Weird Welsh Waters threaten England

When one of my children got a fever she would rush about randomly picking things up and putting them down and talking too much (quite sweet but scary); we knew if we didn’t cool her down she would have a convulsion; the more energy you put into a system the faster it goes — even a little girl.

The weather has been like that. As things warm up the system speeds up – the winds whizz around the globe picking up more moisture and dumping it in ever increasing amounts. The winds blow faster – the whole thing gets unstable (from a human point of view).

In fact, I suppose, nature is doing what nature does best — she is resisting change – using all that extra energy to blow and suck and push and pull – to evaporate the seas and to lift the sodden air and swirl it around to generate static electricity and throw lightning around the heavens melting telephone lines in Wales and flooding the low-lying areas of most of Britain.

Flooding yesterday in Caersws

We live in the Cambrian Mountains of Wales which are not really mountains at all — they are about the size of the Black Hills of Dakota, but green — very green and very wet. We have an epic amount of rainfall all the year round, except perhaps in April, if we are lucky. A consequence of this is not that we have webbed feet but we do cope with it quite well.

When we arrived here we were amazed by the amount of attention lavished upon the ditches and culverts. Yesterday I checked the grill on the drain by our gate, to dig away any silt or blockages — it was pristine and in the hedge nearby was a fresh pile of mud,gravel and dead leaves — the drain-fairy had been there before me!

The flood plain of the Cerist starting to fill — note the absence of buildings

Here are the gathering grounds of the rivers Severn and the Wye. The little river Cerist feeds the Severn and here the Severn has plenty of room to expand:

The head-waters of the Severn are also regulated by the Clywedog Reservoir which can hold back huge amounts of water.

But the reservoir is nearly full, it has been raining and snowing incessantly for weeks and it is warm so the snow has melted, the ground is waterlogged and now the melt waters are just pouring off the hillsides.

The muddy water fills the ditches, overflows and runs down the roads – the roads flow, waterfalls appear everywhere.

Streams that normally trickle are tumbling down every cleft and roadside brooks thunder towards the valleys, scaring the people and jumping the bridges.

What flat pasture there is, and there is not much, is disappearing–

Grazed only by mallard ducks.

It is snowing again today, the news is full of pictures of the floods on the Thames around London. The weather forecast is for more rain and more snow for the next month and all this water is bound for England.

Architecture, Art, Humour

Excited about Architecture

‘It’s the building with the huge golden knob on the top,’ said the handsome soldier recruiting in Victoria Square. He had real leadership potential — I found it immediately — the Library of Birmingham.

He could have said, ‘the three tier cake with squiggly icing, or ‘the Spirograph Building,’ that would have found it too.

You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover and neither can you judge a library from the outside. Judge the inside for yourself–

Tiered circular balconies

illuminated escalarors

Central suspended escalators

Looking out at traditional cityscape

From a circular mezzanine

And at the very top, the golden knob illuminates the whole — the hole in the bibliographic doughnut.

Next to this enormous roof-light is the Shakespeare Memorial Library, remember we are near to the birthplace of the bard. This has travelled through time and space and been given new life on the roof of this iconic building, designed by Francine Houben of Mecanoo Architecten and opened in 2013.

Shakespeare Memorial Library

Original stained glass roof of Shakespeare Memorial Library

Farsighted sons survey cityscape

There’s the bard

Birmingham’s civic pride

Nothing is perfect though: the glass lift was out of order, to the great relief of my lift-phobic friend, and the route to the top was through a warren of corridors, the ceiling of which I could easily touch — two meters perhaps.

‘Why so low?’ asked friend (her son is 6’8” tall).

‘Mistake!’ said I (having run out of head-room in our barn conversion), ‘Still, at least there are no beams!’

Communication, Doggy, Humour

Dog Friendly Accomodation

Not just dog friendly — pig friendly — horse friendly — duck friendly — goose friendly — and, yes, human friendly!

We stayed in a place once, recommended by the Cornish Tourist Office as dog-friendly, where Pedro had to sleep in the car and the landlady sniffed at the gap under our bedroom door. When we surprised her in the act, she accused my husband of smoking which he had not been doing (although he might have smelled of tobacco!)

