All at Sea

At the pinch point between going forward and giving up lies fear: fear of the unknown, fear of making a mistake, fear that what you’re about to do is about to lead to some kind of doom, be that death or shame.
Several posts ago I said I thought we’d been procrastinating, putting off the inevitable. I also felt somewhat cursed through the nearly two years we’ve been planning and getting ready, which only added to the dread of moving forward.

We are superstitious creatures infused with generations of primal fears given to us by those who would lead us, be they men of god wanting obedience to their lord, men of business wanting us to buy their products or services for fear of falling behind the social and economical curve, our parents trying to guide us with tales of lost souls, bogeymen in dark corners, or the power of the wind to set a sullen face in stone, and even friends trying to make light of our trials and tribulations by saying “perhaps it’s a sign you shouldn’t go travelling”.
Yoda said (and I may have quoted this before) “Fear leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate” blah blah blah. However never were words truer spoke, except in one sense. Fear can also lead to utter paralysis of the mind.

I had to book the Ferry on the 16th of December 2013 literally a day before we sailed for Santander. It was expensive nearly six hundred quid (£600) with the cabin. Combine fear of the unknown with a price tag like that and the chance that you could miss said ferry because you have over a hundred miles to drive to get to said ferry during rush hour and paralysis is pretty much assured.

I must have completed the booking three times and re-checked it before committing, and even then I felt a frankly moronic urge to call Brittany-Ferries and go through the booking before I pressed continue to spend the money ... the call was the difference. Talking to a person, confirming that what I was seeing on the screen was real, immutable and we wouldn’t be bumped to the next sailing if they overbooked, or bumped out of our expensive cabin, again because they had overbooked (compensation would be applied according to the T&C’s) . And yet a part of me paradoxically hadn’t wanted (through fear) to book the ferry over the phone for fear of feeling foolish speaking to someone in a call centre. Part of me wanted Amanda to make the booking so if it went pear-shaped it wasn’t on me.

Without getting too lost, I managed it, by which  I mean I managed my fears, booked the ferry and here I am today with Amanda sitting in a bar on Deck 7 of the Brittany-Ferries Line Pont Avon, with a pint of Bass and my laptop, looking out the `Offside’ (I should probably know Port and Starboard by now) window, three and a bit hours into the crossing. Wondering why I was so worried. However Andy Harrison (A man wiser than he thinks he is) said something at 6am this morning as we left his and Sarah’s drive to make our early morning dash to Portsmouth: the commitment of the mind, it’s easy to say you’re going to do something, but far easier to make excuses and `pull-out’ at the last minute. It’s the commitment that takes the doing. And that’s all in your head.

I liken it to that brave swim in a cold sea. You can dip your toes in and pullout, you can walk out to your waist where the swell can swoosh water up to your chest and tickle your nerves with stinging cold and send you back to the sand, shame faced excusing your lack of manhood, with reasons for not willingly giving yourself hypothermia ... or you can buckle up and dive in head first, take the cold and gasp for air as cold shock takes your breath away in payment for your bravado. In the sure an certain knowledge that it’s not going to kill you swimming in the sea twenty feet from shore in the middle of August ... but it’s always a bugger to get in at first.

 It’s relatively easy once you know what you’re doing to travel around the UK in winter ... it’s expensive, but the language is the same, the plugs all match, you can read the ingredients on packets and you know the social conventions. For gods sake I’ve holidayed in Spain, I’ve driven left hand drive in Spain, but there was a moment yesterday I could have quite easily found a rock to crawl under. The boys on Top Gear often say before they execute a challenge `How hard can it be’? The answer is quite.

Mastering your fears is not easy, and we are in the relative safe zone of Western Europe. We have dragged our heels a little, the mole (which turned out to be a Mort ... that’s a mole with a wart), was if you like a stay of execution, that promised shake down from October set back to November and December.

I checked the info graphic screen a few minutes ago, we are sitting in a two or three metre swell on the Eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, visibility is about a mile (it may be less, but definitely not more, there is bad weather coming and we sail through mist). The ships vibrating and creaking (well all the fancy trim is). The glasses behind the bar make that shaken not broken noise once in a while. I can see deep furrows in the sea coming in obliquely to the `Offside of the ship’, once in a while we meet them properly and the whole shebang pitches up then down, or side to side and I remember that I’m not the world’s best sailor, but we are here, and the Moho is parked below on Deck E. Tomorrow at Midday we’ll be in Spain, I wonder how I managed to get so worried now I’m here. People have said it was a brave thing to do, now perhaps I understand why they said so.

Mole of Death

Having hung around for weeks waiting for the mole to be `Excised’ and for the follow up appointment to be fitted in we can announce in no uncertain terms that it’s ... a cluster fuck.

