Big BORING Garden Bird Watch

As usual, the RSPB chose the dead week of the year for this event. I've been up since dawn filling the feeders and covering four bird tables with seeds and fat. Two weeks ago the place was alive with every kind of bird, and that included 13 fieldfares and 11 male blackbirds fighting it out under the apple tree and my usual variety of finches, tits, wrens and house sparrows. And, indeed, before the fieldfares flocked in, there was that same solitary one that I started this blog with two years ago. That means he is now four years old.

This place is normally bird heaven. Normally I have to chase away the starlings, magpies and woodpigeons so that the little birds can have a go.

There is a certain week every February when the birds just throng in: throngs of greenfinches, tits, chaffinches, robins, the lot, so that the hedge is a living tapestry of colour and I can't tear myself away from the windows. I have recorded 52 species of birds here over the years.

At some point last summer the first ever coal tit arrived (because I planted some fir trees, I think), and can often watch water hens and herons in the field. I have a beautiful song thrush or two bouncing up the garden most mornings.

So far today, 4o minutes in (I've more or less given up) I've had one rook and one blackbird. There are some vague large shapes of a magpie and two fat pigeons in the tree in the field, but no one is hungry, despite the hard frost and the frozen water butt. And it was just the same last year. The RSPB say don't worry about it; it means that the birds are being recorded elsewhere. But I wish they would chose a week in February instead.

I have been longing for a tree sparrow (passer montanus) since I came here, but, even though there are some in Wiltshire, I am not to be rewarded.

Taking Stock

I love my blog but it just wasn't possible for weeks. Work was horrifying and felt like a prison. Here I am doing my annual review in January, but it still feels to me like the end of the year. This was the first year since 1989 that I haven't written five lines of diary every day. That just shows how wretched my life got.

And the English weather got to me so much that I lastminutedotcommed down to, of all places, the corny old Cote d'Azure, and discovered, like Matisse, that that light will always be there for me. It was a revelation to spend five days in the sun. I will go back every winter. Art, light, sea, walking, beauty.

Part of my taking stock was that I dragged myself, very reluctantly, out of Wiltshire to get up to London and spend New Year with friends. This is because one of them reminded me of Millie's diary (see my archive of 19th September, 2007) and I didn't want to be alone, just like her, in bed here yet again, as I have been year after year, and like Cliff, too. The great news there is that Cliff, the treeman, is back in Wilts, and I will blog about that soon, or ask him to guest blog. My mother says, "There is always something really nice about treemen." She's right.

It was just brilliant to see the New Year in with friends and wine and takeaway in London with fireworks going off around us, an early-hours dash to pick up their drunk daughter. "Do NOT yop on me, Chloe", I said, worried about the back of my neck in the passenger seat; "I have to take my little god-daughter to the London Aquarium tomorrow".

The London Aquarium is okay, but going to be much better after Easter when they've got the rays back. I could have sat and looked at the shark tank all day. Even better than that was eating in a restaurant with god-daughter and her parents afterwards. I felt normal. It was a very funny feeling to feel normal, on the South Bank with good food and company and music. This is a sort of once-a-year kind of thing for this old country girl. Little things please this little mind.

But you know what: it was so very beautiful in the hoar frost on Wednesday, the last day of the year, that, before heading up to London, I went for a long rough walk among the sheep and the white cobwebs. The beech woods were one of the most lovely things I have seen in my life. They were like those cold frosty Christmas cards of snowy landscapes that I don't always like getting (I like red Robins and red Pillar Box-type Christmas cards; anything to cheer me up), but I was shouting to these frosty woods for their beauty.

I watched a very large rabbit with his large white tail bounding through the beeches, and then a second later a large red fox bounding in rather a desultory way after it. It was the most beautiful fox I have ever seen. He had a huge white tip to his tail, and when he decided to stop his chase and stood above me (up-wind, though) I saw his most elegant outline. He then sneezed eight times and disappeared soundlessly.

I found pussy willow on the way home and thought it would look marvellous with the first narcissi or whatever I buy -- as there is no sign of the bulbs starting early this year.

I have been reading, for about the third time, The Enigma of Arrival by Vidia Naipaul. Although it's about South Wiltshire, I was taken with this word, "benign" which he uses to describe our chalk landscape. You can feel taken care of here. I wish I had the perfect pictures of it to show the world how soft and gentle and nourishing it is. Robert McCrum says, and I agree with him, that it is "at the heart of the English imagination".

Here is near perfect: pictures from the wonderful, wonderful website:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/

They show that begnignity.

The misty one is by Andrew Smith, and the farm on Hackpen Hill by Brian Robert Marshall. I am really grateful to them for all their pics. I am constantly browsing the site which makes me love and appreciate what's all around me.

I am making wonderful patchwork quilts. Wait and see them.

Easily Pleased

I'm famous for being easily pleased. An alternative way to put it is, "Tiny things please tiny minds". Today I am very happy with myself because, walking an old horse on the beautiful Wiltshire downland between Chisledon and Liddington Camps, I noticed a funny sort of ash tree, brought a bit home and have identified it as the Single-Leaved Ash (Fraxinus diversifolia). It's sticking out of my scanner right here beside me as I write. You can see the single leaves coming out from the actual twig. Extraordinary. I don't believe it's wild. It was obviously a planting from many years ago when someone planted it all along both sides of the road, almost alternatively with the common ash. What a happy Bank Holiday Monday. It was so quiet and peaceful up there as we plodded along like gypsies and barge people must have done with the leading rein.

Here is a beautiful picture of Liddington Castle (word for an Iron Age Camp) which appears on the great site http://www.geograph.org.uk/ where you can search for good photographs that people have taken near your place. My congratulations to Brian Robert Marshall, the photographer. He has caught some of the essence of Wiltshire.