29. Sizzling hot

June 30th.

Sizzling hot and I walk up the hill. The path is grey-yellow dust, the cicadas harmonise, the nightingales compete with their exotic, rising bubble and jug. Not even midday and the heat is searing. Emile`s white van is coming over the ridge, bumping and jerking, one door is almost off its hinges and fixed at an angle to the cill with a blue rope. He is never in shirt sleves; always a jerkin of sorts over long sleeves. It makes me sweat just to look at him; but I have freckles and sunspots all over my arms and he probably hasn’t.

Now I am at a higher level, where I can survey the grand plan, the lay out of my infant garden. I’m on the ledge of one plateau, looking critically down to the next to see if my field is taking on some shape and design.. I have planted one C. leylandii, that hated, suburban, hedging tree ; so that as it pushes up to the sky it marks the southernmost corner of the plot. When I’m dead and pushing up, I hope , another sort of tree, somewhere, this Cypress will be far less than a quarter of the way to its full and magnificent stature.

As I scramble down, Emile’s van is still there; he is checking fencing and knocking a few posts straight after the great livestock migration. Marie is huffing and puffing after her walk up to join him. She is in a bright blue pinny again and her knees are purple.
“I'm going home to have a cup of tea”, I grin, “very thirst quenching.”
“Phtt! Cat’s piss”, Emile grunts, “you’re welcome to it.”
Marie waves me down the hill, shrugging her shoulders and tittering.

28.

June 23rd. TRANSHUMANCE



June is the month when the animals move from the middle pastures, way up the hills and mountain slopes, along ancient tracks into fresh, high grassland.

Emile puts a patterned leather and wool collar around the lead cow’s thick neck, along with her important bell. The half grown calves amble, stumble and butt each other. Columns of cattle teem up the slopes, bellowing and lowing like a cello and double bass orchestra. They leave trails of partly eaten grass and scents of sweet, fermenting breath. When we cross a lane, the waiting car inmates are already out with their cameras. This migration has gone on for year after year, century after century. Read Graham Robb’s wonderful book, THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE and you will get some idea of the immense age of these disparate, rural practices. ‘ A century ago, some of these journeys lasted for weeks’, he writes. ‘These are probably the oldest routes in France.’
He describes those long lines of cattle, dogs and humans as ‘caravans’, ‘land-going ocean liners of livestock’. Now, of course, quad bikes and trucks are often used in the drive, but Emile is walking, with several of us helping, along rutted, hard tracks. Marie is in the van, way behind on the metalled lanes, which curve up to the col.

27.

June

Cherries, let's talk cherries; a great, wide umbrella of a tree, bowing down with clusters of almost plum sized fruit, crimson, scarlet and black. Easy to pluck, easy to gather in handfuls, dropping them into buckets, baskets and pans. Sylvie and I are on tiptoes, on a hummock, stretching not to miss any, even the bird damaged ones, and looking up into the roof of leaves where the fruits hang like transluscent jewels, bunches of earrings. It's almost a shame to separate them from their tree.

Red is on the mountainsides too. Bertrand has said it is a catastrophe: the conifers are dying. How is that, I have asked, when there has been so much rain? Ah no, this is a result of increasing drought over some years. The snows are just not like they used to be. It's happening everywhere, he has told me and the evergreens' roots can't delve deep on those limestone slopes.

Sylvie scratches her knees as she sits on an upturned bucket and watches the rippling, emerald grassland being cut and lain in great swathes all around us. ' Limes are struggling too, on the higher ground, even though they root much deeper', she tells me. 'And they're usually so happy mixed up with the spruces and pines. 'World wide', she tuts, 'mondial,--all these changes'.

May 19th.

It has been so wet; so, so wet--everywhere. The swifts screech low, skimming the insects that have descended in this lowering sky. There is a heavy scent of lime flowers in the air. 5 crows on a silage bale, like blue-black royals, strut up and down the limited space; their own language. Electric glimmerings and flashings warn out over the mountains; rumbles and clashes vibrate the window frames. Marie has told me that when her children were young there had been a huge storm and a ball of electrical fire had rolled through her house, conducted by the water meter, apparently. [I think and hope that they are earthed nowadays]. It flashed from front to back, up over the kitchen table and into the barn, which ignited. There was a massive fire and hence the barn roof is now tin. No wonder she is always so afraid of thunder storms.

