Thirty minutes

It is hard to believe that this screen of ubiquitous buddleia, scenting the suburban air, hides a railway line that has triggered intense debate, caused thousands of people to protest, and made a minister of state into a figure of hate. It is often referred to as “the Chiltern Line” and if the government has its way it will be the route for HS2, a high speed rail link connecting London to Birmingham and reducing the time of the present journey by about thirty minutes. What could you do with thirty minutes? Start the clock.



Spend your thirty minutes trying to complete a public consultation document, bearing in mind that it has been drawn up by someone who wants you to fall into a trap, to make you say that you actually do want a train charging past your home at over 200 miles an hour, that you have no objection to years of construction work, that you believe every word they say about noise levels. You left school to get away from this kind of thing and here you are taking an exam to stop your home becoming worthless, to justify the years, decades of work you put into paying a mortgage. You take advice, watch videos, listen to the experts before you answer “no” to everything, in a desperate attempt to save all that effort and sacrifice.


Think of all those minutes and half hours spent in a job you hate, gritting your teeth to get through one more day, hour, minute without flinging your letter of resignation at the boss, all for nothing because you are a nimby, small fry, nothing to a man whose salary you pay but didn’t vote for. Another nameless face in the crowd at a demo, along with all the other unwanted little people who have cluttered up his day, getting in the way of “progress”.

You will never be one of those gaining that extra half hour on a train moving so fast that the rest of mankind becomes a blur. You will never afford those plush seats and wonderful service. You will wait with all the rest on a station platform waiting for a worn out train that has been held up, again. Because there is no money to improve what already exists, what you can afford. You will sit in your car, on a bus, in a jam caused by the years of construction work that you are paying for to build a railway line you don’t want, can’t afford, don’t need. You will grind your teeth and curse those who inflicted this upon you and your lowly kind and know that you are helpless. You don’t count, your kind never have.


Thirty minutes in a bluebell wood, deafened by birdsong yet wishing you could make less noise as you walk amongst trees that were old when you were a child. A thousand cobwebs and caterpillar threads cling to your arms as they must have done to those of your ancestors when places like this were vast and untouched. You are the first to walk here today, in a place that has never changed and you thought never would until the minister expressed his opinion. Knowing that you are barely a heart beat in the time it took to make this place that cannot be replaced, replicated, remade. Thirty minutes, a pin prick in time in this woodland set like sapphires and emeralds amongst the coral of suburban rooftops, one last place to remember what it must have been like in this land before “progress” came and ate away at your soul. Time counts for nothing here.


Half an hour at an estate agent’s office, listening to all the advice he can give you on how to sell a worthless house. Paint the walls a neutral colour, thank God you redecorated some of it last year, it will take less money, less time. You’ll get the downstairs lav done in thirty minutes. Put the “For Sale” sign up and hope to hell that the neighbours don’t put one of those bloody posters in the window, hope that whoever takes the bait doesn’t check up on what that means. Keep your fingers crossed for a lot longer than thirty minutes, through every rare viewing, trying not to wince when “it” gets mentioned until you realise that they were just curious, not serious, bad luck. Wish that the things that once made your home such a bargain (“Five minutes walk from the nearest station!”) weren’t the things that make it so undesirable now.

The worst half hour is the one spent listening to your tearful elderly neighbour, born in her house, the one she hoped to die in. Listening to the despair of a woman who cannot fill in a form at the best of times and is rendered incoherent at the thought that her childhood home might be demolished, just another of the worthless small fry who will be swept away for the greater good. She loves her garden but even that has made her a target for the mockery of businessmen. She doesn’t own a bowler hat and her lawn is tiny, a postage stamp of green, but she knows each lily and rose, remembers the ones her mother planted and loves them still. It has taken many a half hour to make this patch of heaven and it was worth every moment.


