ANOTHER RSPB DAY

When I am at home I spend Thursdays working as a volunteer at the Saltholme RSPB Reserve, as the day starts at 8am I have an early start at 7am to cycle into Stockton, along the River Tees which I then cross to the north side at the Tees Barrage, then crossing the Newport Bridge at Middlesbrough to reach Haverton Hill, The Clarences and then along the Hartelpool road for a mile or so to reach the Reserve. On Thursdays I am paired with Barbara Keville, seen here working in the "Wildlife Garden" (note the upside down trees) at the Reserve.

Our morning routine starts off with a security patrol of the Reserve, we keep an eye out for anything untoward, check fencing, open up the three hides which will be open to the public at 10am clear litter and watch the birds, scan the lakes, take photos and generally enjoy ourselves. For most of this year we have enjoyed very good weather on our Thursdays and today was no exception.

Once the Reserve is opened up and we have had our ten 'o clock elevenses, we are available for what needs doing and today we are in the Wildlife Garden forking in humus to improve the soil and aid water retention. The garden is quite large, walled and has a grand pond which if it were deeper would make an even better swimming pool! designed by that "designer gardener" Chris Beardsley" it is clearly going to soak up an awful lot of volunteer hours. Good though to be out in the sun and there are always chatty visitors who like to ask questions, sometimes I can even provide an answer. Volunteering can never be assumed to be automatically and mutually rewarding. Volunteers all have their own reasons which can be at odds with organisational objectives but here I think we are a genuinely happy lot, I certainly enjoy my volunteering and I am getting to learn a lot more about birds (one of my motivations), so we all seem well suited. At 4pm I get on my bike and head home (well tired too).

BIRDING ON THE TEES

Went down to The Holme on the river Tees to have another look at the Black Tailed Godwits, they were still in situ and I counted about 20. Canada and Greylag geese also well represented and a flock of about 80 Godfinches kept twittering away all around. While I was watching the water a female roe deer cantered across my field of vision. I was a bit surprised as unless it cares to swim across the Tees it is hemmed in by a dual-carriageway road to the west and Stockton to the south. Still it didn't seem perturbed. Blackberries are in full fruit so I helped myself to some food for free.

BLACK TAILED GODWITS

Took an afternoon walk down to The Holme, a freshwater marshland on the banks of the Tees only ten minutes from my own home. Delighted to find a group (eight or nine) Black Tailed Godwits feeding there. A lovley bird given Red Status by the RSPB and the first time I have seen them on this pond. The picture is not of the birds I saw today. The males are still sporting the red upper body colours of breeding birds but it will be fading soon. I'll be keeping an eye on the marsh to see how long they stick around.

MORE ON PAUL MULDOON

Born in Armagh, known as "bandit country" during "The Troubles" it would surely be hard for any resident poet not find the conflict represented in his or her work. Here is one of PM's which illustrates how the ordinary may have a more sinister meaning in the context of Ulster.

Since 1987 PM has lived and worked in the USA where he is the Howard G B Clark Professor at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed the poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is a fellow Hertford College at the University of Oxford.

IRELAND By Paul Muldoon

The Volkswagen parked in the gap,

But gently ticking over.

You wonder if it's lovers

And not men hurrying back

Across two fields and a river.

Charting difference and the need for identity:

THE BOUNDARY COMMISSION By Paul Muldoon

You remember that village where the border ran

Down the middle of the street,

With the butcher and the baker in different states?

Today he remarked how a shower of rain

Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly's lane

It might have been a wall of glass

That had toppled over. He stood there, for ages,

To wonder which side, if any, he should be on.

DENTAL HEALTH

Biked over to Yarm for a noon appointment with my dentist, Miss Libby Allen, from Hollywood in Northern Ireland. (Thus I can claim to employ the services of a "Hollywood Dentist"). Yarm is a delight with a Georgian High Street with it's tiny clock-towered town hall. Built in 1710 by Thomas Belasyse, the then town mayor it provides a pleasing focal point among the cobbles and the red pantiles of the shops. Only a few miles from my home in Ingleby Barwick I am always surprised that I come here so infrequently, compared to Stockton and Middlesbrough, well you can't really. Yarm was part of the old North Yorkshire, and it feels more Yorkshire than Cleveland. It's great claim to fame is that the original pioneers of the world's first railway, The Darlington to Stockton Railway Company, met in the George and Dragon hotel in 1821 and subsequently got the necessary bill through parliament. While here I noticed a new sign proclaiming the route of a railway heritage trail, must come back soon and check it out.

