A Fly, a Worm and a Lump of Bread.

A lot of fly fishermen will tell you, by the time you get to the end of August the year’s best fishing days are behind you.  For those keen fly fishermen, the dates of the fly fishing season they know only too well, but for anybody else reading who is not quite as au fait with this sport, the dates are April 1^st until the 31^st of September.  You stop then to enable the fish to spawn.  Personally, I love every month of the fly fishing season and although September is the last fly fishing month, to me it is just as exciting as the first months of April and May.  You don’t see the fish rise anywhere near as much from the middle of August to the end of September, some people say they get fat and lazy, which in my opinion all adds to the mystique of the sport.

This afternoon on watching some of the last winter wheat being cut, this year like any other year always tinged with a little sadness as well as joyousness as you know nature, once the harvest is in, will begin shutting down for the winter.  Much the same as the rivers, once the fishing season ends and the trout have done their spawning the river tends to close down in nature’s ages old methodical way.  As we walked back from watching the combines, down back across the river towards home, I thought of an amusing incident that had happened years earlier.

 It was the end of August in the early seventies and a friend of mine in the village had his relations staying for the last week of the summer holidays and they had come up to my house one bright, late August morning.  As I went out of the house to greet them, my friend’s guests’ accents sounded decidedly odd to me.  They were from Wolverhampton and there was nobody round this part of The Cotswolds that sounded like that.  We joked about it while we decided what we were going to do for the day and within a short time the decision was made and it was going to be a day’s fishing.  Harry who I had grown up with since infant school was trying to explain to them that river fishing was probably going to be a bit different than the canal fishing that they were used to.  Harry said, “I’ve got two rods, have you got a spare one Allan?”

“No I haven’t, but they are welcome to have a turn with mine.”  I went inside and got my fishing rod and flies.  Once outside with them the three Wolverhampton guests looked at the flies with sheer disgust.  “Haven’t you got any bread?” they asked. 

“What do I want bread for?” I replied.

“To catch fish with, what do you think?” they snapped back. “Our dad has always told us that you will catch more fish with bread than you will with anything else.”

“Well I haven’t got any bread, I am fishing with flies.”  Harry’s cousins looked at him.  “Let’s go back and get your two rods Harry and some bread.  We will show this country bumpkin how us townies fish.”

“I’ll see you down the river Harry, I’ll be down on Buzzard Bend.” This was just down from The Mill.  I picked up my rod and tin of flies, the time was 9am, the morning was perfect, warm with a slight T shirt chill, you just knew within an hour that it was going to be a really hot late summer’s day.  As I walked off down the track I looked over towards The Mill where Mr and Mrs Stevens were feeding the ducks, something they had done for years and whenever you went down to The Mill House. The ducks were always around.  They saw me and both waved, I waved back and continued on my way down to Buzzard Bend.

 Late August fish on a morning like this are notoriously difficult to catch.  The fly selection is key. I smiled as I thought of the other boys using bread. They would have been far better off with a worm if they didn't want to use flies. After about fifteen minutes the line was tight, there was a two pound trout on the end of the line doing his level best to break it.  We fought for a good ten minutes, eventually the fighting trout succumbed to the grace of the split cane.  Safely landed I started again, no need to change the fly, we had been successful once and could just as easily be successful again.  After a few minutes a tight line again.  Another eureka moment.  The water broke in a frenzy of splash, we had another one and it was bigger than the last, at least two and a quarter pounds.  He was fighting ferociously.  I was busy laying out line then reeling it in, and laying it out again back and forth, this trout was a serious fighter.  However, my excitement was soon shattered with the shouting from lower down the bank, “Allan, Allan, come down here.” I ignored them, this trout was more important, I had been fighting this trout for at least fifteen minutes.  The shouting got louder and louder which meant they were getting nearer and nearer.  Their voices seemed quite panic stricken and agitated.  “Hang on, hang on, I’ve got one here.”  They had no interest in what I had caught.  “Come on, come with us now,” they yelled.  They were pulling at my arm.  “Wait, wait,” I barked back.

“No, come on now,” Harry pulled at my arm with even more force, my line went limp.

“Now look what you’ve done,” I yelled, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“We’ve caught one,”

“Bully for you,” I retorted. 

“We should have used flies.”

“Well you just said you’ve caught one.”

“We have, we’ve caught a duck.”

Harry’s three Wolverhampton cousins stood there with their heads bowed, almost in disgrace.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On the end of my fishing line, down at The Mill,” said Harry.

“Well that’s one of the Stevens’ ducks, you know they feed them Harry.”

“They followed us down the river for a bit,” said the Wolverhampton trio.

“They would do, bread is all they are ever fed.”  I picked up my rod and ran back to The Mill hoping that the Stevens’ had not seen what had happened to one of their beloved ducks.  Harry and the Wolverhampton trio were right behind me.  They overtook me and then the four of them stopped a hundred yards short of The Mill.  There they had stuck the handle of Harry’s rod into the bank to stop the duck from pulling it away.  I kicked off my pumps and entered the river and approached the duck as quietly as possible.  It was on the water with its head out in front of him, almost resting his chin on the surface of the water.  The three boys and Harry did not make a sound and to my amazement, the duck let me grasp it before it started to flack and beat one of its wings that had managed to break free.  Soon the duck was under my control.  I held it tight, walked out of the river onto the bank, the four boys watched intently in silence.  I forced the bill of the duck open and there I could clearly see the hook.  We had been lucky.  There was a little blood but very superficial as the hook had passed through the side of the duck’s bill.  I showed Harry and his three cousins just how lucky they had been for if the duck had swallowed the hook it would have died an agonising death.  I exaggerated the words, ‘agonising death’.  They all pulled extremely painful looking faces on hearing this.  I felt the lesson had been learned.  I extracted the hook and the duck immediately started to quack as I let it go returning it to the river where it swam off quickly to join his feathered friends.  We all then decided to go home and get some lunch

Ducks seem to thoroughly enjoy a lump of bread no matter where you happen to be.

