Griddy

 

Griddy is a hedgehog which was trapped in my cattle grid and rescued by the two little girls in the photo.

He is not the first one to end up in one of my two cattle grids, I rescued one myself and have since filled in the grid nearest my house along the drive. But Griddy was trapped, the ladder out had rotted and he was very lucky that the girls saw him and had the sense to get in touch with the Hedgehog Preservation Society.

In spite of their ferocious appearance hedgehogs are really quite delicate. Had the girls not rescued him he could have died from hypothermia, dehydration, starvation, or a combination of all three. After 48 hours on a heat pad, warming up and resting, he was eating well and putting on much needed weight before returning to the wild. In the meantime, local craftsmen have installed a new ladder in the cattlegrid. In future there is a way out for any creature that falls into it.

The local representatives of the Hedgehog Preservation Society kept me informed of developments and when Griddy was ready for the great outdoors again, they came to me and asked if I would have him to be released. I was gratified to hear that they could think of no better place for a hedgehog than my garden and the surrounding banks, overgrown with brambles, shrubs, hedges and furnished with piles of wood and plenty of hiding places for such a shy creature. I know he is still here, he leaves me signs in the form of black hedgehog poo, although he has possibly started to furnish himself a winter den for hibernation. The weather is still rather warm and I hope he is eating as many slugs as he can find before he withdraws. Any food I leave out is usually gone in the morning, I sincerely hope it's not the marauding cats who eat it.

Can’t stay away

in spite of feeling that I have nothing to say. I am feeling a little sheepish about having been away for so long.

It’s been up and down, mostly up, the past two months. In fact, most of the time it feels like I’ve turned the corner; you may not understand when I say that I am coming back into myself, that I am not on the outside looking at the strange ‘me’ I was for more than a year, but that that ‘me’  and the ‘I--myself’ I have always been are closing in on each other. Of course I am often sad but being solitary is not in itself a dreadful thing. Having decided to stay not only in Valley’s End but in my house until such time as I either must, or wish to move, has taken one major decision out of the equation. Sure, there are several other decisions to be made but they are not as life changing as a move. Which means that I can take my time over anything else. And if I don’t want to do anything, well, I won’t. In any case, perhaps the decision will be made for me when the idiots who call themselves ‘our government’ back themselves into such a corner that they take revenge on EU citizens living here without British passports and expel the lot of us.

I still follow the news obsessively and what sad reading it makes. Is humankind really turning into a nasty, mean, hateful, selfish, greedy, unkind mass? Sometimes I’m glad my years are numbered except that I feel guilty for leaving a huge mess behind for the next generation to clean up. Does every generation feel like that? Statistically things are getting better, poverty, disease and wars are decreasing, it just doesn’t feel like that. Perhaps the current older generation is the first without first hand experience of war, wide spread hunger and lack of basic necessities. We have food, clean water, shelter; we brought up our children to expect the same for themselves and their children, we live in peace and security. And still the world feels like a hostile place and far too many are viciously opposed to grant these blessings to those human beings who lack them.

What do I do? Stop reading and watching the media or get involved? My quiet little backwater allows me little personal involvement other than perhaps make donations to organisations that try to make a difference.

Organisations that deal with the continued existence of our planet are close to my heart and hand. When I look at my garden I could weep. This being  the first year that gardening has featured on my pleasure list for several years, when old gardener and I have worked hard on at least two days a week, it’s been all for nothing. Or nearly nothing. Clumps of herbaceous perennials have dried up, shrubs are drooping and even trees are shedding leaves from the stress of coping with temperatures way beyond our experience. From Algeria in the west, to the Arctic Circle in the north and the Baltic States in the east a huge swathe of land is sweltering in unnatural temperatures. Similar conditions are devastating Japan, Africa, Canada, North America, Australia. Sweden, country of snow and ice for months on end has asked for help with huge forest fires. The global forecast is for more rainstorms in winter and heatwaves in summer. Here in the UK the effects are relatively mild, although we have hardly any rain this summer and scorching temperatures, the heath fires have been put out and we have so far only reached the lower 30sC. Too hot for me, at any rate. I hardly move between midday and 5 o’clock. I have read an awful lot and also watched quite a bit of afternoon TV. Of course, I am lucky, there’s no need for me to move if I don’t want to. I go to the air conditioned gym to cool off.

