Stars: looking up at the heavens

Stars

 

‘We are all in the gutter,’ said Wilde

‘But some of us look for the stars’

 

Yet the heavens are blank over London

Since light cancels out such a view

 

So I travelled to Travemünde

And I stood on the Strand after dark

 

Below pollarded trees in the cold

Ursa Minor winked down from above

 

The sight made me breathless with joy

And I wept with a new sense of life

• Image courtesy of Wikipedia

 

As lockdown ends, there's another pandemic

Another pandemic

Piled pyramidally on top of the bin

Precarious crates and paper plates

Lord it over the overflow ...

A plastic salad tub or two

And paper masks

Crumpled blue

With broken strings.

There’s no pub near the lone pint pot

That leans rakishly against a birch,

Nursing the afternoon’s dregs and

Staying stock still so as not to lurch.

Bottle tops trodden into London clay

Sprout between tussocks of weary grass,

While a barber-pole straw dallies with daffs

And a pizza box spreads like porn-style ass.

Percussive rain on a discarded can

Refreshes the parts with a pinging tune,

And a neon spoon floats across the pond

As though water has borrowed the moon.

Bedraggled plastic caught in branches,

Remains of bunting tied to trunks

Shiny metal stars, bombed into the air to greet a birthday

Fallen now like blossom

Sparkle on the ground

And vie for space beside the wall

With shreds of a dog-torn rubber ball

And a plastic five that speared the cake.

Lockdown is easing as spring is sprung.

Let’s surge to freedom and

Show nature what it’s missed.

April 2021

Taking flight into a magical world

Wing

Matthew Francis

 

Faber & Faber

 

 

What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.

 

It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.

 

In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.

 

In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.

 

It is a joy.

 

With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.

 

After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.

 

Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:

 

Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched

Into raucous air,

 

and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,

on the cushion of wind,

 

to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities

of the buffeting element.

 

Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows

of a chequered world.

 

The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.

 

The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.

 

It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.

 

The final section, Canticles, is more playful.

 

In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.

 

And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.

 

In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.

 

Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.

 

Wondrous.

 

Flights of glorious nature writing

In May 2018, on a brief sojourn to Margate as part of my extended recuperation following cancer surgery, The Other Half and I found ourselves visiting the Turner Contemporary, taking in an exhibition about the relationship between animals and humans.

In the shop, we came across copies of H is for Hawk, signed by author Helen Macdonald, who had (presumably) been at the previous evening’s opening and had either been asked to sign them or had undertaken a Gaimanesque exercise in guerrilla autographing.

 

Finding that the book was about the author’s struggle with grief at the loss of her father – and the role of a goshawk in dealing with that – I picked it up. The sentiments might have been different, but my own father had died exactly a week before my surgery and exactly 50 weeks after my mother.

 

Reading it was a difficult emotional journey, but its impact was such that, when I saw that Macdonald had a new book out, I wasn’t going to wait for the paperback.

 

In her introduction, she explains that Vesper Flights is intended to be a literary version of 16^th century Wunderkammer – usually known in English as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, but far better understood with a literal translation from the German of ‘cabinet of wonders’. Boxes and cabinets that were, in effect, small museums/galleries, they could contain anything from bones or fossils to works of art.

 

These essays, new and collected, are Macdonald’s effort to combine both science with the power of literature to inspire in readers a better understanding of the magical nature of nature, and what we stand to lose in the environmental calamity that is already befalling our planet.

 

But there’s a thing: “our planet”? One of the threads that runs crystal clear through Macdonald’s book is that we neither own ‘nature’ nor the lives of Earth’s non-human residents.

 

She wants to use literature to awaken (or reawaken) a sense of awe at the natural world – and with it, a greater sense of urgency at what is at risk in terms of the environment.

 

From considering the class nature of attitudes toward watching or keeping birds, to the relationship created by hides and feeding birds and mammals, Macdonald is determined to make us think with more detail about our relationship with the rest of the world.

 

Indeed, one of the points that comes through is that humanity is not apart from nature – but part of it. And there is a disconnect and massive problem in not realising that.

