Kosher bacon buttie

Half-way through half-term, and we're having something of an Indian Summer. It would, I thought as I heard the sound of arguing over the computer from upstairs, just be a total waste of these last gorgeous days, not to go out somewhere. Could we make it, on our bikes, to a particularly nice spot I vaguely had in mind, and back, in time for Lunchista fille's rendez-vous at the flicks with her friend just after lunch? Turned out no, because her bike's tyres were flat, and our new, unfeasibly-compact, technologically-advanced bike-pump was (a) lost, and (b) totally lacking in anything as technically downbeat as instructions.

Which meant that Lunchista fils and I set off alone, after much protesting on his part.

Now Lunchista has the sense-of-direction of a deranged fruit-fly, but fils happened to know a nice route beyond the ring-road that would (allegedly) take us round in a big circle, through nice country, entirely off-road. It started with a ride down the entire length of the local golf course: it's a very long thin course and, for extra entertainment, seems to include part of the ring-road. People were driving golf-buggies over a special little bridge. I was rather glad fils was wearing his helmet. Part of the path, along absolutely flat land with rows of trees, running beside a fosse, reminded me of the opening sequence to "Secret Army" with its roads through the Low Countries.

The golf-course includes a large area of land still marked as "Common" on the map. Hence the old ditty:

The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the Common.
But then it lets the villain loose
that steals the Common from the goose.

Beyond the golf-course lay grazing land, which (we found out from a notice on a stile) was also an SSSI bristling with ground-nesting birds. And, erm, cows. We were halfway through the field beyond this, in other words in the middle of nowhere, when fils suddenly announced:

Ten minutes to ice-cream!

What???

And sure enough, ten minutes further on down the line there was a campsite, with a cafe, with a terrace, and (yes!) ice-cream. So I bought him one, and sat down with a mug of tea while he went off to investigate a nearby lake, and give some passing anglers a hand chasing the cafe's chickens off their grubs. It was idyllic: the terrace had a pergola (half of which was discreetly covered with perspex, in case it rained), up which newly-planted clematis were making their first steps. In a couple of years' time, I thought, it would be like my favourite place on earth, the pergola (now sadly demised) at the CAT.

Apart from the serious-looking chaps who had come for the fishing, we seemed to be the only visitors. I got talking with the chap who ran the place, who'd been a farmer there since the 1950s, but now looked like one of those classic "Farmers Diversifying" success stories you regularly find in the Yorkshire Post Country Supplement (every Saturday). The cafe, for example, had been there less than two years, and the fishing was taking off to the extent that they'd just excavated another lake. He seemed even more outraged than Lunchista about the Common, and also knew the name and address of the owner of a disused piece of land whose predicament had been puzzling Lunchista for years. What's more, as a farmer he happened to know that cows, amazingly, never step on birds'-nests. Not even when they're on the ground.

I could have sat there all afternoon, but for two things: it was lunchtime, and I'd run out of cash. There was a gorgeous smell of bacon butties, so I asked about cards, or even cheques, but no go. So non-existent bacon butties it was, then (the only Kosher type: well, better that then Zen ice-cream I suppose), and we'd have to have lunch at home. Such is life.

One consolation was our haul from today's sortie: in addition to fresh air and sunshine, we'd picked up lots of pine-cones (we dry them, spray them gold and use them for Christmas decorations), and a golf-ball. I checked with fils and he reassured me that, yes, it had stopped moving before he picked it up...

The Bees' Knees

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.

The Orchard Squad

I'd not been looking forward to yesterday's date with the Orchard: the prospect of wielding a mattock to uproot unwanted vegetation in 32 degree heat is a bit too TenKo for Lunchista's tastes!

As luck would have it, though, heavy rain on Friday had taken the edge off the heat, as well as promising to make the digging a bit easier. I arrived at eleven, and headed for the usual hole in the fence. The contrast in atmosphere, going from the road into the orchard, is striking: suddenly the air smells of flowers, trees and grass. On a day like this, just after a night of heavy showers, you can even sense both temperature and humidity changing as you walk the length of the site. Towards, in fact, a bunch of unfamiliar faces, who turn out to be Ecologists (what, I wonder, is the collective noun for Ecologists?).

They are busy explaining the importance of elderly trees, with their gnarled and leaky bark, for the local insect life. It turns out that trees, just like people, can have burst veins, and in fact you could see sap leaking out of some of them: stuff which would keep insects ticking over in the absence of their more usual fare of pollen and the like. The tree, meanwhile, can cheerfully go on producing fruit. Within minutes the team had produced a rare type of Longhorn Beetle, plus another rare beetle whose name, sadly, has slipped Lunchista's memory. A woodpecker could be heard in the trees: given that nobody in the Animal Kingdom is daft enough to waste energy looking for food that isn't there, I think we can safely assume that the bird in question had detected something in the bark and was on to a good lunch.