Mickey Mouse Politics + Badger = Apache

The badger cage has been picked up from the local blacksmith and put into place at the sett and the Coopers have spent the last two nights baiting it, trying to get the badgers into it. When I saw them earlier this morning, they told me they’ve had their successes and that this sett of badgers have been really partial to a few peanuts. The Coopers are going at it with such gusto and enthusiasm ever since they had learnt from the Telegraph that the badger cull was going to commence on August bank holiday Monday. A lousy bank holiday for the Badgers, whatever the weather. The Coopers were not going to be happy until they could get all eight badgers into the badger trap on a nightly exercise, so that if the worst came to the worst and DEFRA snipers or any other badger harmer came near the sett, we had our contacts and the badgers could be air lifted to safety within fifteen minutes of a phone call. However, to do this you had to get the badgers into the trap, which we rehearsed three weeks ago, along with a BBQ in our garden.

The guest list for this BBQ was the Coopers, a friend who is a RAF parachute tester and his friends – including a helicopter pilot - and two people who the Coopers wanted to bring along. Grid references and helicopter logistics were discussed and clarified with the two professionals but the conversation soon got round to the Cooper’s son, Michael, and what high regard everyone held him in; this included the parachute tester who had come into contact with him in the past on various assignments. The hole that was left at his passing in combat was unfillable and touched a great many people, due to his incredible work when he was alive. From the little I could glean, the pilot and my parachuting friend owed Michael a great deal and that Mozart’s Magic Flute was one small way in which the pair could pay their respects to Michael and his parents. What struck me as really quite amusing was that whenever they mentioned Michael, they always called him Badger, this is the same nickname he acquired when he was about 5 years old, as an endearment from his mother. Mozart’s Magic Flute was also discussed and the conclusion was eventually reached that we needed at least one dummy run, just to be on the safe side of safe, so if the worst did come to the worst, they actually stood a chance of pulling it off. If the airlift did take place, the destination for the eight badgers was to be Hereford, where we were all of the same mind that, once in Hereford, they would be under the top security of the like that was given to Presidents and Prime Ministers.

This bank holiday weekend, I found myself having to work the whole three days, the to-do list has definitely got smaller but it has left me a bit short of time on the badger project. Last night I was on my way to the Coopers and unbeknown to them, I had made the all-important phone call. The phone rang three times, then it was answered.
“25^th August 2013, 24:00 hours, Operation Mozart’s Magic Flute.”
“Out.” Was the reply.
I arrived at Beechwyn at 21:30, the Cooper’s disability buggie was pulled in between the beech trees out of sight, I walked up past it through the trees and just stopped short of the big rocks that surrounded the sett and watched, the Coopers hadn’t heard me coming. There they were, crouched down twenty metres from the cage and they seemed to be having a good giggle amongst themselves and, as I watched, it really did bring a smile to my face because they were really in their seventh heaven. This was the place they used to bring their son Michael to watch the badgers, but that was all a long time ago. As I watched them, my eyes averted to the tree just behind them where there was lightly dished trunk, forming a hollow at the base, and there I could see a few tins, some bottles of water and two or three tupperwear containers - they had brought provisions and they were in it for the long haul. I walked slowly and quietly towards them, they turned, didn’t flinch and instead gesticulated and mouthed ‘look!’ to me as I made my way towards them further. As my gaze followed the pointing fingers, I saw that there were six badgers inside the cage and that the old man badger was up five metres in front of the cage; if you didn’t know any better you’d swear he was standing stag (that’s country slang in this neck of the woods for ‘look out’). “Two more and then you’ve got a full house!” they both laughed. The badgers in the cage were brevetting about after what the Coopers laid in for them. “Haven’t we done well!” said Mrs Cooper,
“Unbelievably well,” I replied. Mr Cooper chuckled and he continued to do so as he turned to the hollow tree and withdrew the captain Scott stove. “Let’s have a brew!” he said,
“That’s the best thing I have heard all evening,” said Mrs Cooper. He poured the water from the bottle into a little kettle whilst Mrs Cooper pumped the stove. She then put a match to it and Mr Cooper rested his kettle on the bright blue flame. “You’ve got some supplies in then,” I said, the Coopers both nodded at this, “you don’t know how long this is going to last,” she said. Soon the kettle was whistling, a couple of the badgers pricked their ears at this and darted back into the sett, this didn’t seem to deter the Coopers at all on seeing this, they simply said “they’ll soon be back, they like peanuts too much!” As we drank our tea, the Coopers said how disappointed they were in the government, in a week which has seen the Prime Minister on holiday down on a Cornish beach, wrapped in a Mickey Mouse towel, parents and children gassed in their hundreds in Syria, twenty five percent of British youth from the age of 18-25 have still got little prospect of getting meaningful employment and the best this government can do is wage war on one of Britain’s most noble animals.

After an hour or so’s conversation about old times, these times and times to come, I looked at my watch. It was 23:30. ‘Time to light up the badger beacon,’ I thought. I got up from the Coopers. ‘What are you doing?’ They asked.
‘I’m lighting up the badger beacon!’
‘What for?’ They asked, ‘we’ll be going soon.’
‘Now that the badger cull has started, we’ve got to make sure all the plans that we have put into place work.’ I didn’t want to tell the Coopers about what was going to unfold as I myself was unsure, I didn’t want to build their hopes up and make myself look stupid. But they wouldn’t stop, they kept on quizzing me about the lighting of the badger beacon. I reluctantly explained to them that I had made the phone call to Michael’s old comrades. What was sticking in my craw was that, if they didn’t show, I didn’t want the Coopers thinking that it was in anyway a slight on Michael or them. It was a nervous wait, the time ticked closer to 24:00 hours.

The badger beacon on the North boundary of Beechwyn was flaming brightly. ‘They’d have to see that,’ I thought. Three minutes to midnight and no sign. The Coopers faces that had been so bright and jolly five minutes earlier were now solemn and slightly distraught. You could see that their confidence was ebbing away.

Two minutes to midnight, still no sign.