Wonder, sometimes, how long it would take, how many pills, how much booze, to take the problem away forever. How many of those affected regularly spend thirty minutes that close to edge, when the worry becomes too much - “Why are you crying Mummy?” - when there is no fight left and despair takes over. When you begin to think that all the effort is pointless, that all those half hours have been wasted and you are worn away to nothing, for nothing. Knowing that, when the dust that can never settle makes its way, every day, into your home, your precious half hour will be frittered away by a business man, distracted by the many pleasures in that brand new temple to retail - the station - rushing off half an hour late in a wasteful carbon heavy cab to the appointment he might have made, had he been more mindful of those thirty minutes.

Stop HS2 - advice on completing the consultation document
Stop HS2 natonal petition

Fallen from grace

A few nights ago we were woken by the pained screeches and howls of two foxes getting it on somewhere very close to the house, until recently one of the less notable sounds of suburban life. On this occasion I would not be surprised if a few of our neighbours had got up and checked that they had locked the back door and shut all the downstairs windows.

The fox has is no longer seen as the charming redhead that you help out over the winter with the odd bowl of cat food. Tabloid headlines have put Mr. Fox into the same category as the paedophile. He is no longer fantastic. A mother found a fox mauling her twin baby girls in their nursery after it entered her north London home through patio doors left open on a hot night. Since then the local council has set traps in the garden of the house and destroyed three foxes caught there subsequently.

A number of Londoners, among them the mayor, Boris Johnson, have come forward to declare that foxes are vermin, a nuisance and now, a potential danger. The surprising thing is that just as many have stood up for the fox, pointing out that London and its suburbs have become a free food fest for vermin of every kind. It is not just the kind hearted residents of the city who are to blame. Patrons of take away food establishments do not feel the need to dispose of whatever they have left over responsibly, dumping it anywhere; proprietors leave bags of rubbish in the street long before collections are due because the fines are never big enough to put them off. Add to that the introduction of fortnightly rubbish collections for reasons of economy and it is hardly surprising that the fox and the rat have flourished.

In spite of what has happened I am quite happy to see foxes in our garden. If we keep the doors closed on hot evenings it is because we are worried about the two-legged variety of visitor, the burgling kind. I heard the eerie shriek of a fox for the first time in the suburbs, believing at first that it was a woman’s screams. Then it almost sent me into orbit but I now know that one of nature’s charmers is about. And I have been charmed by the fox. The sight of cubs tumbling over each other on the lawn, of an adult sunbathing on the compost bin, of another loping purposefully along the street ahead of me, I still regard these moments as special, magical. If those strange and dangerous eyes have once looked back into yours from a safe distance they are hard to resist. For those as divorced from wild nature as some town dwellers are it must be hard to resist trying to turn such a creature into a friend with the help of frozen chicken.

My perspective had to change once we became cat owners, not actively discouraging them but the occasional bowls of cat food stopped (I once economised by providing cheap dog food and was treated to the sight of a fox having a sniff and then walking away from it. Everything in its demeanour said “You expect me to eat this?”). We do leave out bowls of water, shallow enough to prevent a hedgehog drowning or tilted to allow an easy escape, that double as a lido for young starlings. I began to do this after seeing a desperately hot and exhausted fox take a rest on the patio. It was too frightened to let me put water out for it and ran off.

There was one hairy moment when I glanced out of the kitchen and saw a large fox standing stock still on the lawn with our beloved moggie right next to it. To my amazement the fox ignored Jones as he began to lie down next to it in a submissive gesture, the one that told us that he was due for a tummy rub. By this time my hand had rattled the doorknob and the fox departed in a hurry. Jones didn’t look too unhappy to see me but he didn’t seem frightened either and it has led me to wonder what sort of relationship he had with foxes in his early life as a stray. Most cats don’t win the argument. Nevertheless, when I found three young ones gazing at me expectantly through the French windows one Sunday morning I thought of Jones, at that moment snoring under the duvet, and resisted the temptation to slip them a dish of Felix.