Sheet rain is building up and I watch a row of swallows , pointing their beaks to the sky as they grip the swinging telephone wires. The rain, turns to hail, then drops again, pours down their backs.. When there is a lull they smooth and gloss their feathers, shake and preen but do not dare fly off. Rain shutes once more and the swallows are like vertical pegs on a washing line until after 70 minutes the storm eases up and with further shaking, fluffing of feathers and flapping of wings, the first brave ones take off in the gloaming to roost. A hungry night.

25.

May 12th.

At five o’clock this morning the dawn chorus is almost deafening. The loudest are the blackbirds, as always. One other camper is parked a few pitches away from me, a white, expensive looking, all convenience sort. They are not up yet. The sky is busy and changing all the time; long bubbles of grey white cloud moving fast beneath a backdrop of mottled strips of cloud, while swifts screech and arc across it.

The lane out of the campsite winds steeply uphill to a plateau where cows lounge and graze, bells clang and tinkle and, apparently at this moment, no human is about except me. Lax flowered orchids, white helleborines and serapias line the verges and I can hear the liquid ‘pyrrup’ of some bee eaters flying at a lower level than the swifts.

I sit at a picnic table and look up towards the peaks, some still streaked with snow. It is cool but I can feel the strength of the sun already on my lap.

Three dark spots appear, circling, spiralling. Within seconds I can see they are birds with huge wing spans, sun dazzling through the wing feathers, the back edges dark, black even. Legs bare, yellow heads, golden cream ruffs; they are clearly vultures, Egyptian vultures. And magnificent. They wheel in synchrony and begin to spiral upwards and outwards until they are pale specks again over the rim of the mountain. Sylvie would be having hysterics if she saw them, but they are hundreds if not thousands of meters away from her level, and looking for carrion, not her scrawny, thin feathered chickens in their arid run.

24.

MAY 11th.

Today, at the end of the day, I am right up in the mountains with the van. I have found an ancient campsite with equally ancient proprietors. The wash rooms are uni sex, all brown and cream gloss paint; pissoirs backing onto the line of lavatories, only one of which is a sit down, as you please, arrangement. Monsieur is ever so curious , so I`ve pulled down the blinds after exchanging many pleasantries and trying to explain why I am here on my own. To compensate there are breath taking views. I fear to think that I am inured to such stunning views, since I have been spoilt for choice over the few years. But this one, at a distance, is as dramatic as they come: all purples and sandy oranges, scraped, scoured and bleached rocks, a bit of a mist and twisted pines. The evening is chill but fine and I know it is going to be a clear day tomorrow. Kites are circling and diving. The ravens are out in full team. The antics of both utterly convince that acrobatics in the airflows and up draughts are done for huge pleasure. No less.

I am going to sleep nearer the stars, wrapped in a duvet and a sleeping bag and tomorrow I may see a Griffon or perhaps an Egyptian vulture.

23.

MAY 8th.

You may think from reading this journal that I live a totally secluded and eccentric life, communing only with my immediate neighbours. But I am choosing carefully what I put down so that it has a particular roll.

Today is May 8th.

The war ended for France, this day in 1945 and every year, in every square, in every village, town and city a ceremony takes place. Each year there are less anciens combatants to raise and lower the tricolour and less people willing to sing out the anthem. But here, among the stalls of a tat sale: a vide grenier, the mayor, who has obviously already had a stiff drink, reads out the same annual speech. He mentions the brave Maquis and the losses that past generations of current families suffered. Drums roll and old Madame Jaure sings in strict time, looking more and more dismayed that so few join with her.

I have a lump in my throat, as usual. My father was in the navy during the war and he always says the miracle of his life was that he survived it, travelling across the seas in troop ships, frequently under torpedo attack.

I am with a small group and we drink coffee in the local, no smoking bar, but there are plenty of cigarettes, hanging from finger tips and bottom lips, smoke curling the air and catching the throat. I count one or two sterling English people as my friends, no more thank you; and I am with them now, discussing the past, the present and music.

On the way back up the hill I meet Sylvie and Bertrand mending a wire fence beside the road. She says it’s her birthday, she was born on the day the war ended. She adds that she was a big baby but seems to have grown smaller . I laugh and continue walking, in T shirt and cut offs, wondering how warm they must be in their layers and gilets.

22.