The Coopers knew as well as I did that the people we were dealing with knew more about time-keeping than Rolex. Their existence depended on it.

50 seconds to midnight.

 In the distance, you could see a light. The light was very low and travelling very fast from the North. The Coopers’ heads lifted in unison. In the still dark of the night, with just the crackling light of the badger beacon, this streak of light was now resembling a bolt of lightning: its speed and height were unbelievable – it was so low! A very deep “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” was getting ever louder and closer. The co-ordinates were spot on and the next thing we knew, they had passed overhead. They were that low, the down draft from the rotors were exciting the leaves as much as a small hurricane. No sooner had it gone over us, it was banking sharply: we’d been seen. It then seemed to creep over the top of the trees in the darkness, with its bright yellow lights beaming down. The Coopers were waving frantically in a little clearing in the woodland where the badger sett happened to be. “It’s an Apache!” Shouted Mr Cooper. Mrs Cooper jumped up and down. The Apache was directly above us, its nose pointing towards us, the body of the aircraft hovering almost vertical in the night sky. Then, all its lights went out and the cab lit up, the two pilots saluted them both. Then, the machine levelled up, three bright red lights on the underside of the craft began to pulse on a two-second interval: we’d been acknowledged, the plan was a go-er. It then left the scene quicker, if that was possible, than when it appeared. “Mozart’s Magic Flute will work,” we all said and then Mrs Cooper started the phrase that we all finished together: “He who dares, wins!”

The Captain Scott type stove that made the wait for the Apache more homely. 

Lying, Scheming, Fishing

“A great day’s fishing starts in the mind and seldom disappoints”. This I quoted in 1973 back in the days when a fishing rod was thrown out of the bedroom window and was swiftly picked up on my way round the side of the house, supposedly on my way to school and from there the most glorious summer fishing days were had. 

I woke up this morning and the day was just such one of those types of days.  A tad humid, sunny and plainly just great fishing weather.  Work has been very full on this last two months and it is certainly one of the longest times I have gone without extracting anything from the river.  As I sat eating my breakfast I was trying to think of an excuse which would wash on why I shouldn’t go to work today.  The carpenter and the electrician surely could manage for one day, which brought me around to thinking of an excuse I had made to my mother some many years earlier.  “Mum, I’ve got a bad stomach and I don’t want to go to school today.”
“Is it that bad?” asked mother.
“It’s crippling me”, I replied.  My brothers and sister didn’t believe a word of it for the previous evening we had been playing tag in amongst all of the bales which had been freshly baled outside the house.
“There is nothing wrong with him,” they all yelled.  I just sat in the chair, slumped, slumping that much I could barely hold myself in the chair, but the look on mum’s face, I knew that the playacting had worked.  “You go back off to bed, you can have a day off school today.” I poked my tongue out as I walked past my heckling brothers and sister.  I laid in bed for a few minutes, listening to them exchange their goodbyes with mother and then I was on my own with only my mum down in the kitchen starting on her large wash day.  I put on my old clothes and crept downstairs.  Mum was always busy, she would never notice I had gone.  Out of the house and round to underneath my bedroom window, I picked up my fishing rod that I had thrown out earlier.  Ducking underneath the kitchen window, rod in hand, river bound, it was going to be great day, and so it was, for a couple of hours. 

It was a warm, sultry, beautiful summer’s day.  The calling of the Swallows as they darted about in the summer sky and the beauty of the dragon flies.  I was totally lost in the experience and I must have laid back and fallen asleep for the next thing I heard was the snapping of my rod and a grisly gamekeeper kicking me in the ribs screaming, “You shouldn’t be fishing, you should be at school.”  That bit of it I could handle, however, I did feel my lips curling up when I  looked down and saw my broken rod, but the next thing he said gave me that petrifying, tingling feeling, the type of feeling you get when you know the day is going to get decidedly worst.  He grabbed me by the ear and marched me up the field.  “We’ll see what your mother is going to say about this.” I tried to reason with him all the way to my front door but he was having none of it.  Once there I tried my getaway but his grip was too tight.  He kicked the door loudly three times, my mother answered it with a pair of washing tongs in her hands wearing a very stained apron.  Wash days then were with an old copper, exhausting work. “I’ve caught him down the river fishing, and let me remind you that you are in an estate house.”  The last phrase was just what country parents did not want to hear.  He pushed me inside the door. “Don’t let it happen again,” he shouted at mother.  Mum then gave me a swipe with the washing tongs.  “You wait ‘till your father gets in.” The whole incident was something that I regretted for a long time after.  The getting caught was unforgivable. 

A month after that unfortunate incident, we were all sat at the table having breakfast and that morning I really did have a crippling pain in my stomach.  It hurt when I sat down, it hurt when I stood up and it hurt when I laid down, it hurt constantly and over the next two days the pain got decidedly worst. “I’ve got a bad stomach,” I groaned, “I don’t think I can go to school.”
“Oh no you don’t my lad, you are not catching me on that again, you get off to school with your brothers and sister.”  It was hopeless, nothing I could say could persuade her otherwise.  I dressed for school and went out with my brothers and sister for the mile and a half walk to school.  My brothers and sister met up with the other kids in the village and they walked on chippily heckling me.  “Your lying and scheming didn’t get you fishing today did it?”  I could not answer them, the pain in my stomach was getting quite unbearable.  They soon left me far behind.  By the time I had arrived at school everyone was in assembly.  “I’d better not go in there late,” I thought, “or that would be another rollicking. I had better wait and tag on the end of the juniors on their way to the classroom and that way no one will notice that I am late.”  I went back to the school’s small cloakroom waiting for assembly to finish and tried to make myself more comfortable but by this time the pain was so acute I could not stand up.  The most comfortable position I could find was curled up in the foetal position and there I stayed for a few minutes.  After about five minutes I noticed that I was crying but I was making no noise.  This was the most severe pain I had ever experienced.  I heard the doors go and I tried to stand but could not.  The only way I could get to the classroom was by crawling on my hands and knees.  “I am never going to get there in time and join the others without being noticed,” although the not being noticed was not important anymore, I wanted to be noticed as the pain I couldn’t bear.  I started to cry out and in seconds the two teachers were trying to help me to my feet.  “Get a doctor, get a doctor,” one of them said.  A doctor promptly arrived followed by an ambulance and my mother; off we all went to Cheltenham General Hospital where my almost burst appendix was operated on and removed. 

