TWO YEARS LATER. . . .

I could still cry, as Google has made it so hard for me to use this old blog. But I am determined and I will win.

Nature itself (and a load of text codes and help forums!) will help me win.  In the silent spring that is present day Britain, I thought I had lost, among almost everything else, my little bat that has come out at one end of the cottage roof every dusk for 23 years.  I have been looking for it for about two years, and not seen it.  So, more gloom than ever.

Tonight, I sat outside in the dark until 10.00.  I said that if my little bat appeared by the end of the news headlines at about 10.01, then I would return to my blog.  And on the very second that the headlines finished, there it was, speeding across the sky like the loveliest thing I have ever seen.  The joy was similar to that of seeing ET in the bicycle basket.  Who ever, ever thought I would be saying hooray for one little bat.

There is hope.  Now, someone tell me whether David Attenborough said it was too late to save the planet or not.

Three years ago there were a hundred swifts overhead all high summer.
Two years ago there were fifty swifts overhead all high summer.
A year ago I only had twenty swifts overhead all high summer.
This year there are four.  They are my precious symbols, too.

And this is what I am shopping for instead of shoes and handbags:

http://www.swift-conservation.org/Shopping!.htm

I COULD CRY

I couldn't get onto my blog for a year since Google took over the internet.

And it has been the same with my beautiful YouTube account with all the music and favourites that I love.  I couldn't even say I liked anything.  And now whatever you watch is ruined by adverts.

I could have cried again and again.  They would not help me.  Nothing worked.
I remembered an old email account and return tonight.  I could cry again.  Why have they made life so horrid?

I will blog about the swifts and swallows tomorrow.  That is yet another cause of grief.
Before this blog gets too sad, let me say that the compensation in my life is SKYLARKS.  I haven't had them since my childhood.

The First Day of the Rest of My Life

I gave up the day job yesterday.

I am a free woman (who should now perhaps be entitled "Polly Pauper") until the day I die.

Perhaps I will blog every day. Extraordinary that this is what I have come to do before I even have some breakfast -- though I have been out to feed the birds.

THE CHIFF CHAFF IS HERE!

It might reach 21 C in Wiltshire today. That means that the swallows might come early, and that I will have to get those house martin boxes up in the eaves just asap. Scary job.

The resolutions are extensive: be downstairs by 7.00 every morning, go for an uphill walk every day. . . .

All I know is that I am going to be a much happier human.

New Beginnings

Here I am a whole year later. It must be because this is the only time of the year I have to look at my beloved blog. But everything is going to change later in the year when I give up the day job and try to live like a crofter, making a living by doing this and that: crafting, writing perhaps, selling things at the Farmers' Market.

I spent early New Year's Eve bemoaning the Silent Spring that seems to have befallen my world. No insects, no birds except pigeons, magpies and rooks, no hedgehogs; nothing but badgers who leave their signs everywhere.

But in the joy of the new resolution early-morning walk, I saw that the bird life has simple left the haunts of man while it is so warm (about 11 degrees). First I heard a pheasant. Then I saw a raven. There suddenly appeared the first chaffinch I've seen for weeks, up on a hawthorn, and then six long-tailed tits on another one. Then there were some mixed great and blue tits on yet another one. It seemed to me today that if you plant hawthorn you will have birds. There were absolutely none in the beech clumps that adorn our Wiltshire hills. They are the home of wonderful wind noises (soughing being the main one), but not of birds.

Anyway, it was pleasing, and they will probably be back when there's a cold snap.

Then I saw a rabbit, so all is not lost! And I also found a clump of shaggy ink caps that I am cooking right now, mixed with garlic and baking on the top of two eggs. And then a huge clump of Jelly Ear which I have chopped tiny to dry on the Rayburn and then powder for soup. Those were my recipes of choice for those two funghi. I have an enormous box of paper recipes that I've been collecting all my life. I don't suppose I will ever look at them again, as whenever I want to make anything I just google it. People in the countryside have such lovely lives these days, as we have our cottages so warm, our wonderful broadband (if we are lucky, and I am), and the best of all possible worlds.

I came home to google house martins' nest boxes and there they were on Amazon. I bought two as an experiment, but could see how easily I could make more if ever I need them. Last year, for the first time ever, the swallows and house martins swooped in and out of my shed, the door of which was open to allow the neighbours' cats to sort out a wee mouse problem. I thought then that if there was some sort of support under the eaves of my cottage, then they might just decide to nest here for once -- as well as down on the farm where they are so much part of our divine summer scenery.

I have burnt a load of logs this winter. Although elm is about the worst wood for heat, it's great to stick the odd elm log in as it burns even slower than coal. It's a great log to put on when you are going out. I have a supply of elm stumps, as they are still growing to eighteen feet and then dying, as they have been doing for the last twenty years I've been here. I wonder if they will ever start becoming resistant.

