Nature Notes

An update, a catch-up … January, 2024.

Southern flank of Gallows Down, Combe Gibbet on top.

It’s been over a year since I’ve published a blog here – it’s been rather a busy one –  and whilst I’ve updated other parts of my website, I’ve unintentionally neglected this page …

At the start of 2023, I began writing a monthly opinion column for Countryfile Magazine, which I’m immensely proud to do. The column pieces are often to be found online as well as in the magazine itself (which is full of great content and insight) and I sometimes get to write features too (on Blackbirds, Foxgloves and Red Kites, recently.)

I’m also now writing a more regular Guardian Country Diary (online as well as in the newspaper) that usually appears in the first week of the new month. Being among these esteemed diarists (several of whom I’ve admired since I was in my teens and early 20s) is an immense privilege. The column (the oldest newspaper column in the world) reflects and addresses so much change, challenge and joy in the natural world, and I’m delighted and excited to be part of what feels like a newly-enriched golden age of all its writers.

I continue to write quarterly for the RSPB (another source of great pride) and up until the autumn, was writing the weekly, then fortnightly column for my historic, award-winning local newspaper, the Newbury Weekly News – as I have done for 20 years. But sadly, that has come to an end, with the economic challenges facing local press.

But, along with an (almost) full-time job as a School Librarian, family and other community commitments, and continuing (joyfully) to attend literary festivals and events sparked by my book On Gallows Down, writing my blog has remained out of reach, on the ‘to do’ list.

2024 is also shaping up to be a busy year (anthologies, an ambassadorship, being an environmental and literary prize judge, as well as all the above) but, whilst I’m still using Twitter as my main communication, so very much there has changed – and many good, good people have left (though many remain.) I want to keep in touch – that’s what it’s all about, in the end, isn’t it?  So I’ve decided to try writing once a month again, on the second week of the month, with a bit of an update on what’s happening, what I’ve written about elsewhere and some nature notes – and see how that goes. In the meantime, I will try to get better at other social media – Instagram included, and in the longer-term, find the time to do a Substack. I’ve always been someone who has had to  ‘write in the gaps’ and I’m continuing to do so … I’m writing and researching another book, too (eeek!) More news on that, perhaps … soon.   

Research on new project …

So this month, I have written a very sad goodbye to our beloved Labradollie/ Colliedor, Kite, in The Guardian. She was the best doggo, the sweetest, most biddable soul, who could turn her paw to any ‘job.’ A (happy for us) farm ‘accident’ between a shepherd’s collie and the gamekeeper’s labradors (mother and daughter both) she was one in a double litter of 22 pups, 12 years ago. One of her best and most intuitive, self-taught ‘tricks,’ was to learn that when I picked up my binoculars, she would be as still and quiet as possible – if I had them to my eyes for longer than a few heartbeats, she’d lay down and put her head on her paws for the duration. More here: Country diary: Farewell, dear Kite, my companion among these hills | Environment | The Guardian

My Countryfile Magazine column this month is how we need our communities when the weather freezes – I’ve many memories of knocking on farmhouse doors for a pan of hot water to unfreeze a bolt or padlock; and it’s a good reminder of how we routinely call on those farmers, foresters and gamekeepers to stop whatever they’re doing, to help in these situations – a bus stuck on a rippled glacier on the lane, an offer to drive your cans of water down to the field (when negotiating the same ice-glazed tarmac) or to bring a chainsaw to cut up the fallen tree blocking the school bus route – this week, a combination of fresh road closures (see previous Countryfile Column!) floods and a fallen tree meant the bus took 2 hours to get the kids 5 miles to school! Funny how, when they met the fallen tree, none of them knew any farmers or keepers that owned a chainsaw … hmmm.

That’ll be closed then … Rooksnest Lane, to the Manor Farm (a muse of late.)

A recent Countryfile Column, on the importance of local newspapers is up online now, here: https://www.countryfile.com/people/opinion/decline-of-local-newspapers (as ever, beautifully illustrated by Lynn Hatzius – who also did the covers for the iconic Seasons books for The Wildlife Trusts and Elliott and Thompson, edited by Melissa Harrison.) https://www.lynnhatzius.com/ Here’s a teaser of the Countryfile article …

“Local newspapers, particularly rural ones, are a vital service to the community as well as a mirror, and their slow decline is an unquantifiable loss. That personal, present, long-form witness is lost; the one that pauses in a gateway to chat with its readership, its own community.

When we found ourselves blinking bewildered on the world’s stage, it was the local paper that carried us through, especially in a time of tragedy in our town of Hungerford in 1987. When a farmworker turned a pair of guns on his community on a summer’s market day, the local paper represented us all, with quiet strength and dignity, against the insensitivity of the national press.

Local news outlets are where democracy starts, and otherwise-silent country voices are heard. And though I shan’t see myself in that mirror directly anymore, I’ve had the most magnificent run.”

That’s it for now … I hope to be back next month with more ‘nature notes.’

Thank you for reading, and for your patience!