As I left the hospital, I shall never forget the instructions to my mother and father and my brothers and sister.  “He must be treated as if he was an egg, very gently.”  And I milked this for the next two weeks to the absolute maximum.  My brothers and sister waited on me hand and foot.  

The lesson from all of this is what I have practised to this day, never make any excuse to do with health.  To tempt fate is folly beyond belief. So going back to this morning, after that flash back, you can safely say, fishing is off until this glut of work is completed.

My old split-cane fly rod. Split-cane, for me, is the only material to make a fine day’s fishing that much finer.

Badgers, Look Out

Mr and Mrs Cooper are still doing a grand job at keeping an eye open over the badger sett. It’s very reassuring to know that there are still people about who care enough to devote some of their spare time to guard one of the countryside’s most noble of animals. Every detail in the protection programme has worked out splendidly. Last Wednesday evening, all was still remarkably well and the badgers were very much in play-fighting mode. All was serene. No one, apart from the Coopers, had been anywhere near the sett, so Mozart’s Magic Flute had worked brilliantly well.

 Like all visits to the badger sett, you always stay a lot later than you have time for. Just as I started to leave, the badgers darted towards their holes. Their hearing, obviously much better than my own, had picked up something that had disturbed them greatly. I stood still and crouched down behind one of the big rocks that we had put into place earlier on in the year. ‘Could it be the Coopers?’ I thought; I doubted this idea. I stood there, just listening. The badgers continued to remain underground and I started to come down from the bank, away from the badgers, to a couple of look-out posts. Quite amazing, really, how the badgers had decided to make their home within yards of two of the finest look-out posts in the Cotswolds; I was making my way to one of them. Still nothing could be heard, bar the odd skylark and the cooing of the pigeons. I looked back down the route that the Coopers would have used and there was no sign of them. ‘Badgers won’t run from foxes or deer,’ I thought, ‘so I wonder what spooked them.’ I made my way to the look-out point as quietly as possible. Then, I heard a bustling, thumping type sound: something was taking on a hawthorn bush. For those of you who know a little bit about hawthorn, the hawthorn was getting the better of the encounter as the thumping and rustling got louder. Then quiet, deathly quiet. Whatever it was, had spooked the last of the remaining pigeons and the skylarks. What had they seen from so high up in the sky?

To the look-out at last. The look-out was a tree that had grown absolutely perfectly for the job as one could be within this tree and walkers and deer would walk right by, almost leaning up against it, with no idea that one was inside; I loved this place. As I scanned the area where I thought the sound was coming from, I could just make out a black shape, it was still. After ten minutes of watching this black shape, the stillness of it was starting to get a little unsettling. Whatever it was, it didn’t want to come any further, which meant that I would have to go closer to it. I left the safe seclusion of the ingenious look-out post and made my way back into the wood, further down. As I crept up through the trees, it really was quite eerily silent. Then movement could be heard. It was coming towards me. I crouched down by an ash stump, trying to make my persona as less likely as possible. ‘Was this someone who had come to do the badgers harm?’ I thought. My heart started to beat a little faster as the thing was definitely getting nearer. It was now starting to break twigs and sticks in its path: this sounded big. I couldn’t help but think that this was more than one person because one could not make this level of noise and if this was their idea of stealth, it was a joke. Only, just at this moment in time, I couldn’t see the funny side. Then, with an enormous explosion of fear, I jumped up and fell backwards. The nemesis reared up on its back legs, in as much fear as he had struck into me. We stood there for a few seconds, well he stood and I lay on my back, just looking at each other: it was a young Devon bull calf, a beautiful looking beast. He seemed as relieved as I was at our revelation. I cursed him for being out of his field, and it was going to be another three-quarters of an hour getting him back into where I knew he had come from. I felt a great deal of satisfaction on just how secure we had managed to make this family of badger’s sett. Everything worked. The badgers were safe for now, if not a little startled by our lost and not-so-stealthy friend.

 This little Devon bull calf isn’t nearly as frightening as what he made out to be.

Look-outs don't come any better than this.

Bats and Bedrooms

The middle of August is one of the best times to watch bats and always reminds me of our daughter Sophie, because it was on a night such as this when a couple of bats decided to have a closer look at our bedroom.  Jackie was heavily pregnant and she had been going all through the uncomfortable tendencies that women in this state go through, opening of all the windows, lifting of the legs, bed held up on wadges of books; one had to be careful getting in and out of bed when Jackie was in that state. It was a really difficult thought rendering experience. The tolerance of stealth needed were comparable to that of scaling the Eiger.

Going back to the night in question, it was a balmy warm late summer night and the bats were about in large numbers in the garden underneath the Beech and Sycamore trees. The combine harvesters had cut all the cereal from around the house and the moths were in their thousands, dancing all through the air.  The bats were seemingly having a field day.  The windows of the house were all wide open as the day had been terribly warm and humid and Jackie had been very uncomfortable all day.  The baby was due anytime and Jackie had got her hands on this marvellous piece of kit called a TENS machine which, according to the midwives, would ease the pain of the contractions and make the whole thing a little more bearable.  At twenty past nine, Jackie decided to call it a day and so up from the garden and into the house we both went.  Once into the house Jackie did not hang about, upstairs to the bedroom she went and started to attach herself to this contraption.  A little red light on the front of the little box you could clearly see flashing on, off, on, off.  What this was actually telling us neither of us was certain, however, Jackie certainly knew it was on.  I listened in the kitchen to the bed creaking and groaning, Jackie had obviously got into it.  “My turn,” I thought as I went up the stairs.  As I went into the bedroom, I could just make out Jackie on the bed, the bed at a rakish angle, her feet at least two feet from the ground.  “Don’t turn the light on, the room will be full of moths and I can’t have this window closed tonight, I have been absolutely boiling all day.”  The task of joining her on the bed was being made more difficult nightly and now I was having to negotiate walking around the bed, getting into it with the pillow side of the bed more or less on the floor and the feet side of the bed at least two feet up in the air, now I was being asked to do all of this in almost total darkness.  Jackie was totally oblivious to the awkwardness and difficulty of this nightly procedure, but once in, we said our goodnights.  Jackie would lay there with a feeling of safety and comfort and total trust in this new-fangled TENS machine.  I was laying there thinking just how lucky we both were and hopefully we would be blessed with the most magical of all prizes, a healthy baby, due anytime now. 

