle, a writer and editor for Mobile World Live focused on the telecoms, media and technology sectors, will moderate the panel. Representing Semtech is Richard Lansdowne, Senior Director of Network System Solutions from the Company's Wireless and Sensing Products Group.
Registration to attend the webinar is now open. The webinar will be archived after the initial broadcast and be available for review on MobileWorldLive.com.
Open Standard: The LoRaWAN protocol ensures interoperability among applications, IoT solution providers and telecom operators to speed adoption and deployment.
To learn how LoRa enables IoT, visit Semtech's NEW LoRa/IoT site.
Download application briefs summarizing a range of use cases for LoRa Technology.
All statements contained herein that are not statements of historical fact, including statements that use the words "will," "designed to," or other similar words or expressions, that describe Semtech Corporation's or its management's future plans, objectives or goals are "forward-looking statements" and are made pursuant to the Safe-Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause the actual results of Semtech Corporation to be materially different from the historical results and/or from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors are further addressed in Semtech Corporation's annual and quarterly reports, and in other documents or reports, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov) including, without limitation, information under the captions "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and "Risk Factors." Semtech Corporation assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release, except as required by law. Semtech, the Semtech logo, and LoRa are registered trademarks or service marks, or trademarks or service marks, of Semtech Corporation and/or its affiliates. Third-party trademarks or service marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.


text:
package com.twitter.finagle.http.service

import com.twitter.finagle.Service
import com.twitter.finagle.http.{Status, Request, Response}
import com.twitter.util.Future

/**
 * NotFoundService just returns 404 Not Found.
 */
class NotFoundService[REQUEST <: Request] extends Service[REQUEST, Response] {
  def apply(request: REQUEST): Future[Response] = {
    val response = request.response
    response.status = Status.NotFound
    Future.value(response)
  }
}

object NotFoundService extends NotFoundService[Request]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Python: Swap Blue and Yellow colour values in an image from PIL import Image, ImageEnhance, ImageCms, ImageFilter, ImageChops

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib as mpl
import numpy as np

%matplotlib widget

Hello
I found the following function for inverting colours in images:
ImageChops.difference(image)

The problem is this inverts the whole image. Now I'm asking myself wether there is a way to only invert specific colours in an image. I want to swap yellow and blue colour values in an image and do not know how to do it using the packages above.
Is there a way to that using the mentioned packages?
Thanks

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The screenshot above is hosted and provided by networktunnel.net. Please contact them directly for any copyright infringement as we are not responsible for that content.
Super Network Tunnel is a professional http tunnel solution, include client/server, it equal SocksCap+Bidirectional Http Tunnel +Remote Control. Normally used in building a network tunnel between the home and office computer, it's alias name is home2office.
It creates a real privately owned bidirectional virtual data connection tunnelled in HTTP requests or Tcp connection, and easy bypass firewall and NAT.
Use this software, office computer can access home computer's network and control home computer, and can run game/IM/Stock software via Home's network, also home computer can access office computer's network and remote control office's computer, and can continue your work in home, such as use pl/sql develop connect to office's oracle database.
Client support flash drive portable version not need install, can be run from removable media such as USB stick, floppy, and not need admin rights.


Each year the Department for Education (DfE) publish performance measures for multi-academy trusts (MATs). For the period 2017/18, we were positioned 23rd (out of 47) for medium to large sized MAT performance across the country, based on Progress 8 data – which measures a student's progress from key stage 2 to 4.
Notes: DfE data is based on MATs with 4 or more academies who have been in the trust for at least 3 years. The DfE includes NCEAT under the listed name 'Diverse Academies Trust'.
Read more about Ofsted and SIAMS judgements.