I don’t blame foxes in any way for the problems they cause. They are fulfilling their role in the ecology, scavenging and cleaning up after everyone else and it is not their fault that we provide them with so much work. However I believe that for some the feeding of foxes has more to do with a need to be loved by an outlaw than a genuine desire to help wildlife. We have forgotten that this adaptable survivor has been charming humans for centuries. Very few animals have engaged the attentions of artists, writers and poets in the way that the fox has. Brer Fox, bold Reynard, Disney’s Robin Hood, Beatrix Potter‘s “foxy-whiskered gentleman“ and The Tod in “The Plague Dogs” by Richard Adams, from Aesop’s Fables to Roald Dahl it has been recognised as cunning, sly, deceitful - the Loki of British wildlife. Most recently the fox has been equated with the scheming young women drawn to celebrities in the video for Wiley’s “Wearing my Rolex”.

Perhaps those living within the town walls would be slower to defend the fox if their livelihoods depended on it. The playfulness that leaves our back garden strewn with shoes, rubber ducks and sparkly Christmas baubles is the same as that which leaves a hen coop in a bloody and distressing state. There are those, parents in particular, who have come to understand that a patio covered in faeces is a high price to pay for a glimpse of something wild.

It is time for the authorities, in consultation with local wildlife trusts, to take a rational and sensitive approach to the urban fox, educating the public in the best way to interact with it and acting in all our best interests. A blanket approach which treats all foxes in the same way would be inappropriate, what we need is a fox czar.

The recent incident really worries me. I fear that it will be used by politicians to gain votes by hitting an easy target rather than tackling obvious litter problems and dangerous dogs that Londoners fall victim to every day. Another concern is that the tabloid reaction to it will give permission to thugs to torture and kill foxes. They will use the same dogs that I worry about to carry out this task and then celebrate with a take away. One of the saddest interviews I heard following the attack was with a teenager who described the foxes in her area as scruffy, clearly unaware that sarcoptic mange causes these animals real misery - it isn’t because they are too lazy to groom themselves. Ignorance of this sort leaves the door open to cruelty.

Unfortunately, thugs on the other side of the argument have also made their feelings known online and the family in question have been given police protection. I have no doubts about the truth of what happened and wonder how those who care so passionately about animals in general can be this unfeeling towards the human kind.

I wonder if, by treating the urban fox in this way, we have worn away some of the mystery that drew us to it in the first place. As a result of our affection it has become commonplace and ordinary. We have lost our innocence having denied it the dignity due to it and our fall from grace is all the harder for it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_cycle

http://www.thefoxwebsite.org/index.html

http://www.save-me.org.uk/

Too much of a good thing

At last, the thaw. When, unusually, it began to snow before Christmas it added to the festive atmosphere. For once the weather outside matched the images on the cards indoors. It rapidly lost its appeal. London was bored of snow. Every local phone-in show made that very clear.

The problem is that the British don’t have to deal with it very often so we are left in total disorder on these rare occasions. There is a desperate rush to spread grit and salt on main roads (but not residential side roads, leading to many complaints) and panic when they start to run out. This year there was outrage when the snow turned to slush after it was rained on, creating a slippery treacherous mess on station platforms and pavements. It turned out that grit had been spread but the rain had washed it away. The slush then became icy and even more slippery. I saw one man slip over on the steps at North Acton Station before Christmas, hitting his head on the metal edged steps.

Judging by the state of the pavements in West Ealing this week I think I know where most of that grit ended up. A shame that some of it didn’t reach residential Greenford or the business district in central Ealing.

New snow is special. I love the way that it reflects the light and muffles every sound, especially at night. It’s easy to walk in (crunch crunch) and renders everything beautiful. It even managed to lend a quiet beauty to the place where a good man met a violent end a few months ago.

When the snow first hit the UK it was regarded as lovely, if a bit of a nuisance. I was obliged to head out in it and couldn’t help smiling at everyone I encountered. And everyone smiled back. It was a lot less fun hours later when there had been a slight thaw and even worse when it had refrozen. I watched a pensioner pass the house, holding my breath in case he slipped over.