Some of my own shelves

Since Macdonald is such a very good writer, she succeeds: the essays capture a sense of the ephemeral and the mysterious; of the lives of birds and creatures that we do not understand, but are no less real, lived lives.

And with all this, a sense of the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious world that we are already losing – and will lose altogether, if we do not act soon.

 

It is a collection that also has the power to feel deeply personal.

 

For instance, there is one moment when the author describes how, as a child, she collected her own Wunderkammer – using her nature findings to decorate the shelves of her burgeoning nature library.

 

Reading it was a sort of jolt, as I realised I’ve been doing the same thing in recent years. A personal Wunderkammer.

 

This is a deeply serious book, with a deeply serious purpose. Don’t let that put you off. It will haunt you, but it is wonderfully written and a joy to read – and will hopefully inspire many to increase their contributions to saving this extraordinary planet and the incredible, awesome range of life that lives on it. 

 

Do buy (or get your library to do so).

Summer solstice … bone and stone and feather

Rosary

Bone and stone and feather

Leaf and stick and shell,

Scent of purple heather

Sound of ocean swell.

Green of grass below me

Blue of skies above,

Iced beck burbling freely

Cooing of a dove.

Thunder up in heaven

Drizzle in the breeze,

Kronking of the raven

Snow upon the trees.

Swooping murmuration

Swirling Northern Lights

Swifts’ airborne gyration,

Bumble bee in flight.

Fledgling’s hungry calling

Curlew’s haunting cry,

Wind through grasses rushing

Breeze’s gentle sigh.

Mist through woods now pouring

Ghost of breath in air,

Sun in azure soaring

Moon in ink set fair.

Bone and stone and feather

Leaf and stick and shell,

Whatever be the weather

Such things will keep me well.

Freedom Bid

A budgie, pretty in lilac, cream and brown

Perches on the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Unafraid.

Yet just yesterday,

The next-door blackbirds lost a chick.

Fledging too soon from the shielding hedge,

It dropped from the ledge and once on the ground

Was trapped.

Easy meat for a magpie to peck.

The budgie, charming colours so striking here,

Perches on the trellis

Alongside dowdy sparrows,

Pecking at jasmine flowers.

Ceramic white petals float to the ground.

Forget the local sparrowhawk or passing peregrine.

Staying alert, a black cat leaps

To snatch.

The budgie breaks away with a squawk,

Escaping – this time at least.

But having leapt from some shielding cage

Spread its wings and flown free,

How long can it survive?

The budgie, exotic in its parrot hues

Returns to the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Still unafraid.

But up and down and all around,

They watch.

And wait.

4 June 2020

Monday in the park with Loki – or meet the raven

Loki and me – that grin is really not an everyday one

It was last year, reading Joe Shute’s A Shadow Above: the fall and rise of the raven, that I first came across Loki and Coda Falconry.

While I haven’t written much about it here, I have a thing about ravens – those huge, deeply intelligent birds, steeped in mythology, but also a source of fear across the globe.

The Norse god, Odin the Allfather, feared that there would be a day when his newsgathering corvids, Huginn (knowledge) and Muninn (memory), would not return.

In March 2016, after a trip to the Tower of London specifically to go raven spotting, I wrote that there was something poetic in the idea of a god that feared losing memory. While scholars have suggested that that originally refers to a fear of not returning from a shamanistic trance, for us, it can seem poignantly like the fear of dementia.

Little over a year later, after my mother had died suddenly, it started to become clear that Dad was suffering from more than ‘forgetfulness’, as his GP blithely insisted. The ravens had flown and the mists were descending rapidly.

As we slipped into the final autumn of his life and the hospital visits became more and more frequent, I would ritualistically greet the crows that hung around the hospital itself and in the open field opposite. The ancient belief in a link between death and the cawing corvids seemed alive, yet their presence was almost reassuring.

With Dizzy, a beautiful (if brainless) barn owl

I have seen ravens in the wild since that Tower visit: in Bavaria, circling the medieval towers of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in the early spring sunshine, and kronking away from a rooftop opposite our hotel.