It seems to me, when you have those lovely peaceful, carefree thoughts sleep can come upon you very quickly and that night was no exception.  I had learnt how to negotiate Jackie’s odd kick and flailing arm and the nights’ sleep for me were pretty much uninterrupted and the hard physical work during the day that I had been doing obviously helped.  After what seemed like five minutes, but was actually about couple of hours, I felt an elbow in the ribs.  I startled awake and thought of the baby. “Is it time?” I asked eagerly.

“No, I don’t think so, it’s bats,” Jackie whispered.

“No,” I said, “Not inside, goodnight, see you in the morning.” But I sensed that Jackie was laying there stock still.  Yes, she was definitely looking through the gloom for bats. Then there was a scream and then the bed covers were pulled with such ferocity over her head that it actually burnt me round the neck.  As I sat up, Jackie was still screaming, “Bats, bats, if they get in my hair I’ll go mad.”

“Don’t be so ridiculous.”

“Get them out, get them out.”  I hadn’t actually seen any myself at this stage.  I sat up in bed and I managed to calm Jackie down who was now much quieter underneath the duvet and she was right, for just then a bat flew right over my head, you could feel the draught of its wings on my forehead.  It is surprising just how you can see in darkness as there are very few nights in a year when the nights are pitch dark.  I quietly got off the bed and as I walked around my foot was stubbed into the pile of books which was keeping my side of the bottom of the bed in the air, it came down with a thump which in turn generated another lot of screaming and wailing from Jackie.  Maybe this would be enough to send the bats on their way.  After hopping around for a minute or so the bats were still there.  I opened the bedroom door wondering how on earth I was going to get these bats out.  Our bedroom door opened onto a large landing type bedroom and from there down a winding narrow cottage staircase.  I went down the stairs and shut the door at the bottom of the staircase, I then returned to our bedroom, Jackie was in Egyptian mummy mode, and she was not making a sound with the duvet still pulled tightly over her.  I opened the bedroom door to its widest extent and one of the collapsed books that was holding up the bottom of the bed I picked up and rammed under the bedroom door. I then pulled the duvet off Jackie and Jackie started to scream.  I held the duvet up like a sheet and waved it, pushing the bats towards the doorway.  They went through, I shut the door behind me.  Jackie was still screaming, “They’re out now,” I shouted, Jackie’s screaming subsided, however, I still had two bats to catch.  I was holding the duvet like a wide net and I was pushing them towards the stairwell.  They went down the stairs and I followed them holding the duvet up to the sloping ceiling, nearly falling on every tread as I descended the stairs. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I had the bats between the duvet and the door.  I gently slid the duvet from the top of the door down to the floor.  I had them, the bats were inside it somewhere.  I picked the whole thing up, gently rolling it into a rough shaped bundle and made my way hastily to the back door which was promptly unbolted and opened and the duvet was cast outside.  I then followed it out and started to unfold it, there they both were, right in the middle.  Up off the duvet they flew returning to the night sky for their summer night feasting on the moths that you could clearly see in the light of the moon.  I picked up the duvet and went back to the bedroom.  Jackie was laid flat out on a half collapsed bed but I noticed that she had been able to get up and close the window. As she lay there on the bed, the night’s scenario became clear.  Her TENS machine was working on sonar pulses, it was this that had brought the bats in.  I then tried to explain to Jackie this theory.  “Well, I’m keeping my TENS machine on.”

“By all means,” was my reply, “But if you do, we will have to keep the windows closed for a bat free zone.”  Jackie looked at the duvet, “Well I don’t want that on, I’m boiling.”

My daughter will be twenty in a couple of weeks’ time and I have never been able to look at her on a summers’ evening and not think of bats.

The only flying Mammal. We have always been very lucky in the fact that there has always been an abundance of bats in the area in which we live, due to being fortunate enough to live around woodlands.

(Image from: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/mammals/bats/session2/)

Trees: Nature's Most Versatile Creation

Planting a tree and helping the environment, for prosperity, for your grandchildren or for whatever reason, always seems to be a very worthwhile thing to do. Like others thinking in the same vein, that’s exactly what we have done over the years and it was with considerable disappointment on inspecting some of them a couple of weeks ago to find they had been through a torrid time. Lots of chewing and bark removal had occurred to the poor young saplings: something had to be done. The first job was to find the culprit. Last Monday I woke up early and down to the plantation I went to try to catch the tree maimer in the act, or so to speak. After about ten minutes, a troublesome threesome came into play straight up to the trees and started their tree damaging work.  Muntjacks. I hit a stick up against the tree I was standing against and they ran off down the ride. ‘That won’t stop them for long,’ I thought. As I started to walk back, I spotted them again setting about another unsuspecting young beech. Under more intensive observation, I noticed the beech and ash were the muntjacks’ favourites, the oak, chestnut and hawthorn were less to their liking. I was thoroughly stumped as to what to do. I looked over to the two dogs, Mitch and Shep, laying about on some old hessian sacking type material – this gave me a marvellous idea. Mitch and Shep were not best pleased with sharing their bedding. “It is the middle of summer so a little less bedding will do you no harm, boys,” I reasoned as Shep gave me a disapproving look. That evening, I ripped the hessian into strips and wrapped a length around each badly nibbled tree trunk. Thankfully, the result up to now has been really quite encouraging, whether it the smell of the dogs the muntjacks don’t care for or the coarse texture of the material. For whatever reason, they are leaving the saplings in peace and are nibbling the grass and other flora in between the trees. Much more sensible.