May 4th

Beside the slow river a man with a navy blue cap is sitting, rod resting beside him. He says he is only really here for the nature; doesn’t have much luck with the fish. A golden Oriole sings its ‘lillity leeo’ high in the bankside of poplars. Armies of budding foxgloves line the ditches and tall, slender leaved campanula are showing pleats of colour on their breaking buds. In a week or so waves of blue and pink will creep up the banks.

I see a tail less lizard on a stony path leading to the river. A cat`s trophy. Beads of blood become black spots; first the lizard is a dull, buff colour, but on my return it has become a shimmering, turquoise corpse.

Later, I'm out along the lanes with a wheel barrow, looking for some broken pallets that I spotted some time ago. They will make great compost bins. With very little warning I see blue flickers of lightening behind the mountain ridges. I had forgotten that earlier, I had watched the sky turning to a violet slate . Marie was quite right. Rumbles of approaching thunder follow; forlorn splashes are turning quickly into sheets of rain. A car stops with hazard lights on; there’s no moving in this sudden deluge. In seconds the roads are glass lakes, skating routes; streams of water bubbling into verges. Someone continues to drive, slows down, stops and asks if I need a lift. I cannot see the driver through a curtain of hair and water. I point to an open barn beside the lane and say I’ll shelter there, but thanks.

Emile’s last hay is bundled into fat cylinders in that barn. More are roughing it out in the fields. I join the dry ones, along with a tortoiseshell cat who hisses at my intrusion and slinks to a higher position. I sit out the storm until, amazingly quickly, the sky clears.

The car has gone and I head home with the barrow but minus any pallets. Everything is steaming; the trees, the grasses, the road surfaces and me…

21.

May 4th.

Silence.

The village has dropped into silence. Even the dogs lie in hot and soporific stupor, too relaxed to be aggravated. Lunch is being eaten, but I , of course, am outside, enjoying the 2 hours of absolute privacy.

Goldfinches are weaving a tiny nest of cobwebs and grass in a slender cypress and I'm watching them. One, - I like to think it’s the female, carries the nest fabric and dives into the tree; the male sits on the fence and twitters liquid trills to her. At some signal they fly off together in an undulating dance.

The crickets, grasshoppers and all their relations sing with the heat and in the background is the crowded sound of cowbells. On the first of May, Emile fetched the assortment of bells from his barn; I watched him clanging along the lane to his yard. There he selected the lead cows, dressed them each with a bell and now the top fields are ringing night and day.

May is definitely the musical month. Every year at this time the village impresario, a maestro or diva of a starling begins its long repertoire of perfect mimicry: from Buzzard to chicken cackle, car alarm to Golden Oriole, tail down, throat ruff fully inflated, the amazing performer takes centre stage for hours on end.


“Coucou!” Time’s up: Marie is out with sheets to hang and she has spotted me at the garden table. I`ve tried moving it to different corners but I'm nearly always found out.
“Storms coming soon so get these things dry quick”, she says staccato voce.

“Is that what the meteo says, then?”
“ No, they said non-stop sunshine but they often get it wrong. I know this sky.”

I look up and to the west. Sure enough, there is an ominous grey and pink tinged cloud edge to the horizon and the sun is a long time from setting.

20.

Snakes and Serins. April31st.

I know, I know, I haven’t been writing, because I have been outside all the days long .

The weather is magnificent, the prairies are a mass of lady orchids and the snakes are out. And snake killing is done by Emile, with great pride. First he is on his terrace, above my garden. I hear him grunt and then yell, “Marie, a pole, a stick!” The tone of voice makes me slow up what I am doing and start watching. Sure enough, Marie hears the urgency and is out from the house in a flash; bright, flowering overall tucked over knees and thick switch in hand.

“Grass snake! He was going to strike!” I'm listening with horror but can do nothing. Later, when I go up to look at the beaten body, still twitching, I say, “ But Emile, grass snakes aren’t poisonous. They are beautiful”
“Wshtt Pfitt,” he spits,” I don`t know about that. It`s a snake. And you, you`ve got to keep that grass cut up against these walls; keep`em clear”.
“Yes Emile, but you didn`t need to kill that snake.”
“Wshtt….Pfitt!” This is an expression that has much meaning for Emile and is said frequently, as non sequitur, insult, or mere adjunct or punctuation. It is up to me to interpret this time.

Later, in the early evening, the heat subsiding, Marie shrieks on the terrace. “A lizard!” Now there are a thousand and one little brown lizards, everywhere, up the walls, on the rocks, on the compost heap. She can`t mean one of these. It’s one of those large, green, slightly hooded ones. And it needs David Attenborough, right now.