Last autumn, speeding past Thurrock on a train, I caught a glimpse of a pair. There had been countless crows in the fields as we passed. Then these two birds on their own, so obviously much bigger, yet (as much as I could ascertain in seconds), about as near to tracks as the crows had been.n

Later, a friend with a great deal of expertise in birding told me that, if I had such a strong gut response, then I was probably right. And as Shute’s book makes clear, ravens are making a comeback.

Loki is a rescue raven. When he arrived at Coda, he was clearly traumatised and deeply unhappy.

Yes, yes – that’s discussing a bird in terms of emotions. Not so long ago, to do as much would have been dismissed as the near heresy of anthropomorphism, but the science world is finally learning about non-human species in terms of emotion and intelligence. No longer are people who talk of their cats and dogs the only ones who contemplate such things – and while it brings it’s own challenges, it’s also a welcome end to a particular kind of species-based exceptionalism.

It took time and considerable dedication for falconer Elliot Manarin to gain his trust – and Elliot still bears the physical scars. But Loki is now very much a part of team Coda and you can arrange to meet him.

Star, a saker falcon, on my fist. How beautiful!

So, last December, The Other Half gave me a birthday present of vouchers to do precisely that – and to enjoy a half-day falconry experience beforehand.

We finally managed to get booked in a couple of months ago and on Monday, made our way up London’s Lee Valley to the falconry, which sits within the Lee Valley Park Farms. It’s a very pleasant walk from Cheshunt station to the site, across part of the Lee Valley Country Park (with lots of birds).

The OH was there to film and shoot. We were with a small group and were led by head falconer Emily Corless and falconer Paul Ryder, spending time first with Teo, a young (and very noisy) aplomado falcon, then Dizzy, an exquisitely beautiful barn owl who is Emily’s favourite (though obviously she doesn't really have any favourites).

In both cases, the group took turns to have the birds fly to their gloved fist to collect raw meat (this is not an experience for the squeamish).

Then Paul and Emily took us into nearby fields and woodland with Griff, a 14-year-old harris hawk.

Unusually, these hawks hunt in groups – and in a situation such as our walk, regard the humans with them as being that group. Griff flew straight from his box into a tree and then followed us as we walked on, with Paul setting food on fists to get him to come down, showing us a variety of his flying skills.

This got a little more complex at one point as the rain came on and Griff refused to come to the fist – until substantial food was available (a mouse).

Back at the falconry, we met Freya, a snowy owl, as she flew to us for food.

Feeding Loki cat biscuits

Then it was the turn of Star, a saker falcon. First, Emily used a lure (food on a rope, in essence) spinning it around to exercise the bird and give us the chance to admire her flying abilities. Then, giving a call of “ho!” she let the lure go. Star caught it in mid air and took it to the ground to eat.

In turn, in a “trade off” as it’s known in the falconry world, Star was then encouraged to fly to each of us in turn with more food.

A display for people visiting the farm park followed with Eclipse, a rare black barn owl, Rico, a three-year-old harris hawk, Storm, a peregrine/gyr/barbary falcon, and Otis, a tiny sunda scops owl.

Then we were given certificates and everyone left, bar the OH and me.

Now was the moment.

Outside, Paul opened Loki’s enclosure and he flew out to his little toy piano, where he hit the keys with his beak until receiving cat biscuits as a reward. He prefers the cat biscuits to the bits of chicken that I held in a gloved hand so that he’d fly up to me.

I’d been near to Merlina at the Tower, but having a raven on your fist – and then hopping around on your shoulders – is entirely another matter. They are seriously big birds – and magnificent too; iridescent blues and greens and purples visible in their feathers as a they move.

There were further toys – including one he had only seen once or twice before: but with bewildering speed, he knew how to open boxes, use leavers and remove pieces in order to get at biscuits.

The intelligence is clear. Having read about the toys, I had half wondered if it was a tad exploitive – as with a circus animal. But once you understand a corvid’s need for stimulation, it becomes clear that this is not remotely exploitation.

He is mischievous too. In the picnic area next door, Emily had parked herself in case he spotted food. It had rained, so surely there was little risk? But then a family arrived and one child pulled a cheese and ham sandwich out. Loki was there in seconds – no aggressive behaviour – with Emily having to dive in to usher him back.