One of England's finest emblems: the oak tree.

A Barn Owl Up A Chimney Is Not Recommended.

Gloucestershire County Council have just finished resurfacing parts of our country lanes and a jolly good job they have made of it too.  It’s only when you see all the kit that is needed to lay this black top and chippings that you  realise just how exorbitantly expensive all this type of activity is which brings me round to a telephone call I received the other night.

I picked up the phone to a voice on the other end: “I want to open up my fireplace.”  A Hello would have been pleasant, I thought to myself, as I recognized the voice.  It was a gamekeeper friend, and a very cantankerous one at that, who had got increasingly more cantankerous with my stand on the badger cull business.  He just could not understand all this hooh-hah.  His view was very much, ‘If they have to be culled, then cull them.’  As my wife often points out, everyone is entitled to their point of view.  “Can you wait for a couple of weeks as I am rather busy?”

“No I can’t.” was the reply, “If you can’t do it I can very soon get someone who can.”

“I’ll see you in half an hour.”  Being self-employed in the countryside you can never be cavalier about work and you can never turn down too much because there has been times in the past when I have really needed it.  I was soon knocking on the front door of his cottage which was situated at the bottom of a track just over a stone bridge which was straddling one of the most attractive streams.  As I waited at the door which seemed like an eternity, wondering if he was in or had gone out, the door then opened.  It was his wife, Elsie, who unlike Donald was very friendly.  She asked me in and asked me if I would like a cup of tea or a half of Donald’s cider.  It had to be half of Donald’s cider as I had never known or seen Donald put his hand in his pocket to buy anyone a drink.  All you ever got from Donald was “Ahh, everything is so damned expensive, you drink your own and I’ll drink mine.”

“You don’t need a fire this weather Elsie.”

“No, but we want to open it up for the winter, this electric night storage is cripplingly expensive.”  Elsie then showed me into the sitting room and there was the old inglenook fireplace which I had blocked up some five years earlier just before they had moved in.  “Our Rayburn in the kitchen is fine, I do all my cooking on that, but an open fireplace in this sitting room would be ideal.”

“When do you want it doing?”

“Well, now.”

“What, now now?” I asked.

“Well, yes, Donald will be back soon and he will be able to give you a hand.”

“Ok,” I muttered, “Could you give Jackie a ring for me and tell her I am going to be late?” I went out and got my tools from the Land Rover, lump hammer, bolster and returned to the cottage to make a start.  Elsie had already put a sheet down in front of the fireplace and had cleared away her clock and all her other various china from the mantelpiece.  I had no sooner started knocking the blocks out when Donald bustled in.  He was always like a hornet in a jam jar.  Awkward and also very anxiety struck.  “Evening Allan, I see you’re helping yourself to my cider.”

“Yes, a drop of good stuff, you can pour me another as this is thirsty work all this hammering.”  He ignored the remark and started to carry out the concrete blocks as I hit them out and within a very short time the stone inglenook fireplace could be seen in all of its glory.  “Aha, that’s better,” said Donald.

“You feel warm just looking at it,” said Elsie.

“You will do this winter when I get a few logs into it,” said Donald rubbing his hands.           

“Get the rest of this rubbish out then Donald while I have another mouthful of cider to lay this dust.”  He grunted as he carted the rubble outside.  I looked up the chimney and there was no daylight at all.  Elsie shouted from the kitchen, “What’s it like?”

“Blocked,” I replied. 

“What with?”

“It is Jackdaws that have blocked it with twigs and nest building material, that is five years of uninterrupted nest building up there.”  Just then Donald came lumbering back in.

“What’s up?”

“Fireplace is blocked, you’ll have to get a sweep.”

“Them blasted Jackdaws, we’ll do it, we’ll unblock the chimney.”

“I can’t, I haven’t got a ladder with me.”

“I’ve got a ladder in the barn.”

“Damn.” I said.  With the speed of a missile Donald was gone.  As Elsie was telling me how cold they had been the last two winters, we could hear a few thuds on the side of the cottage. “He’s got the ladder, you’ll have to go up it as Donald doesn’t like heights.”  I went to the front door just as Donald was coming in.  “There’s a ladder up to the chimney and there’s a good long poking stick.”  He then pointed to a twenty foot nut stick on the front lawn.  “Hang on a sec,” and he went and got one of Elsie’s slippers and tied it on the end, it was the rabbit type slipper. 

“The slipper will be ruined when I push it down the chimney with all that soot and debris.”

“It’ll wash off,” replied Donald.

“Yes, it’ll wash off,” agreed Elsie.

I was soon up the ladder staring down their chimney.  It was now time to make some dust. After heaving the nut stick up to the top of the chimney, I pushed it partly down until I started to reach some resistance. I pushed downwards with all my might as it was all terribly compacted. Up and down I pushed and shoved - it was as tight as wax! After a few minutes it was starting to give, then a screech could be heard from the cottage, “Stop! Stop!”  The resistance to my poking was no more, the chimney was now completely free of sticks and debris. I started my descent and could hear the deep voice of Donald, he didn’t sound best pleased. Just as my feet touched ‘terra ferma’, Donald ran out of the house, resembling a seventeen stone mole, he was black from head to toe, covered in soot. He didn’t stop running until he was up to his knees in the stream. In Donald’s absence, the cottage was very quiet as I ventured in, peering into the black to find Elsie cradling a fine looking barn owl somewhat blackened and bewildered but perfectly fine.  The rest of the room was covered completely in soot, it was black everywhere.  This would take hours to clean up and it was time for me to go home.

My two children were brought up with their pet Barn Owl, Chloe.