Tant pis: spade in hand, Emile finds it at the foot of a climbing rose, …and chops hard. Now why? It is totally harmless.

I say nothing. I stick hard to my seat under the Cherry tree. Even the lovely running song of the Serins , like the winding up and down of thin chains, can’t distract me from an internal rant against ignorance.

18.

April 27th.

Aubergine coloured hair seems to be the trend with women of a certain age here, Look closely and you will see the blueish pink tinge on the scalps. Marie has a wedge of dark reddish black coiffure and at this very moment I'm watching her toil up the red dust track to join Emile in the white Renault van. Her pinny sits nicely on the table top of her stomach, which also raises her skirt to practically mini level. The effect is finished off with short green wellies.

I feel a surge of nostalgia; a grandmother memory moment. To fight off nostalgia one has to not yearn to go back and put things right; merely remember, like watching a picture show.

Looking at an old photograph, I can still remember precisely the feel of the sun, the look of the light, a black and white picture. M. stretches his hand out to touch a plump baby’s leg and I take that moment with the camera; including the scattered toys, the wooden garden table, the old gym benches around it, the ducks rifling amongst the grasses. Skeins of nostalgia are there...

16.

April 19th. Dogs and Caves.

My furthest neighbour, Robert, passes me on the lane, in a flurry of mud and gear. A gnome on a quad bike. He is going up into the hills to meet friends and make a great deal of noise, as it’s the weekend. We two have a mutual antipathy, since I complained about a young dog he kept in his barn and which wailed every night so that I couldn’t sleep. My silent misery matched the animal’s protest until I lost it and threatened to go to the Maire. The puppy was re-housed with his other hounds.

He keeps an assortment of these in pens, within hearing distance. They are all amiable enough, but out of the hunting season, spend their days on the roofs of their kennels, to avoid the accretions of their own shit that join with stone, weed and rock to create their ground. Every so often, at a signal from one of their own, they set up an almost choral howl. This deeply upsets me and on worse days makes me think of selling up…..


But then there are almost silent times, profoundly quiet days, when I can only hear birds, the occasional voice or vehicle. The children are at school, the dogs are too warm and I watch, work, walk and listen.

In a landscape minus human beings there is a surfeit of beauty but a human says those words and so sees the landscape and edits it, alas. The mountains tell of deep and distant time, before and beyond human experience and thus frighten me a bit. Too far to walk, to high to climb, to deep to fathom. In a cave not far away, 2 km. inside, are marks of childrens hands and rust and black drawings of horse and hind, 15000 years old. What are equally as fascinating are the more recent graffiti, which mark the walls for perhaps one km. in. 200 years ago, people were perhaps too afraid to go further inwards. The caves had a quite different meaning for them.

15.

April 17th.

A mower in the distance announces a good day. A jay, as bold as you like, loops in and out of an old Laurel, pounces onto the grass and is up again. It seems a long time ago now when I could hear the jays quarrelling and grating over the autumn acorns.

Winter survived, the frogs are declaring loudly around the pond, accompanied by the rising bubble and jug of the nightingales, hidden in the scrubby copses. Joy,--in spite of the wind, for it is, indeed, spring.

It`s breathtaking to brush through the prairie fields full of ragged robin, lady orchids, ox eye daisies and rusty sorrel flowers and to listen to the shivering of new, silver backed poplar leaves.
I can lie back in a patch and listen to the frantic business of the insect hordes. I can watch the black redstart, indignantly flicking its tail and chkk-chkking at a cat, slowly meandering its way through the long grass, dark ear tips just visible.

This is the life. Spring, the glorious season. A good number of the trees have survived that winter and there’s a promise of real heat in the air. To confirm it I hear a hoopoe. It is ‘churring’ at me from the walnut tree, in warning. Then it takes off on its skidaddling flight, beautiful black and white wing markings fanning its flight towards the big ash, where it sets up its ‘hoop- hoop hoop’ call.

14.

April 13th.

Sylvie is coming with me to buy eye drops at the pharmacie. She sits on two cushions in the passenger seat of the van so that she might see out. She is watching the fields and houses go by and remarking on who lived there, worked there, died there. The shoe factory closed long ago, where she used to walk, 6km.each day. Those were the days, she sighs. Now she doesn`t see many people. Bertrand drives very occasionally, to fetch diesel for the tractor or strimmer, to do some shopping, and she may go with him if the various delivery vans haven't quite stocked what she wants.. She misses chatting with her old friends. She is quite a walker, nevertheless, and we often tramp around the rough surfaced lanes, looking at the carpets of cowslips and orchids, so that she may stop and gossip with one or two passing acquaintances.