Thus we are sceptical about such claims of tolerance and frienship.

Not so at the Crooked Inn, Trematon, near Saltash, Cornwall, England (for far-away friends).

Here we were welcomed by the host, a large, elderly, golden Labrador who met us in the car park and led us into the bar, explaining the rules to Pedro on the way under his breath. Inside was a heaving Friday night bar where unseen wagging tails flagellated our passing legs.

Food was being served and dogs lolled under tables. One of the locals was tired and emotional and obviously disliked tourists, he growled at Pedro and was bundled away by his friends several of whom then came over and introduced themselves.

In the dinning room, Pedro was calmed by under-floor heating and ate fat from excellent sirloin steak.

No one woofed in the night, not even when someone fell over a goose and set of the alarm.

Breakfast was generous smoked haddock with a perfect poached egg, garnished with lemon and fresh lime. Outside the huge pig wandered free, unmolested by the running dogs and ignored by the over-coated horse. The puddle-ducks dabbled and the geese gaggled and Pedro prepared for the serious business of the day

Communication, Humour

Only Puddleducks

Worst floods since 1756

We crossed the Somerset levels this week-end to visit family in Devon and Cornwall, the media warned of an impending apocalyptic storm, the prime minister acknowledged the plight of those whose farms and livelihoods were already flooded and promised to dredge the rivers of Somerset. Weather forecasts showed only swirling cloud completely obliterating our corner of western Europe. We were foolish to set off.

It did rain most of the way to Plymouth.

We saw some swans preening in a vibrantly green field just east of Bridgewater. We peered into the gloom waiting for the sea of flooded fields to appear. The sun came out and we scanned the sky for rainbows, and for doves carrying twigs — there were none.

Where were the news men in galoshes standing on bridges about to be washed away and waiting for the record high tide at Burnham on Sea? We did not expect the motorway to be submerged (we know that the clever civil engineers at least build their motorways higher than the flood plain) but from the high ground we had been led to expect diluvial vistas — silver fields.

As far as the eye could see all was green, actually very green for the time of year and some of the streams looked alarmingly full, I give you that.

When we arrived at our destination I checked to see if the Somerset levels had been moved, perhaps to Norfolk where it is very flat or to Cumbria where it does rain a lot, but no they were still where I thought they were and still in the centre of a media storm. Yes, that’s about it — a media storm.

I wonder, is there something else going on — are they trying to distract us?

(Apologies if you have been flooded – please send photos! — on 04.02.2014 the ‘storm ‘continues with a visit from HRH The Prince of Wales – for your information — an area of 25 sq miles is under water, that is equivalent to 5 miles by 5 miles, not a huge area in farming terms or compared with the area of the whole of the Somerset levels, it involves between 20-40 homes but is disrupting a lot more who feel that the problem is due to the government’s Environment Agency’s neglect of the river system. )

Lyrical, Uncategorized

Lightening strike

I don’t know if it is because we were struck by lightening today (we were not on our way to Damascus) but after the cataclysmic rain storm that followed, as the sun came out and stippled the hillside opposite, it struck me how extraordinary Life is — the whole shebang — all living things — our biosphere, from the bacteria in the soil, the worms in the grass that the crows, hopping about, are pulling out, the naked oak trees on the hill and me, worrying about the food warming up in the burnt out freezer while the man up the pole, mending the supply, is buffeted by the wind — it is all absolutely extraordinary.

Thanks To Kevin W Burkett for this photograph of Lightening over Philadelphia.