I considered (along with many others according to the media) whether to sweep the pavement in front of the house for the benefit of those passing by. A good citizen would surely do it. My main concern was that I would not clear it well enough to prevent a thin layer of moisture refreezing and leading to the problem I wanted to avoid. In the end I left it as it was because I had found that it was easier to walk on the remaining snow and frozen slush, especially if it snowed again.

Extreme cold (by UK standards) leads to a rush on hats, scarves and gloves in the shops (I’ve made three hats since Christmas), an abandoning of New Year diets in favour of warm comfort food and a rediscovery of things like hot water bottles, and balaclavas. Personally I recommend lemon and ginger tea with honey. It has been difficult for birds, who can’t find food under the snow, and the local foxes were louder than usual and probably very hungry.

An unexpected fall of snow last February led to a small snowman in the front garden complete with carrot nose and apple eyes. This time around I find it hard enough to get to and from work on it to have the energy to play around in it which is a shame because it didn’t snow very often when I was a child and I could do some catching up. I spent many childhood Christmases in the countryside and one year (the forecast promising snow) I was given a plastic sled. The worst present ever as the snow failed to materialise.

Now that things are back to normal it is interesting to note what this episode has revealed about the UK. Many schools remained closed because even though the pupils live in the area, their teachers do not (house prices are often prohibitive). Pensioners will leave the house to go shopping but many of the younger generation will have a duvet day. A lot of people don’t own the right footwear for ice and snow. The news channels are more likely to interview the RSPB about the impact of cold weather on wildlife than Age Concern about its impact on the elderly.

In the meantime, while we’re bothered about snow, on other parts of the planet we call home extreme heat continues to take its toll and one of the terrible natural disasters that always seems to follow Christmas leaves its mark on Haiti. The fun’s over.


http://www.dec.org.uk/donate_now/

For Robert Godrey, in the hope that the sight of all that snow cools things down.

An allotment show in suburbia

On Saturday I went along to the local allotments and gardens association autumn show and dropped off the albums of photographs that I had taken of earlier events. I felt that these should be archived as the membership of the association gets smaller and gardens in the area disappear under concrete. There were many of the same old faces, the same reliable people who have kept things going through good times and bad. A stall selling local honey, another selling bulbs and plants, and work by a local artist.


There is something about the very ordinary surroundings of the church hall that makes the flowers and vegetables on display look even more extraordinary. Spiky orbs of orange and red chrysanthemums against the long maroon curtains, pale wavy discs of squash against the green baize of the exhibition tables. I expect someone does tidy up before it all gets going but no one seems to mind the stacks of plastic chairs and the odd mix of screens. The produce is what counts.

Admission is free to these shows that take place in the spring, summer and autumn but it is taken as read that you buy a raffle ticket when you go in. Prizes include the usual bottles but we won a walnut tree last time. It will be a decade before we get any walnuts out of it but we were delighted.


Some might feel that our association is in something of a time warp but I find the sameness and regularity of these events reassuring. It is low tech and quiet, relying on face to face, human contact and legwork. There is no website or email address. I suspect that these modern facilities would increase the membership but it would trade a special, indefinable quality for convenience. When I walk into that church hall I know that it probably looked very much the same in 1956, and in 1978. All that has changed is the fashion and hair that has either fallen out or turned grey.

When the association was founded almost eighty years ago the area that I live in was a shiny new suburb, built alongside main roads, a few Victorian buildings and a railway line. Property speculators encouraged the founding of garden associations and front garden competitions because the bare patches in front of the new houses did nothing to enhance the look of the place. By encouraging householders to turn the muddy plots of land around their homes into gardens they knew that they would add value to their development without having to spend any more on it themselves.



Within twenty years of its being founded the gaps had been filled in by Tudorbethan and Art Deco semis and the gardens were being pressed into service to help those on the Home Front. They became a vital resource and garden associations came into their own. Once the Anderson shelter had been built the space around it was used to fill the gaps that rationing had left. Suburbanites who would never have been interested in growing potatoes suddenly wanted the advice of those who had been growing them for years. The allotment society was the best place to ask and many more clubs of this kind were founded.