Dentistry, dentistry, I'm 63 and have managed despite very poor dental care in my early childhood years in Scotland (no-one bothered about teeth, it was almost routine that by your mid-forties any remaining teeth would be extracted, and false ones fitted), I still have 30 of my 32 natural teeth. Alas one of my molars has become so broken, and now loose that it will by the end of the week become my third extracted tooth and I'll be down to 29. I'm just falling to bits.

Pleased though that I have a "Hollywood Dentist" on the NHS, even so the extraction will cost £45.60 which in addition to my recent bi-annual check-up fee, brings my dental expenditures to over £60, boo.

LOCKERBIE AND MERCY

Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, (AM) the only person convicted of the "Lockerbie bombing" sentenced to life with a minimum of 27 years set as his tarrif is riddled with cancer and will soon join the souls of his victims in that emptiness beyond life.

The Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill has released AM on compassionate grounds and for his pains, is suffering. USA victims families are outraged, according to our media, and smelling the whiff of blood in the ocean; all sharks are steaming toward the story.
PanAm flight 103 exploded in the sky above Lockerbie at 7pm on 21st December 1988, a merry Christmas that some believe was a Lybian retaliation for the earlier American bombing of Col Ghadaffi's Tripoli. 270 people died that night I remember it well, I was not one of them, I was out celebrating with colleagues from work, eating drinking laughing all the good things about Christmas, while north in Lockerbie Hell fell to earth and the Christmas spirit was an inferno of aviation fuel. Driving home to Derby my radio began to tell of this horror though what I recall is that it was announced that a military plane had crashed onto a petrol service station in Lockerbie, proving as always, that when facts are unclear, the media will fill the void with invented speculation, without the bother of qualification.

I lack conviction about AM's culpability or his innocence, my memory is frail, and power politics have determined process (how many Scottish courts have there been in the Netherlands?) but I do know that listening to Kenny MacAskill, made me proud to be a Scot, and I shall write to him and say so. Strictly speaking AM has been shown mercy, not compassion, mercy is a decision not to extract the last letter of lawful and just punishment, compassion is the wider due of all who suffer, regardless of culpability. So to consider mercy. My thinking is that regardless of crime no prisoner (never mind one whose guilt is publicly questionable as per AM)'
should die in goal. If a prisoner is confirmed to be on his death-bed then he should be returned to his family for final days. Vengeance is a bitter emotion, a cancer that ultimately destroys those who succumb to it, anger is completely justified and (as Maya Angelou tells it so right) is like a fire whose burnt wake is duly cleansed. Mercy and anger, like the lion and the lamb, can co-exist. Lockerbie has been a dirty business and the stain blots our polity yet, confirming again the miserable product of chance. PamAm flight 103 was 25 minutes late in leaving Heathrow, had it left on time, Lockerbie would have been spared it's victims as the passengers and crew would have fallen into the sea. Eleven Scots died in Lockerbie, our losses are less than, but shared with America, we hold the jurisdiction and the right decision has been made. Surely we all recognise Shakespeare's sentiment in the Merchant of Venice? it should not be confined to the theatre...


"The quality of mercy is not strained
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,
Upon the plain beneath: it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes"

No "gentle rain from heaven" dropped on Lockerbie that night, but Kenny MacAskill is if not blessed, then on the right side of a difficult decision. Nothing can compensate for the loss of loved family and I know how I would feel vengeful if it had happened to me and that is why those directly involved are not called to jury service, and we must live in a messy place.

THE SERENDIPITY OF THINGS

As mentioned earlier I have been reading Melvyn Bragg's novel "Crystal Rooms". In my mornings after breakfast I have been trying to cultivate the habit of reading a bit of poetry. Today I was reading Paul Muldoon's (PM) third collection "Why Brownlee Left". Muldoon is from Armagh, one of the six counties neighbours of Seamus Heaney's County Derry, what is in the soil of that damp and windswept corner of Ireland that it produces such a poetic harvesting?

The opening poem by PM is called "Whim" the first two lines of which are :-

"She was sitting with a pint and a small one

That afternoon in the Europa Hotel"

Funny how things suddenly jolt into consciousness, In Melvyn Bragg's novel, "Crystal Rooms" just read, there is the following reference to the Europa Hotel in Belfast : -

"Mark realised that they had reached the Europa Hotel in the middle of town without seeing a single soldier. He knew that they were de-escalating in the city centre but he was still impressed. The Europa had the same manufactured calm- like fake antiques of any international hotel. Mark always noticed how much taunting glass there was in the building and in the glass porch flaunted by the Grand Opera House next door and the glass in the new city centre. Fragility showing it's contempt for violence"

These references to the Europa Hotel, strike the anvil of my past; when for sure, soldiers were much in presence in vicinity of the Europa Hotel . During the worst of the bombing campaign by the Provo's in the early to mid 1970's I spent a lot of time in Ulster, and was a regular guest at the Europa. To begin with it was considered safe, but following a night when the hotel was evacuated after the IRA planted a bomb on the reception desk, it clearly became in play. I moved away the next day, but the terrorists won-out, soon it was blown up by means of a taxi-bomb left in the railway car park adjacent which breached the gable end of the building. When I next stayed there, the plaster walls of my room were pitted with the remnant tell-tale signs of exploding glass.