Source=[http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwburkett/3978781404/ Lightning] reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Doggy

Charismatic Canine

Pedro, our dog, ought to have his own blog (not a weblog but a doglog — a glog), but then maybe no-one would ever visit mine. His posts already get all the likes and comments. When we first moved to Wales, when he was still young and intact and the world was full of willing bitches, Pedro was irrepressible, unrestrainable, clever (he still is) and devious (that too). He earned us the reputation of the feckless English who could not even control their own dog. In this farming area he should have been shot; you can’t have big, powerful dogs just wandering about: dogs will always be dogs. The thing was he didn’t just wander; he had purpose and inherent cunning. He was never seen anywhere near a sheep, although he regularly crossed their fields, he always kept out of sight, a commando — along the stream or in the ditch. There were no give-away signs of the sheep gathering or running, they didn’t even smell him. While bitches wailed in disappointment angry farmers locked him in barns only to be bedazzled by his escapology; he is always very biddable when caught, it’s a fair cop, chwarae teg in Welsh; he can speak Welsh and do door handles, knobs and latches. One farmer is still scratching his head, like Sherlock Holmes: you see both doors were locked from the outside and the only window was a good twelve feet from the ground; I’m told he’s taking holy orders, the farmer, not Pedro. It was pure charisma that kept him alive; he would boldly approach the man with the shot-gun, wagging his tail, as if he’d known him for years. Perhaps he had licked his face one night recently when he lay drunk in the hedge while trying to get a bit of shut-eye on his way back from a lock-in at the pub. Perhaps the farmer recognised in Pedro his own younger self; they do say that the Welsh (careful) are a passionate race and have their own traditional ways of courting, not dissimilar to Pedro’s. Anyway he survived and I have written about his adventures elsewhere. I’ve never known anyone, human or otherwise, who knows so many people. He’s a dog who comes home, after a night out, in the post van (You know how postmen feel about dogs). The postman lets him out at the gate and he trots home. We benefitted indirectly from Pedro’s fame; farmers know a good dog when they see one, even if he is with that damn silly English couple. When introduced to us at chapel they would say, ‘Oh yes, Pedro’s people.’ But all that changed when something happened down the valley, news of it drifted up on the wind, came through the key hole and under the door, Pedro sniffed, he trembled, he whimpered… To be continued.

Ecology, Nature Photography

New Worlds above the Flood

It’s been raining quite a lot. Between storms I’ve been having a new look at the world.

The stream is swollen and down the valley they complain that the drumming of the river keeps them awake at night.

We’ve moved our flock to higher ground to keep their feet dry and when the low winter sun comes out, which it has been doing quite often, every sheep has a silver lining:

We’ve been making the most of the sunny periods by cutting back the hedge rows so that the grass can grow with more light although we still need shelter for the beasts and privacy for lambing; behind the hedges we’re cutting back the low branches and brambles that will whip us in the eye and snag us as we give assistance in the spring.

Favorite lambing place,behind a hedge

Cutting back hedges liberated firewood

Cutting deadwood reveals a whole new ecosystem

Winter working reveals aspects of the wildlife with which we share this land that are overshadowed or covered at other times of the year. Hover over these pictures for details:

Up in the oak a rain-forest of ferns and moss

Vertical living on oak trunk

Compass tree – lichen to South. moss to North

Fruiting Ivy

Ant hills, a badger has been digging in the middle one.

Mole hills – evidence of subteranian ecosystem

Rare sighting of mole. Is it still raining?

Today I have been looking in a bit more detail at the moulds and fungi that surround us, if any of you recognise the species I’d love to hear from you – leave a comment.

Any idea what this is

Don’t worry, we won’t eat it

Is this a Grisette

Is this a Grisette – Amanita umbrinolutea

Wood mould on Oak

Same creamy-white mould on oak

Wood mold on Hazel

Another mould on dead wood

Hazel species of mould

Here are some mosses and lichen. After the fall, some of the hawthorn and damson trees reveal so much lichen that they seem to be in blossom!

Lichen ‘blossom’

Detail of ‘blossom’ species

Three different species on one fallen oak twig

Leaf like lichen, a co-operation: mould and algae

Sphagnum moss

Mixed mosses

A whole world can exist on the top of a gatepost!

Gatepost with mini rain-forest of lichens and moss

Relationships, Uncategorized

Generation X

We chose to live on the edge; wrestling with physical adversity seems to be something we need to do. It makes us pivotal in our own existence. We built our home here and there is little that needs to be done that we haven’t learned to do ourselves; we cut down trees that threaten our electricity wires, we mend our bridge and tend the well, we poke sticks through the crust on our cesspit and nod our heads wisely. Our barn and woodsheds are full and we have enough lamp oil to last a whole winter without power.