Back in his enclosure, with me feeding him cat biscuits, he showed us how he stashes his food. He’ll store it as much as possible in his beak and then, when he thinks nobody is watching, bury it beneath the small stones on the floor. He does this outside too, but that can end up in infuriation when other corvids (magpies, crows) see – and dig up the food when he’s safely back in his pen.

We left for the walk back to Cheshunt and the train home. All the birds were magnificent, but as Paul and Emily noted, for birds of prey, the only thing that matters is food (and breeding, presumably): they don’t really have intelligence or emotions. Indeed, contrary to popular perception, owls are “stupid,” Emily told our small group early on.

As Paul noted during the public display later, when you can fly silently and have the hearing and sight they do, you don’t really need much in the brain department.

Loki is a bird of a different feather. And I will absolutely be visiting again. I am in love and in awe – and for me at least, this corvid affair has nothing to do with death, but very much the opposite.

• Find out more at codafalconry.co.uk, www.facebook.com/codafalconry/, at Loki's own Facebook page – www.facebook.com/lokitraven/ – and twitter.com/CodaFalconry and as @CodaFalconry on Instagram too.

• Joe Shute's superb book about ravens is readily available. I highly recommend it – and you can follow him on twitter.com/JoeShute. Read an article he penned for the Telegraph about Loki here.

Charity challenges and mental health

It was 6:55am on Monday 1 July – day one of the 2019 Diabetes UK One Million Step Challenge.

With a few minutes left before the bus for the first half of my journey to work was due, I stepped into Haggerston Park and walked to the next stop via the avenue of young oaks that had been planted 18 months earlier.

The sun was already beaming down and my shadow stretched out ahead as I headed west.

Stepping off the bus in Islington, I continued my journey to the office on foot, along the Regent’s Canal, via Granary Square, King’s Cross and more.

Day two: I began my journey the same way. It was sunny again and there was longer before the bus was due, so I contemplated walking straight through the park, then on down a couple of streets and estates to catch it later on its route. Picturesque for part of the way, but not for the rest.

At the oaks, I stopped: why was I going to do it this way?

The first thing I knew of the step challenge was seeing a poster on a train as The Other Half and I headed to the RSPB’s reserve at Rye Mead in April.

Caledonian street art

But I only made the decision to sign up for it last Friday, registering the following day. Too late for my intro pack to arrive from the charity – though that doesn’t stop me getting underway. It runs from 1 July to 30 September, effectively meaning you need to take 10,869 steps a day for 92 days.

Inasmuch as I’ve planned anything about it, the aim is to go well over that daily total for the first couple of weeks at least.

My first instinct was to treat it as utilitarian: the easiest way to rack up steps is to walk at least half of my journey into work. That can take me along a canal towpath, so far from onerous – apart from the cyclists who treat it as their personal superhighway.

But then it struck me that, if I stop doing that – if I cease to see it merely as a matter of getting from A to B, a question simply of transit – what else can it hold?

As some who has struggled over the past couple of years with mental health issues (both parents dying; having to deal with cancer myself) I was realising that the challenge itself held value. But what beyond the health benefits of walking more each day?

On day two, I decided that, instead of zooming through the park and back onto the road, I’d make a circuit of part of the park, then exit and catch the bus right outside. It was blissfully quiet – apart from a trio of ring-necked parakeets who flew over, a beautiful flash of green against the blue. They’re migrating further and further into our neck of the woods; this was the first time I’d seen them below Acton Lock.

Pied wagtail, Francis Crick Institute

Leaving the bus in Islington, I continued on foot – ignoring the canal and trying some side streets for a change, giving me the opportunity to slip into Joseph Grimaldi Park for the first time.

Cross Caledonian Road and it’s busier as you head to King’s Cross, but after that you can slip through St Pancras station and then across to the Francis Crick Institute, thus avoiding Euston Road (always a plus).

By the institute – a not entirely-successful example of modern architecture in my view – a small bird was hopping around. New to the birding malarky, I didn’t recognise it, but took mental notes and a quick snap. Online research later revealed it to be a pied wagtail.

Treating this challenge as more than just adding a few daily steps could prove to be more enjoyable than I imagined.

Stay tuned – and, if you can, please donate via step.diabetes.org.uk/pages/amanda-73.

Thank you all, in advance.