Talk then turned to what to do about all the stuff growing between the trees: there are still a lot of nettles and "the wrong kind of grass". It turns out, paradoxically, that the best thing to do with the spaces in between the trees is to pull minerals out of the soil, so that meadow-type things can grow there (it also turns out that the UK is short of this type of landscape: a lot of it was lost in the effort to keep ourselves fed, as a besieged island, during the war). Meanwhile the trees, with their deep roots, apparently remain untroubled by all this superficial activity, and in fact this is how orchards were managed in the past. The Ecologists even pointed out the usefulness, to someone like an insect who can't regulate their own temperature, of the temperature changes I had noticed earlier. For a given level of desired activity, you can simply move to the patch with the temperature that suits.

And so we need a Management Plan: one idea was to sow Barley between the trees for three years running, not so much to give us beer as well as cider (although that would be entertaining!) but to deliberately impoverish the top layer of soil, leaving the way clear for the meadow grasses.

And we can't hang about. It transpires that Tesco still has us in its sights...

Cliffhanger

Gorgeous, isn't it? (OK, if you suffer from vertigo, look away now...) Famille Lunchista's weekend entertainment included a walk along the cliffs at Bempton, armed with a pair of binoculars and a leaflet describing each flying object in helpful detail. Without which, of course, all the Gannets, Razorbills and Puffins would have remained Unidentified Flying Objects, at least to Lunchista, who is to birdwatching something like what Jordan is to Nuclear Physics.

Incredibly, you can get here without having to drive, which is just as well because otherwise this post may have degenerated into a rant against hypocrisy as Lunchista's eyes happened upon an advert in which an RSPB "happy customer" expressed his delight at (and I quote) "coming here to escape the exhaust fumes..." But let us give our man with the fresh air fetish the benefit of the doubt and assume that he cycled here across the North Sea, or at the very least took the train. Meanwhile I'm afraid that for once we brought our own exhaust fumes.

If you can't stand the heat, never mind getting out of the kitchen just come to the East Coast: quite often while the rest of the country is baking under a big fat summer Anticyclone, the East Coast spends much of the day shrouded in Haar, its own special mist, brought to you by the light East wind which has drifted in over the cold sea.

Back in town the following day, a community picnic had been organised on the linear park down by the river to promote (among other things) the idea of growing your own food. The weather was absolutely perfect for it. Best of all, the Met Office say we're in for more of the same as the summer goes on.

Have you ever noticed how much better food tastes when you eat it outdoors? And a cup of tea has its own distinctive smell when drunk in the open air, quite different from the same tea taken indoors. I wonder if someone has ever carried out proper research to try to find out exactly why.

Holes in the landscape

Sometimes in the middle of an otherwise busy landscape there are places which remain forgotten for years. They end up unknown, not just by Lunchista (who can usually claim the excuse of being new to a location) but by everybody. They may be bordered by overgrown hedges, or nondescript walls, which everyone simply ignores, or by advert hoardings, which everybody looks at without thinking what lies behind. They are often the site of some terrible industrial mistake, which seemed like a good idea at the time ("We could use that site for the new Asbestos works. It'll be Good For Jobs..." "Hey, you know that big hole where all the clay got dug out for bricks? Why don't we use that to dump all the town's rubbish in?") but left everybody with a mess that was harder to clean up than to hide.

The people who took those decisions will then have doubtless gone home, asked their children to tidy their rooms, and then told them off for hiding everything under the bed.

Years before Lunchista's arrival here, our city got a Natural Environment Trust, whose chair made it his business to find all the holes in the landscape with a view to identifying, and then looking after, all the wildlife within. In the days before Google Earth this was a lot of hard work: walking around everywhere and climbing over the odd wall. His prize find was a huge hole in the east end, surrounded by people's back gardens, where no-one ever went. He once described the sensation of finding it for the first time, as being like climbing through into an unknown other world. By an odd coincidence his name, but for one letter's difference, is Harry Potter.

It turned out to be a former landfill that had been capped off with clay in the 1970s. Nature had already made a good start on it: lots of brambles, bushes, and even some apple trees where the sweet factory had dumped all their unwanted bits of fruit. By the time Lunchista happened upon it, by spotting their wind turbine from the main road, several wildlife landscapes (woodland, meadow, pond...) had been created, as well as a central building run entirely on renewable energy, with its garden and log-store, and a thriving recycling business. And all before any of this became fashionable.

In the several years since then, woods have been planted, a shop has appeared, nature-related courses have started up, the Council's been so impressed it has started giving them money every year, and Lunchista has learned from them which plants will provide a free lunch and which would result in a swift trip to A&E.

I say "them" but it's now "us". Many of this type of place, even those which have no visible signs of work having been done to them, have a "friends of..." which anybody who knows the name of the place can join for a song. If you're new in a city, just put the city name and "friends of" into Google. Or better still, go walkabout (the best time for this is just after lunch, in January. Strange but true).

Every now and then the call goes out, come and help us plant trees (or build bird-boxes, or find out about spiders, or weave fences, or...). And then sit on the varandah (or in front of the stove, depending on the time of year), drink tea and home-made soup and have a chat.

Now who can refuse an offer like that?