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PLZ-05 Artillery SPG
China (2005) - Self-propelled howitzer - 270+ built
The PLA's modern SP howitzer
The PLZ-05 was designed and manufactured by the China North Industries Group Corporation (CNGC), better known as Norinco. According to most reports, its development started in the mid-1990s, as a further development of the PLZ-45, an export version which already saw combat. The first prototype was completed in 2003 and it seems to have been accepted into service in 2005, at least according to its official denomination. It was also revealed during the 2005 Beijing International Aviation Exhibition. However, this model only entered service with the PLA around 2007.
Design of the PZL-05
In general configuration, the PZL-05 resembles the usual self-propelled turreted howitzers deployed by Western countries and Russia nowadays. The turret takes up more than 60% of the hull's length. It is placed at the rear of the vehicle and can traverse 360°. The crew is provided with night and day vision systems. The driver is located in the front-left part of the hull, with the engine compartment on his right. The rest of the crew is located in the turret. The crew consists of a commander, a gunner and a loader. The turret features blow-out panels and a rear door for supplying ammunition. It is also probable that the gun can be fired remotely, with the crew out of the vehicle. This self-propelled howitzer is intended to "shoot and scoot", quickly changing positions in order to avoid counter-battery fire.
A PLZ-05 at an exposition in Beijing - Source: Wikipedia
The hull consists of rolled homogeneous plate armor (RHA) made of high hardness armor steel. The protection is estimated to be sufficient against small arms and shell splinters and possibly against heavy MG (12.7 mm/0.5 in) rounds on the frontal arc. This is a rear-line artillery support vehicle. It is not meant to be on the front line in direct combat with other armored fighting vehicles. For active protection, the vehicle has two banks of four electrically fired smoke dischargers on each side. These are capable of launching a smoke screen or perhaps compatible anti-personal fragmentation projectiles. The crew is also protected by an anti-nuclear biological and chemical (NBC) package to enable it to operate in contaminated environments. The interior is sealed and the air kept at a higher pressure than the outside using various different filtering systems. The NBC that may be optional for the export versions as this makes producing the vehicle much more expensive. There is also an automatic fire suppression system in the turret and engine compartment.
The PLZ-05 powerpack consists of a diesel engine mounted at the front of the vehicle. The drivetrain comprises six doubled rubber-tired road wheels, two track support rollers on each side, drive sprockets at the front and idlers at the rear. The suspension is of the torsion bar type. Additionally, shock absorption units are added to the first and last roadwheel pairs on each side. The engine delivers 800 hp, providing the vehicle with a top speed of 65 km/h (40 mph) on the road and a 550 km (340 miles) operational range. There are significant differences to the PLZ-52 export model to keep the cost low.
The main armament of the PLZ-05 is a 155 mm (6.1 in) howitzer fitted with a muzzle brake. It has a barrel length between 52 and 54 calibers. It fires the WS-35 shell, a 40 lb (18 kg) guided munition provided with a maximal range reported to be 100 km (62 miles). It is guided by the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (the Chinese GPS) plus inertial guidance, allowing an accuracy of 40 m (130 ft). It is not known if the vehicle has a semi-automatic loader or its details compared to Western artillery SPGs. Secondary armament comprises a defensive multipurpose 12.7 mm (0.5 in) machine gun mounted on the turret roof.
The PLZ-05 in service
The PLZ-05 started arriving in active units in 2007 and began to replace the aging Type 83 152 mm (5.98 in) artillery self-propelled gun. It was deployed at division level to provide long-range accurate firepower. The vehicle has not been used in combat. Another export version, the PLZ-52, is also mentioned as a variant, with a more powerful engine.
The earlier export version, the PLZ-45 was sold to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and is also used by the PLA - Source: Wikipedia
The PLZ-05 on Wikipedia -
The PLZ-05 on Military-today -
About the PLZ-45
PLZ-05 SPH specifications
Dimensions 11.6 m x3.4 m x3.55 m (38ft 1in x 11ft 2in x 11ft 8in)
Total weight, battle ready 35 tonnes (34.45 tons)
Crew 4 (driver, commander, gunner, loader)
Propulsion PLZ-52: 8V150 turbocharged diesel, 800/1000 hp
Suspension Torsion Bars
Speed (road) PLZ-52: 65 km/h (40 mph)
Range PLZ-52: 550 km (340 miles)
Armament 155 mm (6.1 in) howitzer 12.7 mm (0.5 in) HMG
Armor Unknown
Total production 200+ (current)
PZL-05, by the author
PLZ 05 (Type 88) self propelled gun - Credits: AK Interactive
PZL 05 with a digital army camouflage - Credits: AK Interactive
PLZ-05 at maximal elevation - Source: chinamil.com.cn
The 155 mm PLZ-05 has a top speed of 65 km/h 40 mph- Credits: PDF
Chinese Army 155 mm PLZ-05 SPG - Credits: PDF
Chinese Army 155 mm PLZ-05 artillery self-propelled gun transportation - Credits: PDF
Modern Tanks
Modern MBTs posters
Denel Bagder (2018)
Type 16 MCV (2016)
Gepard 1A2 last rounds 2011
SANDF
Russian AFVs


Jock Mahoney and Dickie Jones rode the plains of the Wild West in the gunslinger TV adventure series, The Range Rider. This single-disc collection of The Range Rider, Vol. 5 (1953) brings together some of the best Western adventure ever created for television. The DVD series contains the episodes "The Buckskin," "Indian War Party," "The Contract" and "The Black Terror."