The results may be in, but the consultant in charge is away due to bereavement. This in itself is fine ... the proposed follow up in the New Year , Meh? Not so fine.

What is definitely not fine, is that Basildon won’t give me results over the phone, and of course I have run foul of the ultimate Dr Gatekeeper ...  da da DAHHH!!! `the medical secretary’.

Hopefully tomorrow I can phone my own surgery, who for reasons I will discover tomorrow were closed today. Much phoning, much getting cut-off during transfers, much calling other hospitals to be told that the person I have been told is in residence isn’t even in the directory etc etc etc.

We hoped to be on a boat this week. Instead we are dawdling in Hertfordshire, then Wiltshire (walking and Cycling), then Somerset, and then if the gods favour us, we are going to grab a night ferry and drive to Spain. The reason being the reasonable price of the ferry across the Bay of Biscay is now a piss-take it’s nearly Christmas fare.

Tonight we are at another fabulous Camping and Caravan Club site in Devises, sitting in a pub called the Three Magpies, having had a fabulous dinner of Faggots, Liver n’ Bacon, with sliced Black pudding lathered with Onion gravy, some Old Rosie Cider and Bishops Tipple ale. There’s a log fire, decks of cards and a five minute walk back to our bed. Things could definitely be a lot worse.

Cambridge Picture Post

Fruit and Fungi

 

 

 

 

 

A Season of Abundance

We’ve travelled far and wide in the south of the country east to west and back again, from Essex to Somerset, Wiltshire, Kent, Cambridge, more Essex, Norfolk, Surrey and Hertfordshire. We’ve stopped in Buckinghamshire and Suffolk, taken a spin through South Gloucester. We’ve probably made short stops in other counties but the specifics escape me. The one thing that we can confirm by observation is that this has been a bumper year in the hedgerow, well everywhere ... except on the  Hazels/Cobbnuts bushes (theory to follow). Most Hazels get cut back immediately after flowering (Catkins), therefore the pollinated catkins don’t develop nuts (and most domestic Hazels are clones so don’t seed, if I remember right, though that may just be the tortuosa (twisted) ). I reckon you need to get into deep woods or off limits field margins where Mr Farmer doesn’t need to flail to find Cobbs (I did once while on a weekend away in Wales shooting).

In all other ways I have been amazed at the volume of berries, drupes, seeds and spores on the ground and on the trees of southern England. We've seen Yews in every county laden with fruit (so much so that I have made the call on them being Holly trees at a distance), we’ve seen hollies equally laden, and Wild roses covered with rose hips, Beech Mast carpets, Acorns strewn so thick the ground was crunchy, Ash keys hanging like clumps of flat grapes. Black, Cloud and Rowan Berries by the million, Horse Chestnuts and Sweet Chestnuts (which we collected cooked and added to home-made beef burgers). 

In Langdon Hills country park (Essex) Amanda smelled Apples from yards away, and picked plums from a hedgerow spiny dividing corn and pasture fields in Somerset. Hawthorns and Pyracantha have been smothered, but our old favourite the sloe is very patchy this year (a repeat of the 2012 season where by the very late spring meant the bees were scarce, and the fruit hasn't been set ... pollinated). And finally I don’t think I've ever seen the country so bearded in the Old Mans Beard as this year; motorway verges, shrub layers near woods, it’s a Lonicera periclymenum bonanza, a grey mist of fluff in the verges.

Plants are not the only thing in abundance, fungi of every shape and size*; tiny white mushrooms looking like trees growing among the moss’s on vertical green cliffs from boles of trees and rocks. From the windy slopes of Brean Down, through boggy fields, leaf littered woods and among the regimented rows of coniferous plantation. All standing like soldiers among the clumps and humps of fallen pine needles where wood ants room, these little life-forms that mean coal may never be produced by a fallen tree ever again. 

Dry ones, slimy ones, woody ones, giant ones, yellow ones, red ones, spotty ones, a purple one (Amethyst Deceiver), dinner plate and soup bowl sized pixie stools, Jew ears balconies and terraces on fallen logs. Great pyramids of brackets in hollows and cracks, or consuming the stumps they have enveloped, looking like miniature alien cities of organic rock and living buildings; all populated by those little critters who can walk up walls, or flit between shrub and branch ... and sometimes stopping by on us to find out whether our blood is good.

If there is such a thing as the best set table for our hard pressed creatures after three really hard winters, then in our humble opinion, this is the reward year for lean years. If the UK economy could bounce back and feed all of us the same way that this year’s combined seasons have done for the little blighters that make our varied countryside so alive all year round, we could pave the streets with gold.

*we’ll post a selection of photos in a separate blog.