‘I'm not walking out on my own’, she comments, ‘anything could happen. You hear of such terrible things on the news. Aren’t you fearful when you walk alone?’
‘No, Sylvie, that’s just the television for you. One or two bad things happen, but France is a huge country’
‘All the same, I’m glad when you are around to stroll with me’. There’s praise indeed.

Last night, just after dusk, I watched a barn owl sweep low through the farmyard, a little owl flop from telegraph wire to pole and heard the first scopps owl calling monotonously for a mate: “meep……meep…….meep….”. [Owl heaven, but cat city too!]

13. April 6th.

The sunshine is truly cheering. So much stronger. While the plums are losing their blossom, taking on a slightly shabby, dirty look, the pears and sweet cherries have more than enough. The apples are biding their time and I'm thinking how handsome these trees are, so good to see full sized, big headed fruit trees. None of those dwarfed, domestic, patio types dare show up around here.

Big black bees are busy coupling and zooming and the general insect racket is a pleasing background music. The kestrels give a repeat performance every so often, mating high in the pear tree, with chattering, rising cries.

Yesterday I watched the female hen harrier quartering and hooking low over the meadows, so near and silent. I could see her white banded rump and gingery striped breast. Usually it`s the ghost grey male, black wing tips bent back, hunting in that almost skating, gliding flight. Later on I can hear their courtship and exchange calls, higher, towards the forest..

Sylvie thinks I'm out too early, sowing and planting. She doesn’t trust this spring, she says. She nevertheless hands me six seed potatoes to plant. . Unnamed, she is proud to say they have been in the family for years and years. Small, white tubers for an early crop. I shall put them in today, I say. As I am out there, I hear the first cuckoo.

Later that night I go out onto the roof to look at Orion hanging over the hill, and the moon sliver slung between it and the mountain. The tawny owls are hooting and the bats are flicking past the alley lamp.

12.
SomePlace Pyrenean Journal. Bertrand and Sylvie



My neighbours on the east side are two siblings. Bertrand and Sylvie potter with ancient tractors, creaking wheelbarrows, geriatric goats and are nearly always in tweed and wool, impregnated with oil and god knows what stains. Sylvie adds a pinafore that sits like a ledge cloth over her precise stomach. She is not so much fat as well fed and protuberant in various places. Friendly would not be sufficient description for these two. They have welcomed me with uncanny warmth; they, who have rarely seen a stranger, let alone an English woman. They learn all that they know from the village and from their television. There are no books. The only printed paper they glance at, they assure me, is the junk that comes into their letter box , and a calendar left by the paramedic/fire service, Les Pompiers.

Their land runs alongside mine, as Emile and Marie’s does, on the other side. Strange really, that we have these long strips of fields, like allotments, all facing south to the mountains, with nothing beyond except prairie and forest. In Britain I would pay a million or more for these views. And here are layers of lives, laid down over the generations. The ruined walls, the roofless barns, the collapsing wells; echoes of rural histories and industriousness; not quite a palimpsest, the landscape is more a quilting and a layering of lives. No one here, one feels, starts with a new beginning, so much as turns and goes over again; meeting the necessities of a hand to mouth existence. My arrival has inserted a different way of living. I dig in the field and discover pottery, old tool bits, and leather scraps. But it is not my history. However long I stay here, I suspect, the etrangere status will stick. Perhaps rightly so.

Sunshine eases into my joints; there are changes in birdsong and the sward. 3 bluetits are shinning up and across the walnut trees, their courtship rivalries voiced in metallic ‘tsiiits-chinks’

The plums and cherries are all in exuberant mode; pale sweeps of flowering creep up the mountain sides and the red kites are cheeky in their display flights and courtship dances.

My ownership of this small piece of land has intensified my attention to the details of the microcosm. I notice the smallest alteration: the creeping potentilla, the speedwell, the blue flax are pushing their frontiers. The daffodils, free of snow and wind, stand upright and bright. The first spotted orchid leaves are there, in the low grass. Emile is out too, raking out the old tomato haulm from last year but I’m too far out of earshot to catch any complaint.