Dismay and Fun in the Snow

I keep missing things. Now June Jackson who writes Hidden Swindon and Wrens and Hedgesparrows (see Links) is leaving us. She has said goodbye and slipped away and not allowed us to say goodbye back. I don't know why I feel so heartbroken. I always hoped I would get to know her. I went through all her blogs again looking for a comment box just to say thank you for so much beautiful stuff over the years. I have really appreciated it, and I'm sure that many others have too. Now we will just have to read her blogs over and over again.

I was going to write about the snow and the cold and upload my photographs, but everyone else will be doing it.

But I will just go outside and see what the temperature is, this, the coldest night of the year.

Wow. It's -10.5, the lowest temperature I have ever seen, and the water bottle inside my car is frozen solid. It's only 10.30 at night, so what will the temperature be in the early hours?

I am only not freezing in the house because I am wearing my Norwegian army fleece that I got in the army surplus shop on Gorse Hill. It is the real thing, and hard to be cold in. It is a truly disgusting diahorrea khaki colour, but I have heard you can get black ones.

This is one of the coldest spots in the UK, in fact. I live in a frost trap at the bottom of a lovely hill. Apparently it was -14 degrees in January 1995 when I was away and my lagged pipes burst. Today the washing machine wouldn't work until I warmed up the porch.

The sheep must be in. The farmer says they are perfectly happy to -15 degrees, but I should think he's taking no chances tonight.

Rendering Fat

This is what Polly's been doing all week: cutting a block of Stilton into bits for the freezer (see www. stiltoncheese.com), making wonderful soups, and rendering the fat from the ham joint from Christmas.

For the latter, all I did was cut it off, put it in a meat tray in the Rayburn with the door open for about three days (bottom oven is too cool and this heats the kitchen perfectly) and keep pouring off the fat that comes off it. It is beautiful and cream coloured, and I might use it for a high cholesterol goulash or three, or I might just heat it up and mix it with bird food for the little boydies. Today my best pic would have been of a robin on a margerine tub of fat and seeds that I made months ago and just took out of the freezer to make room for all the goodies.

BUT ... the crispy bits that are left are probably the most delicious things I will ever eat. They are just so sweet! They are beyond tasty. And I am wanting to eat them with white bread. How amazing is that: fat and white bread! Luckily I have some white bread in the house for about the first time this year. It is so cold that surely we are allowed. It's surely okay to eat fat if you saw your own logs.

It is so cold but so unbelievably beautiful out there tonight. I had to put out all the rubbish which means a bit of a trek with the various receptacles, but I didn't need a torch as the moon is now nearly a half moon but still so bright.

I geared up for the rubbish treks in all my scarecrow country and lower-class ski clothes. But although it was minus 4, there was no wind chill or damp chill factor, and it was such magic out there I didn't want to come in. I wanted to go for a moonlit walk, but wouldn't really dare on my own. I bet I would see foxes and badgers, deer and rabbits and goodness knows what else: hear the owls probably, but here I am typing this in my big hot coat while the central heating creaks and groans and the beauty is all outside, not in.

The stars are surely the best in January, as in Laurie Lee's Winter Poem (The stars have talons / there is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger / Silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox / Ice on the rabbit’s paw). He was the first poet I ever bought. Not a bad choice for a teenager.

Oh I LOVE January. New beginnings.



Orion: the first constellation I ever learnt when I was a wee girl in Scotland.

New Decade

It's not the end of the world to be away from one's blog for so long. The cycle of the years means that I can reread it according to the season. I started it with fox cubs barking three years ago and I continue it here with my memory of last night's midnight, the start of the new decade.

Going out to my lean-to, I suddenly saw that the moonlight was like a halogen lamp, so I went out to see the blue moon. It was so beautiful, a rainbow halo round it. Why ruin its peace and beauty with stupid fireworks? There she was, sailing radiantly above us, as she's done for centuries. And then a vixen barked: my first one of the year.



Then the decade started in earnest here in Wiltshire with the most beautiful sunshine. What a gift. I started as I mean to go on: with a really brisk walk (ha ha, my version of a jog which is me trotting down the lane for ten yards and breaking into an amble) in which I was pleased to see a water hen. We used to have loads in every ditch and pond till the neighbours' cats decimated them -- just as they decimated my great population of water voles. I also admired a stubble field from the autumn's sweetcorn, totally iced, the stubble in wonderful rows. I might take my new camera tomorrow.

But, hello again blog. I had a year so marked by deaths (including that of my best ever girlfriend which knocked me out for months) that it seemed part of life's rich pattern and that funerals were the regular thing.


In the summer I had wanted to blog about Wootton Bassett and what we do here, but it's a bit gratuitous. We just do what any sentient people would do. Enough to say that one day in the summer I came out from the launderette onto the pavement to stand to attention to the union-jack-covered coffin of an EIGHTEEN-year-old. This is so very very very wrong. For years I have watched the planes come down over Lynham. There is a particular type of plane (an RAF C-17 Globemaster) that comes down over my garden in the late mornings, and it is agonising to think of the feelings of the loved ones waiting.

None of the pictures in the press can show the kind of silence that falls on the town when the police outriders come through, emptying the street, or the abysmal wrongness of the slow arrival of the funeral car.