text:
Du er her: » Microsatellite diversity of the Nordic type of goats in r...
Microsatellite diversity of the Nordic type of goats in relation to breed conservation: how relevant is pure ancestry?
https://doi.org/10.1111/jbg.12226
Forlagets udgivne version
J A Lenstra, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Tigchelaar, Stichting Zeldzame Huisdierrassen, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
I Biebach, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland;
Econogene Consortium
J H Hallsson, Faculty of Land and Animal Resources, Agricultural University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.
J Kantanen, Green Technology, Natural Resources Institute Finland, Jokioinen, Finland.
Vivi Hunnicke Nielsen
F Pompanon, Universite Grenoble Alpes, France.
S Naderi, Environmental Sciences Department, Natural Resources Faculty, University of Guilan, Guilan, Iran.
H-R Rezaei, Environmental Sciences Department, Gorgan University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Gorgan, Iran.
N Saether, Norwegian Genetic Resource Centre, Ås, Norway.
O Ertugrul, Department of Histology and Embryology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Ankara University, 06110, Diskapi, Ankara, Turkey.
C Grossen, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland;
G Camenisch, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland;
M Vos-Loohuis, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
M van Straten, Stichting Zeldzame Huisdierrassen, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
E A de Poel, Stichting Zeldzame Huisdierrassen, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
J Windig, Animal Sciences Group and Centre for Genetic Resources-Wageningen UR, Lelystad, The Netherlands.
K Oldenbroek, Stichting Zeldzame Huisdierrassen, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
DCA - Nationalt Center for Fødevarer og Jordbrug
Institut for Molekylærbiologi og Genetik
In the last decades, several endangered breeds of livestock species have been re-established effectively. However, the successful revival of the Dutch and Danish Landrace goats involved crossing with exotic breeds and the ancestry of the current populations is therefore not clear. We have generated genotypes for 27 FAO-recommended microsatellites of these landraces and three phenotypically similar Nordic-type landraces and compared these breeds with central European, Mediterranean and south-west Asian goats. We found decreasing levels of genetic diversity with increasing distance from the south-west Asian domestication site with a south-east-to-north-west cline that is clearly steeper than the Mediterranean east-to-west cline. In terms of genetic diversity, the Dutch Landrace comes next to the isolated Icelandic breed, which has an extremely low diversity. The Norwegian coastal goat and the Finnish and Icelandic landraces are clearly related. It appears that by a combination of mixed origin and a population bottleneck, the Dutch and Danish Land-races are separated from the other breeds. However, the current Dutch and Danish populations with the multicoloured and long-horned appearance effectively substitute for the original breed, illustrating that for conservation of cultural heritage, the phenotype of a breed is more relevant than pure ancestry and the genetic diversity of the original breed. More in general, we propose that for conservation, the retention of genetic diversity of an original breed and of the visual phenotype by which the breed is recognized and defined needs to be considered separately.
Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics
Sider (fra-til)


Thanksgiving Eve come rock it out with us.
Show starts at 9:30 pm, it is our first show introducing Mike our new guitar player.
Show starts @ 9:45. This place has an awesome dance floor, and we want to see all of you up on your feet. Like the King said, "if you can't find a partner use a wooden chair, everybody let's rock"
Outdoor show starts at 3:00pm. We haven't been here in a while. We can't wait to rock Cecil County.
It's our first time here but hopefully not our last.
Another great afternoon show at KC's. Band starts at 4:00pm.
Dave and Anna's annual 4th of July party.


text:
Are there earthquakes in Sweden?
Björn Lund is head of the Swedish National Seismic Network, which registers all earthquakes in Sweden.
Photograph: Marcus Holmqvist
On average, a couple of earthquakes occur daily in Sweden. Most of them are so minor as to be detected by instruments only, but sometimes there are powerful tremors felt over large areas. This is related by Björn Lund, head of the Swedish National Seismic Network, in a short film.
"We can get quakes of up to magnitude six on the Richter scale. Five point four is the strongest we're completely sure about. That happened near the Koster islands, off the west coast, in 1904. It was such a big one that it shook the whole of southern and central Sweden, Norway and the whole of Denmark. And it was even said to be felt all the way to Saint Petersburg," Björn Lund says.
These earthquakes are due to the North American and Eurasian continental tectonic plates sliding apart in the mid-Atlantic and causing stresses to build up in the Swedish part of Earth's crust. When these stresses cause a sudden break along a fault, the ground shakes.
In Sweden, most earthquake activity is around Lake Vänern, along the coast of Norrland and in northernmost Sweden, where postglacial rebound took place. This occurred at the end of the last ice age when Earth's crust, after being weighed down by ice several kilometres thick, rose up again, activating fissures in the bedrock and, as a result, causing quakes.
But there are also earthquakes in Sweden that the scientists cannot entirely explain.
"In the county of Hälsingland, over the past 20 years, we've observed a cluster of seismic sites that don't quite behave as we thought. We don't know why they're there. Geologically, for instance, you can't see any major deformation zones. We wonder if it can be a hidden postglacial fault that's still active."
Using 13 temporary measuring stations that were installed in Hälsingland in summer 2021, Björn Lund and his colleagues now plan, over the next three years, to find out more about these quakes and try to clarify what causes them.
What is a fault?
A fault is a fissure (crack) in Earth's crust where a marked shift has taken place. Along an active fault, stresses constantly build up until the land suddenly ruptures and an earthquake takes place. Lake Vättern, which formed 650 million years ago, and the Halland Ridge, which is some 80 million years old, are examples of old faults in Sweden.
"Sensors will detect small movements in the rock"