summer is in

summer is in
everyone sing
aah! let us begin . . .*

It seems that for a day or two we are able to enjoy some warm seasonal weather down here on the east coast.  It's about time.  The weather has been awful. During half term week I was marking - the annual festival of AS Film Studies exam marking that takes up several weeks of my time.  As the weather was so bad this year I just got on with it and didn't feel that I should be out and about in it.  Or worse still, off on holiday somewhere.  It has been ridiculously cold so far in this neck of the woods.  The poppies pictured are in a field on the road that became infamous a few years ago where several prostitutes were found murdered by the "Suffolk Ripper" or whatever naff name they gave him.  Beauty and calm have returned to a lovely stretch of countryside by the A14.

Still, back to the matter at hand, I did manage to visit friends in my old home town.  We walked in what is now called "Forster Country".  Forster wrote Howards End about a house that is nearby to my old parish church, St Nicholas in Stevenage. The house is actually called Rooks Nest and a friend of mine from schooldays used to be the gardener there. He's a taxi driver now.

We walked up through the churchyard where many of us have seen ghosts - for another time perhaps.  It's quite overgrown in places.  An area of importance for some rare species of plant my friend informed me. The solitude of church graveyards is a wonderful thing in daylight.  The amount of wildlife that lives in them is phenomenal - I hoped to see a jay as there are so many oak trees there. No jays, but we stumbled onto this small mark of Forster's importance to the area.  As you walk past this into the field behind I had a rush of what? Nostalgia? No, but a memory of those long cross country runs we had to undertake from school.  Our school was just down the avenue from the church.

In those days we had to do a real cross country run.  In these days of risk assessments and a paedophile in every hedgerow (nature deficit disorder!!) kids just have to run around the school field a few times.  That's in those schools that haven't sold off their school fields.  Still, hardly a "cross country" run, is it? Running around the school field was a punishment that the science teacher used to excel in when I were a lad. In those days come rain, mud, snow, hail, whatever - rarely sunshine, though - we had to run through the avenue, churchyard, fields. Sunshine was only for those long hot summers we had in those days. After the run, covered in caked mud and feet clogged with chalk, we were forced to go into the communal shower. It was always a bit disconcerting that the P.E. teacher was in there with you, but hey! it was a boy's school.:
"Pass the soap, lad."
"Yes sir." Thing is, he never went on the run with us.

With several skylarks twittering away high over the fields and my friend's dog startling the partridges, it was a great feeling to walk through the years and dredge up some memories.  On the way home a jay flew out of a tree and plonked itself onto the side of the A14.  I knew I was going to see one that day.

Thinking back to the walk through the churchyard and how it is becoming as immaculately unkempt as Francis Rossi's hairdo, there seems to be a synchronicity at large here.  I have become fascinated by the way the the real world - that's nature you know, weeds and foxes and stuff - has begun to encroach into our world more and more.  The urban world if left alone will always be colonised: weeds, after all, were the first things to grow on the bombsites after WW2. So, "only connect" indeed. I get interested in this stuff just as the BBC decides to show a programme about the unnatural wildlife of London. I missed it, of course, but thanks to iPlayer I can sit and watch it in bed with a cup of tea later tonight.  I missed it because I went to see Prometheus last night: a film that concerns itself very much about the nature of life itself. I'll leave it to others to judge its shortcomings but it's an interesting film.  Eric Von Daniken where are you now?

So reading about small wildernesses and the way the natural world finds a way of constantly surviving seems to be cropping up (no pun intended) all over the place.  Here we have a little jungle - a whole ecosystem - sitting happily outside a house with a usually immaculate garden at the end of my road. I find this sort of patch far more interesting - actually, far more beautiful - than an unnatural garden.  I like the poppies and nettles colonising anywhere and everywhere. More on this another time.

When the sun comes out and we start to feel a bit better about ourselves, I enjoy cooking more and more.  Winter's fine with its stews and heavy meals but the summer starts me thinking about more interesting things to do.  Last Sunday I smoked some mackerel. I had hell of a job getting the Rizlas around it but to be absolutely honest, I am very impressed with the results.  We ate it last night and there were no side effects, just the genuine taste of lightly smoked mackerel.  Mind you, the house stinks but what the hey? Next time I'm going up to the local fishmongers and get some really fresh fish off the boat, maybe some prawns too. Home smoked fish, eh? Whatever next?

* Summer Is In by Anne Briggs - recorded in the early 1970s just down the road from here in Little Bealings with Steve Ashley and his short-lived band Ragged Robin.