So two recent books unexpectedly thrust the Europa Hotel to the front of my mind. I think Muldoon is the better guide, Melvyn Bragg gets the spelling of the Divis Flats wrong, and those who have tramped the lower Falls Road from time to time, know it is "Divis" long gone the flats are but the name is the same.

TAKE TO THE TEES

This week-end has seen a council inspired promotion of the sporting opportunities afforded by the river Tees. Since the barage was completed, upstream of it is now non-tidal and this has opened the way for Stockton to exploit it's position on the edge of this great river as it makes it's now languid way to the North Sea. I got my bike out and cycled down to have a gander, although I was a bit late in the day, I thought that the support was less than would have made the organisers extatic, but everything has to have a beginning if they keep it up I'm sure the locals will respond.

GOOD THINGS IN THE MORNING POST

The picture opposite shows me with Amanda Hoyle (soon to become Hooke) outside the entrance to St Joseph's RC Church in New Ollerton, Nottinghamshire on Amanda's Wedding Day 24/07/09. I have known Amanda and her family for alomost thirty years from the time I moved to Derbyshire from my then wonderful batchelor pad at Hill House in Gonalston, Notts. Amanda and her husband Andrew have now returned from honeymoon in Italy and my postman delivered a "Thank You" card from them, as follows: -

"Dear Fred,

Thank you for your wedding gift and for all your help and support with the wedding. Words can't tell you how pleased I was that you were able to give me away and how reassuring you were on and before the big day. Your speech was beautiful and had me and most of the guests enthralled. One of my friends said she was close to tears whilst listening to you.

Mum mentioned that you would like a photo of us walking down the aisle, I have not seen one yet but I have not seen all the guests photos yet. I'm sure there will be one from all the hundreds that were taken. I will email or post it to you.

Lots of Love,

Amanda and Andrew xxx

Amanda's wedding was a treasured day for me and this card was received with great pleasure.

Also in the same post by chance was a cheque for £1,800.00. On 18th. June I cycled to visit Amanda and Andrew, to discuss my role in their wedding, (giving the bride away) , this journey involved an overnight camp as the distance is 135 miles. (my first cycle-camping trip this year) Just before arrival at Ollerton, I was struck by a car, thrown onto it's bonnet and finished up beneath it's front wheels.. see top picture. I spent the rest of the day in hopital under observation but I was lucky to escape with no more than a sprained wrist and a lot of bruising down my right hand side. Damage to my bike and cloths etc., came to about £400.00 so the balance of the compensation was in respect of out of pocket expenses and the distress caused!

Funny that these two items should arrive in the same morning post. Both very welcome though.

MELVYN BRAGG

Just finished reading Melvyn Bragg's (MB), 1992 novel "Crystal Rooms" a telling tale of media, parliament, big business and bigger ego's and child abuse in a dysfunctional northern family. redeemed by a fairy tale ending, TV the media in general are all subject areas well known to Melvyn's personal experience and that influence permeates his story. An easy read but the plot unwinds with baleful predictability.

I see that I now have eight of MB'S titles so I must be a bit of a fan. He is famously a "Wigton lad" and I recall that the first time I visited Wigton (selling hosiery to the retail drapery trade in 1971) that I was conscious of the MB association. I have seen him a couple of times at the Keswick based "Words by the Water" literature festival - held annualy in March, and I guess I warm to him because of a shared love of the Lakes I recently picked up a second hand copy of his "Land of the Lakes" in my local Help the Aged charity shop - sorry M no royalties on this one - Another anthology of all the old favourite Lakeland Luminaries, but I'm into all that and it might give me some good photo opportunites for my Flickr group - Literary Britain and Ireland.

WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE!

Well I thought I might as well give this a try, I have been using Flickr as a photo-diary sort of place to record what I am doing, so depending on how the picture hosting service is on this blog service I will be considering migrating to a straightforward blog. Looking forward to seeing how it all pans out...