I get perverse pleasure from asserting myself over an animal that weighs more than I do but doesn’t understand the need for immunisation. We can gather and marshal our herd with ease now, albeit more with cunning than physical fitness — still very satisfying.

It’s only when our grown-up children arrive, bringing their own worlds with them that we start to feel marginalised on our edge. It’s not that they sit in silence texting, they don’t anymore, or have a hybrid stealth car (we used to enjoy bump-starting their old wrecks) or that they don’t want the benefit from our experience about routes home — it’s okay we’ll probably just follow the sat-nav.

They bring their films and music, grab the remote and find channels on our TV that we didn’t even know existed, channels which have their own familiars, strange creatures that leer from the box making jokes that aren’t funny (to us) but they laugh; their cultural allusions are lost on us and ours on them.

Thanks to Laura Mountford for the Flickr.com photograph of Noel Fielding (CC BY-ND 2.o) Laura Mountford

They ask for mysterious bathroom products that are not soap or toothpaste, they want to know if the cheese is pasteurised. They are outraged that the baked beans went out of date in 2006 and the cloves in 1994 and fill the fridge with essential dietary items that are unknown to us. They ask their father not to smoke in the kitchen and are shocked by the lack of a toaster and hair conditioner and the suggestion to use washing-up liquid when they finish every drop of shampoo in the house. They definitely look slightly put-out when one of us absent-mindedly breaks wind.

They can’t understand a plumbing system that refuses to act as a garbage disposal unit and which exercises its own water-rationing. They put all the lights on all the time and use unbelievable amounts of toilet tissue. They download all sorts of strange programs onto our computer, change the browser (so we don’t know where we are) and complain about the broadband speed and the poor wi-fi signal. They put everything in a different place and worry about our poor memory and declining powers when we run round in circles looking for things.

They go for a 10k run or climb one of our little mountains, we provide back-up or bring up the rear, panting, feeling our age, feeling bad because we’ve held everyone up, made everything more complicated; we are no longer central to the exercise.

Then something occurs that bridges the gap, that slots us all back into a familiar place: they produce another generation.

Suddenly we’re all on familiar ground, all singing from the same song-sheet — the Oxford Nursery Songbook to be precise. We ‘re all saying the same daft things that we did 30 years ago — blowing raspberries, funny voices — Tweetie-Pie is going south for the winter again.

Now generation Y is learning why. Another little girl is learning to be gentle with the pussycat, not to pull the doggies tail. Another boy is learning not to put the fish-hook through his finger

Expeditionary forces again march behind their trusty leader without benefit of sat-nav:

And trudge home tired for tea:

This Christmas there was someone new to show to the sheep and to introduce to the joy of muddy puddles and carried away by it all the Mummies and Daddies were soon entering into the spirit with a planned Boxing Day dip in the pond — it’s not chlorinated you know!

Thoughtful, Uncategorized

On your own at Christmas?

Husband, pillar of the church, run off with the Sunday-school teacher? Partner of twenty years gone and died on you, after harrowing illness, leaving you bereft and penny-less? Wife of even longer, your right-hand and practice manager (married to the job, not you, apparently), upped and off on the day you retired? Daddy/ Mummy just gone to have some me-time — but what about me? Gone to live with your grown-up daughter and her family’s just fallen apart?

That’s who we all were that first Christmas, the first Christmas after Armageddon, our own personal Armageddons — so what could we do?

As it approached we all knew that it would be terrible, that Day so laced with expectation and us with our open sores.

For the first time we realised that there were people who were alone, not freaks but people like us. Not all strictly alone; some had children, but all were bereft, abandoned. We felt bad that we’d never thought of them before — you see good things do come out of bad.

On Christmas Day four women, all supreme in their own kitchens, their own Christmases, stood stirring around the central hob, with no vying for dominance, we stirred as one. Tom attended the Turkey and the children watched their new almost grown-up friend, almost a cousin, eat fire in the garden and had goes on his unicycle and tried their new diabolos and blew bubbles that made rainbows in the winter sunshine. When the sprouts boiled over we laughed until the tears ran down our faces, it was the first time that had happened to me (the tears of joy, I mean) for years and years but, you know, it was to happen more and more.