Mythology, cats and ceramics

 A view from Relais Regina Giovanna

Off the boat and into the Sorrento sunshine, we were far too early for hotel check-in but just in time for the start of lunch. Of the two waterside eateries, we picked Ristorante Bar Ruccio, since it seemed to have the most conventional and Italian-looking menu.

As it happened, it also had cats. Although not before we had food in front of us.

I rarely opt for soup – it’s usually too filling a starter for me – but the primavera caught my attention. I’m glad it did. A huge bowl of beautiful, seasonal vegetables in a light but flavoursome stock. Genuinely scrummy – bang full of flavour. I had grilled octopus next, refusing to let myself be put off by the previous evening’s poor Neapolitan experience.

A generous portion, it was shared with the two cats – a ginger tabby and, we believe, her daughter; still technically a kitten, but with a very grave face and advanced skills in the ‘give-me-food’ telepathy department.

Mummy tabby cat

It was a pleasant meal and the cats – who were clearly not considered a problem by the staff – added to the experience. Then it was into a taxi for the trip up the steep, hairpin road into central Sorrento and then south along the coast, hugging the hillside, to the hotel.

Relais Regina Giovanna is a series of buildings, gloriously refurbished and set in a 50-acre estate. The hotel itself has a dozen rooms, while a block 500 metres away has five apartments for self catering. Other buildings are dotted around, including one that hosts yoga classes.

The estate is a joy to wander in. It’s never going to be crowded and includes olive and lemon groves, plus the vegetable and herb gardens that supply the hotel restaurant. Relais Regina Giovanna makes its own olive oil and limoncello.

There’s a small, private beach at the top of a small inlet, with clear emerald waters washing gently in. Unfortunately, we were too early in the season for that to be open. Another time, then. And more of that another day.

‘I want the octopus’

Signs let you know what birds you might see: during our stay, we spotted at least one buzzard, many white-throated swifts and flashes of bright yellow that we eventually identified as canaries, plus abundant Italian wall lizards.

In places, you can hear only the sea below, the wind in the trees, birds singing and your own thoughts. If you want an idea of paradise …

And at this point, let’s digress for a spot of history.

Queen Giovanna D’Angiò was a sovereign of Naples. It seems that, between 1371 and 1435, she often went to the area. And it now bears her name.

So this is a point: the whole area reeks of history: you simply cannot escape it.

And at this juncture, let’s take a step back a few decades.

In the first year at my (state) grammar school, everyone did Latin. I took to it like the proverbial duck to water, while modern languages never caught my imagination.

Around the estate

To be fair, that might have been influenced by my father who, while he had nothing negative to say about Latin, was disgruntled at my having to learn French and, when I had to swap Latin for German in my second year, was apoplectic. It was not, after all, Why We Won the War.

But stopping Latin after a year meant that I was not introduced to the mythology of southern Europe. When I finally came across any mythology it was years later, when a friend told me the story of the Nibelungen.

I was gripped. Memory can be a dodgy thing, but I don’t remember my parents telling stories like that (or even reading to me). German and Norse mythology leapt in to a vacuum. I’ve dipped into the Classical variety since, but it’s always seemed tame.

Yet between the presence of Vesuvius and the knowledge that this part of the Mediterranean has the far older sounding name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, something started to come to life.

On a long, narrow street in Sorrento, after passing shops laden with mass-produced souvenirs, we found Terrerosse.

Terrerosse bowl

It’s a small shop with space at the back to work. There, Allessandro and Enrica create unique ceramics that are bound up in the mythology of the region.

Sorrento … the name comes from ‘siren/mermaid’: winged creatures that became sea-bound.

If you’re in Sorrento, seek out Via Fuoro, 73 – because the work of Allessandro and Enrica has a magical, mythical quality you’ll rarely find elsewhere.

We’ll be going back in September. Italy has captivated us. In August, we will now spending time in the shadow of Etna, at Aci Trezza, before making our way back to Sorrento and Relais Regina Giovanna. I fully intend to make a trip to Terrerosse my primary ceramic aim of the the holiday.

And in the meantime, I find myself increasingly dreaming of an amazing mythological landscape that is coming alive for me as never before.