Badgers Say: Keep Your Powder Dry

Yesterday evening I watched the badgers gather new bedding - out with the old and in with the new - industriously minding their own business, like all badgers everywhere. However, according to David Cameron, what a lot of these poor unsuspecting creatures need is a strategically placed lump of lead to cure all their ills and to save the British Government one billion pounds per year.  This in turn will make British farmers succeed in the years ahead.  “We need our farms to be strong and successful,” he said.  No right minded person would argue with the last comment but why on earth do you need a Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs publishing the government a twenty five year strategy plan on how culling badgers is the answer to all their ills. You can’t help but think that David Cameron, who doesn’t seem like a bad chap, is being very ill-informed and advised. For the last thirty years, successive governments have tackled this problem in an adhoc, mishmash fashion, in a kind of ‘pass the parcel’ type politics. Well now the parcel has stopped in the form of a ticking time bomb and the badgers are the poor creatures left holding it. 

Thirty two years ago I first heard mention of AIDS/HIV. Scientists of the day said in their opinions there would not be a cure in our lifetime because the disease was so unbelievably complex.  Here we are thirty two years down the road and they say the cure is within grasp, a problem that was “unsolvable” has become within reach in just over thirty years. Surely we can apply this logic to the issue of Bovine TB. Coming back to the TB problem, Adam Quinney, vice-president of the National Farmers Union, welcomed Mr Cameron’s comments and said there needed to be a long term plan. 

Experts in the field of oral vaccination for badgers have said the vaccine is at least six years away.  If the government were really serious about safeguarding the countryside and the beauty within it, six years does not seem that far away in the grand scheme of things, so my advice would be, until (and after!) we have developed a vaccine, to tighten up on cattle movements. The government never wants to mention it but this, in my humble opinion, is where Bovine TB - cattle to cattle - is transmitted. The truth of the matter is, no matter which side of the argument you happen to be on, oral vaccinations for badgers has never been an issue this government or any other government has ever been interested in. Let us keep our powder dry and wait for the vaccine.

 I wonder where the badgers have got all of this barley straw from for their bedding...

...Never mind!

Trolls Vs Emily Davison One Hundred Years On.

Down at the badger sett, consoling the badgers on their loss in the Emblem of Britain vote against the hedgehogs, which one or two of them seemed to have taken quite personally, I got to thinking about the excitement surrounding the new female face on our ten pound note.

I believe the Bank of England missed a trick on the choice of this new face; nothing at all against Jane Austen, a very worthy nominee, I am sure, but when one sees the amount of aggravation this has caused replacing Darwin with Austen, one cannot help but think that Emily Davison should have been the bank’s first choice, simply because she tackled these bigoted, misogynistic trolls head on and she did it with others at a time when women, much to our disgrace as an Empire, were treated very much as second class citizens.  It is a hundred years since Emily Davison’s demise and how fitting this would have been to commemorate a life that really did change women’s lives throughout our land and the world.  Although the undoubted brilliance of Jane Austen is without question, up until the birth of Emily Davison, over half of the women in the United Kingdom could not read; it was deemed not really necessary for working class women to be overly educated.  They were merely looked upon as child bearing machines to produce cannon fodder for the Great British war machine. Women were sometimes killed in domestic violence issues, but as long as the perpetrator could prove some kind of provocation and it being an accidental incident, very often went completely unpunished. What is not always known is that Davison did more for the cause than acting as a martyr in her failed attempt at flying the flag for women on the King’s horse, resulting in her death, as she served more time than most in prison for her acts in the movement. She gave her life fighting perhaps the biggest troll of them all: the British Establishment. A more fitting face for the rights of women in this country and across the world, the Bank of England could not have found a more rightful face for their note. 

The face that changed so many women's lives in the UK as well as the world.
(Image from:
 http://i1.chroniclelive.co.uk/incoming/article4027690.ece/ALTERNATES/s2197/Emily-DavisonJPG-4027690.jpg)

Trolls, Nature Could Be Your Cure.

On the day so many choose to boycott Twitter you cannot help to be a little saddened that so many people are affected by these so called Trolls. It is unbelievable the level of hostility towards a woman’s face on a banknote. For heaven’s sake why not? It has been a fact for many years that girls are so very often more intelligent than boys going through their schooling years. Women look after and conserve and boys are still born with a hunter gatherer mentality.  We are still very much in an evolutionary stage.   My take on the days’ events are that, once the arbitrators of malice silence decency then the battle is half lost.

 I am very new to this twitter game.  I started my account a couple of months ago to voice my views on the proposed badger cull.  Technically I am a total moron with computers but my saving grace is my wife and kids who are much switched on to the medium and I have only experienced positivity.  It is really quite refreshing to see other people’s points of view and be able to comment on them, a medium of learning most definitely.

Back in the days when I was totally uninterested with this type of technology my kids would bring up something about a particular person they were following and the awful language this person had been using.  You just don’t expect to come across it there in front of you, as though to speak, in print, which always seems to be most disagreeable to the majority of people.  Their mother would soon tell them to hit the ‘unfollow’ button and that would be that. 

As a society we have become desensitised to language.  When I was at school, my English teacher would say that swearing was a sign of ignorance, backwardness and of course laziness.  “Why not look to try and increase your vocabulary with a more descriptive, half intelligent word than come out with these mindless, meaningless expletives?” I thought the advice then as I still do quite sound.  What chance do our children stand of talking inoffensively and nicely when they are bombarded with profanities from almost every media point?  It seems really quite wrong so many of these youngsters’ idols cannot string more than three words together without using the same old totally uninviting language and from my stand point, if I were Twitter, I think it would be far more beneficial and user friendly to actively discourage this type of language abuse on their medium. 

Swearing is always the precursor to violence, almost always swearing is grounded in negativity. 

This to me is the beauty of nature. It is so very difficult to look at anything to do with her and see negativity.  Nature and anything to do with her is always positive and on a high.  If it is short of food, it will look for food, if there is too much food, her ingenious ways of taking care of the surplus is ingenuity personified.  The translucency of nature is for everyone to see and so my advice to the Trolls and all those who continually swear is to GET OUT MORE!