For the first time in a thirty year marriage I am marrying our books. We always had his and her shelves before, now I am sorting through both, discarding some and reorganising the rest. Boxes and boxes go to charity shops, some antiquarian books I hope to sell, novels are shelved in alphabetical order, others arranged according to subject matter. Any of the novels I will never want to read again go into the give-away piles. I seem to have chosen to read  many more non-fiction books than fiction recently, have also started to buy new ones which is possibly rather stupid of me. Out with the old - in with the new.

For everything there is a season and not just a season but a whole new chapter of life. This is my fifth chapter: childhood and youth, a first very miserable marriage, a period of hard work and child rearing, and a second very happy marriage. I am settling into this latest, and probably last chapter of my life with renewed hope and the realisation that even now, and on my own, there are joys to be had.

It’s Pouring . . . . . . .

Both Beloved and I belong to the generation which has life-long ‘Saving’  with a capital ’S’ as part of their genetic makeup. We, that is me in particular,  have in recent years been a little less dogmatic about the rainy day vision and the need for having a large umbrella to catch the inevitable downpour, and I have persuaded us to allow ourselves the really rather modest luxuries we indulge in; in other words, becoming skiers, spending the kids inheritance. All the same, just as well that the Boomer years have meant well for such as us, because the rains have started to fall in earnest.

On top of the newly necessary sums of money we need to spend on carers, assistance in house and garden, etc. the property itself is falling down around us. In the case of trees literally so.We had very high winds during the weekend and when Millie and I went for our morning walk on Monday we found a huge chunk had fallen out of the beech tree. As we are on the edge of the castle grounds this was cause for concern. Had somebody been walking in the moat at that precise moment they’d never walk again, they’d be dead. As it was the second time within a week that a branch had come adrift I thought I’d better call Jonathan, a proper, bona fide, letters-after-his-name arborist. First of all to remove the part-corpse from the path, secondly to cut it up and chip the unwanted bits, and thirdly to give me an idea of the state of the patient’s health or otherwise.

Jonathan hedged his bets. “Well, hm, I can see none of the funguses (fungi? or is that only for mushrooms?) associated with large trees. “  ( The beech is at least 70 feet tall - it’s massive).  “On the other hand, there is some die-back which might indicate that the tree is stressed.” The tree is stressed? What about me? I am stressed just thinking about his hourly rate! “On the whole the limb sections look normal, it could just have been the high winds. Or mechanical weakness”. Deep breath out . “On the other hand. . . . .” Renewed intake of breath on my part. The noughts are simply tumbling into place following the initial figure, in itself a fearful thought!

We’ve left it that I keep a very  close eye on developments and call him the minute I see anything untoward, like a white blob or a tarmac-like black blob on the stem near the ground. Mind you, Jonathan says,  sometimes these blobs come out and immediately withdraw into the tree again, like they are some delicate violet shrinking away from the light of day.

A definite help, that.

This is the third and last of our large trees threatening imminent departure. We’ve lost the sycamore and the horse chestnut to a deadly fungal disease, I really don’t want the beech to go as well. It’s also the last of the beeches, there were three originally, two before our time; we have merely the stumps left, one of which has thrown up  a large new limb which might not be viable for long, coming from a diseased parent plant. We still have more normal sized trees, like maples, a few ash trees,  ancient hawthorns and a thirty year old walnut, mere Johnny-come-latelies compared to the big boys who may have seen a few hundred years of tourist activity around the castle since the Normans first threw it up to ward off those Welsh barbarians, thinly disguised as tourists but really after Norman damsels. And loot, of course. As well as the land the Normans stole from them. 

Seriously, my garden is not some suburban plot with a few newly planted decorative specimens. even the plum and apple trees are groaning under the weight of considerable agedness; they really are in need of chopping down!  Everything in Valley’s End is old, including the human inhabitants, so we should all be left in peace and allowed to disintegrate  into the ground gracefully, as nature intends for all of us.

To quote Jonathan once more :  “if the beech were in a field or a wood somewhere it could just shed limbs as it went along. It might take another hundred years over it. As the saying goes:  A hundred to grow, a hundred to stay and a hundred to die.”   Lovely.