I find it sad that, at a time when the UK is undergoing such a positive change in attitudes to the environment, these associations are disappearing because no one is prepared to run them. Most of those running the one we belong to are retired or very elderly and are actively seeking new organisers. I play a small part by pushing leaflets through doors three times a year and putting a poster in the window but I can’t help thinking that many people pay lip service to the environmental movement but can’t be bothered to part with the £2 annual membership fee or walk two streets to a church hall where these events take place. These associations usually offer a discount to their members which can mean quite a saving to someone on a tight budget. They are a great example of a local, green, community resource and in spite of a renewed interest in growing vegetables they are literally dying off.

There will be a time, not that far away in the future, when we will have to start growing our own food just as they do in Cuba, where every spare foot of land is being put to use. When that time comes we will need all the good advice of the members of such associations to make every seed and drop of water count. Let’s hope that they are still there to help us out.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=82416

　

Forbidden fruit

The fig tree that belongs to my neighbour is heavy with fruit. I have a fool with a fondness for bonfires to thank for this. Two years ago, whilst in the process of taking in hand the neighbouring rundown property, he began burning bits and pieces one morning and kept this up for five hours. I was a bit concerned that he might set fire to our shed and then, quite possibly, our home. Before I went out I spoke to him just to make sure that he was aware of my concerns, just in time as it turned out. He was about to pull apart the fence panel that we had propped up to cover the gap in the fence (that our neighbour was in fact responsible for) and burn that too.

Most of the stuff on the pyre came from the garden that he had been “tidying up” and I mentioned that as much as I loved their cherry tree I was certain that it was responsible for the cracks in our walls as it was so close to our house. Half of it was leaning over the fence and some of the branches almost touched the walls. He claimed that the roots of a cherry tree never spread that far but the cracks in the concrete on our side of the fence told another story. When I pointed out the sticky cankers all over its trunk he said that it would need some looking after but I was glad to see that within a few days that he had looked after it to the point of cutting it down.

I do miss the cherry blossom and the sherbet scent in the spring. The cherries were nothing special but still edible. Some years ago I got annoyed that the starlings were the only ones getting the benefit of them and actually asked if I could have them. I had found a recipe for pickled cherries and was determined to use them for it. For several weeks I kept running outside to scare off the birds and finally picked as many as I could reach. Then I spent a sticky, juicy hour removing the stones. I didn’t have the right kind of pan for the purpose and used a Le Creuset casserole pan but I did have the right kind of preserving jars.

By the time I got around to cooking them up it was around 11.30 at night. I heated up the vinegar with the brown sugar and brought it to the boil. Unfortunately cast iron retains heat too well to allow it to cool down quickly when needed so the bloody thing boiled over and the boiling hot sugary mess ran all over the hob top. My eyes watered as the kitchen was suddenly filled with acrid fumes. There was just enough left to put the cherries into and I spent some moments holding my breath while handling a very hot glass jar into which I was pouring an equally hot cherry/vinegar/sugar mixture. It didn’t explode so I got something right. The lid went on easily and tightened perfectly as the vacuum was formed. By now it was 1am, the back door was open and the kitchen looked like the site of a dangerous experiment.

The next morning I proudly pointed to my jar full of pickled cherries. “They look like sheep’s eyes” he said and went to work. That jar went onto a high shelf and was eventually binned after living there for quite a few years.

I did make blackberry jam on one occasion and we were both surprised at how purple it was, I’ve always meant to make more. The strange thing is that there don’t seem to have been that many this year in our garden. I try to pick as many as I can because if I don’t the rats and the birds will get them and spread them around the place. As a consequence there are brambles and cherry trees everywhere.