March 31st. SomePlace, Pyrenean Journal


The poplars are showing their sienna gold, new leaves; like waiting, ordered armies, they whisper amongst themselves. The lime yellow of the willows joins in the fanfare of spring colour and chiffchaffs, blackcaps and swallows accompany the whole concert. The first swallow arrived on the 29th. March; definitely earlier than last year. Later that day, two more joined up and by the next day there were a dozen or so, swooping and slicing low over the long grass land, inspecting the barns and chattering in their tinkling voices all along the telegraph wires. Non stop sunshine lifts the most stubborn of hearts.

I try to transpose this landscape, in my imagination, into Dartmoor, Devon, Wales, but it doesn`t work. There the signs, - the ditches, fences and hedges, would present some recogniseable language; I could read them as familiar. But here they are different. A group of ash, birch and hawthorn are somehow displaced in my imagination. There are no holloways, trodden by millennia of feet and wheels; no cottage gardens or grand demesnes, only ruined castles and tumbling barns, marking some ancient, landowning histories. These sweeping fields are not divided by trimmed or layed hedges. Huge sweeps of land, vast agri strips, their umber or emerald lines changing direction and stripes, to denote edge and perhaps propriety, decorate this wide space. Clouds of cherry and blackthorn blossom plume up the hillsides and the Prussian blue of the bigger forest crosses to and fro’, upwards towards the mountains. Here the hares are big, the deer frequent, the boar strange and the birdsong pervasive. And in spite of the Wednesday and weekend hunting sprees this a sort of a fecund paradise

March 27th. Return.

Returned from a two week stay in England. The grass appears to have grown enormously and for the first few days back I felt like a real stranger again. Not that I didn't want to get back. I had arrived in Britain during storms and an arctic chill. Plastic bags decorated the bleak trees and verges, signage had sprung up and through, like the council knew it was supposed to be spring. Friday and Saturday evenings still sprouted their bunches of lurching blobs; a gross animus pervades. Is this just me?

Yet on return to the mountains I know that I will never be truly at home here, that the traces, signs, faces and features do not share my recent history, that I am a visitor, an escapee from the shades and clouds that drove me here to focus inwards and to the land that might give me motive and sort me out.

If you manage to get up very early in the morning and go out into the snow that fell, just before the full night began, you may see the tracks of animal traffic. These are untainted, as yet, by thaw or new snow. The passers by leave their signs. Here is a hare, two prints in front, with just a trace of hock or thigh. These first are the hind feet, passed under and through the fore legs, which print themselves behind. I follow them alongside and find scrapes where this hare has found tasty shoots. The hills are silent, no birdsong, no cursed dogs. I'm almost ashamed to sully the cleanliness. It's not that cold, just white, but the trees up the mountain have already shed their shawls and the thorn blossoms are like dirty handkerchiefs. I can hear the river clearly; the water sounds are exaggerated, framed by the muffled landscape.

Being a poor gardener one gets excited by very small things. And they are here, the tips of ruffled daffodils around the well. The snow lies like a skirt around each prima donna. In spite of the snow, the season is changing. Molehills are lumped in a diagonal across the field, like big brown mushrooms. I watch a greater spotted woodpecker shin up the bare trunk of a beech. 'Pchikk, pchikk!' Its call ecoes its French name: 'pic epeiche'. Its loopy flight gives it away before the sound.

In the house, ash from the fire fills a metal bucket and fills me with pleasure too. The simple and repetitive routines I indulge in, riddling the stove, collecting the wood and ash, are profoundly satisfying. Yesterday's despair has lessened. Nature might be waving at us frantically, her imperatives obvious, but, as James Lovelock says: enjoy life while you can; and that is why I am here, lucky, in this wild and abundant place.

8. March 9th. Pyrenean Journal. Oaks.

I'm off to plant a red oak, whatever the weather, before I crumble into an elderly bigot.

The wind howls, the sleet streaks and drives and hail tinkers with a tin roof. The broad beans are just miserably proud of this thin blanket of snow. Garlic, too; erect points of bright green hope. No optimistic blackbird pipes up this time. But I am out; winding up the wind, slurping over the field, to dig a hole for the oak. Emile has told me not to plant it too near the fruit trees, as its root system will eventually be unsympathetic to them. That is, the fruit trees will not prosper. Now that is interesting because I also know that oaks planted near other oaks ARE mutually conducive. They can, in a way, share each others' root systems, and, so to speak, download nutrients to others in their group that are perhaps struggling to survive. Ah trees, what magic is working there!