After lunch, we lolled on the sofas and on cushions on the floor to watch the Queen’s speech, in the euphoria of full stomachs and alcohol, moulded to each other, inspecting singed hair and smelling slightly of paraffin, in comfortable congestion, like a pride of circus lions.

That was how we had our best-ever Christmas.

Communication

My dog can’t read

My dog can’t read – but he can smell where I’ve been.

He can eloquently remind me when I forget something in our shared routine. He does this by urgently engaging my attention by gazing through my eyes into my mind then shooting a glance in the direction of the task that I have forgotten (usually one that he enjoys). His body-clock is not, like mine, regulated by an unreliable stomach – it has pin-point accuracy, ‘Gosh, is that the time Pedro (that’s his name) you’re right, we’d better feed the sheep before it gets dark,’ or, more likely, ‘Alright! Alright! Don’t nag — I hadn‘t forgotten!’ which I had.

‘What did you say?’ asks my husband.

‘I was talking to the dog!’

His empathy is as finely tuned as his sense of smell (the dog, not my husband). He knows exactly what I am feeling and he is not alone in this – I read of a dentist who had the greatest difficulty in separating his blind and nervous client from his guide dog — you’ve never heard such a kerfuffle. Not until the master had removed his fluorescent harness, rendering him off duty, would the dog sit edgily in the waiting room.

The point I’m trying to make is that in pursuit of more and more exacting verbal communication we may be missing something.

My dog can’t text
but uses the internet-
BT

reading pee-mail

sending pee-mail

Non-verbal conversations can be the most eloquent, exchanged in an instant, are fluent in different languages, understood by other species and are rich in emotional content.

If you ask any parent who has a child on the other side of the world if they’d rather video-call or have a conventional telephone call they’ll tell you the importance of seeing their loved one’s face to know how they really are.

I suspect that, like everything in nature, the ability to talk without words is normally distributed, some of us have a lot of it and some of us have very little and most of us are somewhere in the middle. I think that where we are on this spectrum is probably, like most things, a bit genetic and a bit learned. I have had two babies, both normal: one arrived as a blank canvas and learned facial expression gradually by watching and mimicking, the other came out of the womb with, to our surprise, a complete repertoire of facial expressions. Right from the beginning this child could express, pleasure, disgust, alarm, fear, pain, puzzlement, interest, attraction, satisfaction, surprise and wind. Children like this are an open book and can engage more easily and earlier with others – we are not all born equal.

For those children born at the opposite end of the spectrum, endowed with little inherent understanding and deprived of opportunities to learn from others all those non-verbal cues that inform us about what other people (and my dog) are thinking, for whom other people’s thoughts are a mystery, life is confusing. It is as if all their social interaction is by telephone. Worse than that: even the non-verbal elements of speech are removed; the secrets of prosody are hidden, the nuances of intonation and rhythm in speech that can change a statement into a challenge, or a rebuke, or a question, or just a ruminative echo.

The question is: when Nature alters brain structure or function a little further in one direction so that we notice it and call it a syndrome, what is it making room for? What new possibilities may be opening to us.

I also read (in the Christmas Good Housekeeping, or maybe it was Prima – I went to the dentist this week) of a little boy with Asperger’s syndrome (which includes difficulties in understanding the non-verbal) who was helped by having a cat – this brings us full circle to my dog who has no words but communicates perfectly and could, like the cat in the article, teach others the art of non-verbal communication by repeated reinforcement without any parental pressure or angst.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/multimedia-storytelling-challenge

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Not just dog friendly — pig friendly — horse friendly — duck friendly — goose friendly — and, yes, human friendly!

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Worst floods since 1756

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Source=[http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwburkett/3978781404/ Lightning] reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Thanks to Laura Mountford for the Flickr.com photograph of Noel Fielding (CC BY-ND 2.o) Laura Mountford

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