I don’t know if the rest of the country has been affected in the same way but in west London we have been blessed with an abundance of free fruit. There has been enough of the right weather at the right time to leave the trees along the A40 quite literally dripping with fruit in shades of gold and red. I’m not sure what these trees are, damsons probably, but unfortunately their proximity to a road with high pollution levels means that I can never take advantage of that harvest (this doesn’t stop one woman I’ve seen picking and eating berries as she walks along even though I’ve mentioned the risks to her). The pavements alongside it are sticky with rotting pulp and I have to watch my step because their slippery skins and small hard stones can send you skidding, especially after it rains.

One morning I found myself peering out of the window at one of the self sown trees at the wilder (OK, scruffier) end of the garden. At first I wondered why its leaves were turning so early in the year. Then I realised that these autumnal dabs of gold were in fact the same kind of fruit that I had seen at the roadside. I had never seen fruit on it before. Even the ornamental plum, Prunus cerasifera nigra, is strutting its stuff in the fruit department.

Unfortunately there is only one fig tree but as I said I have bonfire man to thank for the abundance of them that now hang on my side of the fence. Once he had hacked down the cherry tree he managed to prune the fig in such way as to leave all the fruit on my side. Thanks to the way the shed and the fence are arranged I can pick all those figs the moment they have ripened. I consider it payment for five smoky hours and summers spent with the windows closed because my neighbour liked his Beethoven loud.

　
　
　

Line and iron

We have had warm weather for several days now. This means ice cream for some but to me it says laundry that smells of sunshine, dried in an hour.

I grew up in a house without a garden and, after moving from the city, discovered that one of the pleasures of having an open space is the chance to line dry clothes rather than baking them in a tumble dryer. Something about the sight of clothes furling and snapping in the breeze kept me at the back door for minutes at a time. I found that if I left things on the line overnight they would acquire a perfume that was better than any synthetic scent that the soap powder manufacturer could come up with. The ”Spring Breeze” that came out of the bottle and had been designed in a lab was replaced with something more subtle.

Once those clothes made it onto the ironing board (along with a few very small spiders) that perfume really made its presence felt, released by the applied heat. It made a pleasure of a chore. Towels that had been folded away after time in the sunshine released it again when I took them out of the drawer.

Of course it isn’t always sunny and it is frustrating in winter to spend cold minutes hanging wet stuff on the line that still won’t be dry by the end of the day. Somehow it is worse to have the same washing hanging on clothes horses in doors, where that synthetic floral odour becomes more intense in a centrally heated atmosphere. I think it has more to do with a dislike of the cold outdoors than a need to dry things quickly inside that makes me do it. I can see why it is regarded as unlucky to hang up washing indoors in some countries - in the past the damp atmosphere must have invited chest infections.

At the time I moved here I had an elderly neighbour who still obeyed the etiquette that had probably been followed by her mother and grandmother. It was regarded as rather slovenly to leave your things on the line overnight but I like to think that I helped to break that trend. After I had done this a few times so did she. I once heard Aggie Mackenzie, co-presenter of “How Clean Is Your House”, talk about this. She said that there was word used in the area she grew up in, ”clarty”, to describe someone who didn’t get the washing in by the end of the day. Clarty - that’s me! I have an ulterior motive, I want my clothes to smell of the morning dew.

It is easy to forget that an earlier generation of women had to spend hours scrubbing those clothes down, their hands cracked and sore and backs aching. Even so I would be surprised if they didn’t stop occasionally, to watch the wind make flags of those sheets and shirts. There is nothing quite like a perfect drying day.

I still have to remind myself to wipe down the line first so that I avoid a grimy mark across the duvet cover, even though I’ve been doing this long enough to have needed new supplies of pegs both wooden and plastic. Some of the wooden ones have taken on the silvery hue of age. We’re not sure where pegs disappear to. Some end up keeping bags of flour safe from invasion. Plastic ones disintegrate with heavy use. Quite a few end up in the lawn. We now have enough experience to seek out more durable pegs in nicer colours.

Occasionally a bird scores a direct hit but it is a small price to pay for the pleasure I get from line drying. If I’m lucky, that mark will be washed off and the item dry again within the hour, courtesy of the sun and wind.