Nature, full of bright ideas and positivity.

Kestrels Are the Art of Persuasion.

For those few people that follow me on Twitter, I left you last evening pondering over a photograph of a stunning Kestrel and why he had been following me around all day.  All will soon be revealed but first let me fill you in on something that happened many years ago.

It was about this time of year, August, the school summer holiday season.  The excitement, the anticipation of countryside adventure, even now, the thought of it still conjures up that summer time magic when we were all so young and just about anything was possible. 

There was a new girl in the neighbouring village, her father had just started work on the neighbouring estate, and to us, 11, 12 thirteen year olds, she was lovely, and it wasn’t long before she joined us in our games of tag, blindman’s bluff, Cray fishing and French cricket. The list was endless and for the games which required partners for example,  Cray fishing teams and any other two bod teams, she was the one all us boys wanted to have as our partner and this in itself created competition, which created even more games.  “Phoebe will be on my side,” one of us would say,

“No, on my side,” someone else would say.

“It will be settled by seeing which one of us can skim a stone and get the most bumps over the river.” I said.

“No, because you always win that, “

“Drat,” I thought to myself, they were not quite as green as they were cabbage looking.  I then suggested knocking a baked bean can off a post from twenty five yards.  Again they were nonplussed with this idea. As we all stood there getting cheesed off, arguing amongst ourselves, I noticed Phoebe’s eyes were on a bird which was perched on a gate on the opposite side of the river. “Aha”, I thought.  It was a boiling hot day and the sounds of the grasshoppers were as loud to your ears as the butterflies were plentiful to your eyes.  “A competition” I said, “where nobody will have the advantage. We must see how many grasshoppers we can catch before 5’0clock.”  When I said this, it was about 12’0clock, dinner time.  “We will all go and have lunch and we will meet up at 5’0clock down at The Mill and see how many grasshoppers we have got and we will get Mr Stevens,” who lived in The Mill, “to count them and be referee.”

“Brilliant” they all shouted.

“And the winner will have Phoebe on their side as their partner for the rest of the holidays if she so wishes.”  The other three girls in the group did not look upon Phoebe with any jealousy or malice as she was the newcomer and we were all making her feel special and at home.  The girls went off for their  lunch and us boys also went home for something to eat.

I arrived home and Mum had prepared beans on toast.  I asked Mum if she had a jam jar, she said “Yes, there is one in the bin.”  I finished my lunch at break neck speed, up from the table and out to the dustbin and there it was.  A few wasps buzzing round it, I grabbed it from the bin, took it back inside and washed it under the tap.

“What do you want that for?” Mum asked.

“To catch grasshoppers,” I replied.

“Oh, you will have to be quick to catch those.”  With my nice clean jam jar I headed off back down to the river.  The weather was melting, not a cloud in the sky.  A perfect school summer holiday day.  I walked along the river bank slowly.  Phoebe had seen the bird from the left of The Mill and this was going to give me my edge, because to Phoebe it was a bird, but to me it was the grasshopper catching master.  I had watched him times when I was down here fishing towards the end of July, beginning of August when the weather was really hot.  He would dive down from his post or tree just onto the field and it took me sometime as a kid to work out exactly what he was after.  Expecting him to fly up with a vole or a shrew, he never seemed to catch anything until one day, when he appeared to be on the grass for what seemed to be an eternity, I walked over towards him.  Up out of the grass he went skywards, just like a plastic bag that had a burst of air put into it but far more graceful.  Up into a tree he flew and from there he watched me, and then the noise of the grasshoppers were all around me.  I couldn’t see them but this was what he was after so whenever I saw a Kestrel in a grass river meadow at the end of July, beginning of August, diving repeatedly into the grass, it was a grasshopper diet he was on. 

Loaded with this information, I walked along the river bank and as I walked the Kestrel that Phoebe had seen flew up around thirty five yards in front of me and I ran with my jar to the area the Kestrel had just left.  On my hands and knees I started to catch them.  One by one I put them into the jar.  I’d caught fifty in about an hour and a half.  Time goes so quickly when you are having fun.  From there I went paddling in the river and caught four Cray fish for Mr Stevens.  He and Mrs Stevens loved them and it didn’t do any harm to keep on the best side of the grasshopper counting referee.  I legged it along to The Mill to be greeted by the sight of a group of marauding kids pushing their jars to as near to the faces of the Stevens’ as they possibly could.  Everyone jostling for position, each and all wanting to have in their jar the insect or fish that the Stevens’ would find most interesting and in turn lavish the most praise.   “You’re late,” they all shouted.

“You’re early,” I replied.  I gave Mr and Mrs Stevens their four Cray fish in an old stocking net. 

“Oh, thank you Allan,” they said gratefully, “You’ve caught a good few grasshoppers there, the other boys and girls seemed to have had a totally uneventful afternoon.”  Most of the jars were full of nothingness except for the odd insect, butterfly or two and the odd stickleback so grasshoppers must have been pretty thin on the ground where they had been.  Phoebe was up alongside me pawing at my jar which was full of grasshoppers.  We asked Mr Stevens if he was ready for the count, he assured us that he was and Mr and Mrs Stevens knelt on the lawn by the river as we started to empty the jar.  For those of you who have ever emptied up a jar of grasshoppers will know that once the jar has been turned upside down, approximately three inches from the ground the grasshoppers go everywhere, making counting extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, but Mr and Mrs Stevens assured us they had counted each and every one. That summer afternoon’s grasshopper challenge set a record round this neck of the woods that has never been beaten and Phoebe and the rest of us continued our summer holidays in the same fun, carefree vein that it started, it was absolutely heavenly bliss.

Coming back to yesterday, my tidying up of the river bank was disturbing a large number of sun hungry grasshoppers.  I could hear them, the Kestrel could see them, but I would be very hard pushed to catch fifty in an hour and a half today. 

The Kestrel is the only bird in the world that can hover holding its body perfectly still.

The majesty of nature never ceases to amaze.

Can you spot the grasshopper?