Watch out Substack townies, here comes the second instalment of the ‘country diary’ you never asked for.
The first instalment of ‘Another Country Diary’ can be read HERE.
17/9
A morning spent in front of the computer—emails, online meetings, and so on. We go for a circular lunchtime walk as the sun comes out, taking the route along the long hedge and bridleway, past the old brickworks wood, then through the fields to ‘the top’ and back past the old farmhouse, through the lanes, and home.
The long hedge was cut in the early spring following work on the ditch, and none of the apple trees are producing. Usually it is abundant with crab apples, coxes, and varieties we don’t know the names of. There are blackberries which we pick and eat as we walk.
In the old brickworks wood we try to work out what is growing in the green plastic tree tubes. Some seem to have oak in them, others perhaps hazel. The wood was clear felled of a load of dying ash trees a couple of years ago. It is a damp wood of several acres, planted in the hollow left by the excavation of clay for bricks. Until the trees were felled you could still see the remains of a building from the old brickworks, but I think it got lost under the piled up logs and brash. In a hollow in the trunk of an old birch tree we find a small party of sheltering snails.
Along the field edges we try to find sloes, but there are few in the usual places. The crab apple tree next to the field pond only has about ten apples so we leave them for the birds. A few solitary red admirals flit above the hedgerow. I’ve hardly seen any this year.
In both the bottom and top fields they are ploughing, plumes of dust are being thrown up as they break the soil with the harrow.
A British Airways airliner flies slowly overhead, its landing gear extended.
18/9
I take a day of annual leave and spend it mooching around Tombland1. When I get back more apples have fallen. The fridge is filling up with courgettes.
20/9
The dawn skies are a murky grey. It’s been like this all week—autumn in the morning, summer in the afternoon. I take the car to be serviced but forget my reading glasses. In the waiting room I manage to read through a printed copy of a story I need to teach by holding the paper close to my eyes. The radio is playing only nineties-era Britpop. The ring road outside with its car dealerships and light industrial units is depressing. The mature trees in the gardens of nearby houses look rust-tinged and tired.
I’m home by the early afternoon. Benji, our tabby cat, brings back a bank vole and leaves only the entrails to warm on the flagstones. Every half hour or so a gas gun fires to scare birds in the field beyond our house.
The weather clears and we walk up to ‘the top’. By my favourite hedgerow there is a Southern Hawker dragonfly hunting in brisk movements at head height and Large White butterflies. Most of the fields have been ploughed and harrowed—they are somehow satisfying to look at, like freshly made beds, or like mashed potato smoothed over with a fork. A red kite is gliding in the wind above the old farmhouse, slowly working its way along both sides of the hedgerow for prey or a carcass. Two fighter jets claw noisily across the deep blue sky.
At the crossroads we discover a sign tied to a post and struggle to understand what it might mean. It is a blue arrow which contains a depiction of a pink cartoon fox and a handwritten number ten. It signifies ten pink foxes. It signifies the tenth sign of the pink fox. It connotes the hunt and the pack. It connotes the barbarity of the gentry. It’s mystifying and mundane.
We stop to look at a line of old oaks that runs parallel to the road in the middle of a field. They are beginning to die and fall apart, bleached limbs twisting skyward. I speculate that before the village common was enclosed2, there was a roadside green here, and that the oaks marked the former edge of it.
Ceci says something about taking the land back to put a goat on, but I hear ghost and it takes me a moment to catch up with all the talk of ghosts and goats. As we walk up the track to our cottage I think about the way the land is haunted by enclosure, that great greedy land grab of the already landed class. The local estate still owns most of what used to be a large open area of common.
Later, when I lock up the hens, the rising moon is huge and golden and tangled in a black lattice of oak twig and branch.
21/9
I water the vegetable beds in the morning. A large frog leaps out from beneath the shade of the butternut squash plant leaves.
A tractor sprays the field beyond the copse and a strong petrol-like smell settles in the garden, so much so that I begin to worry that the heating oil has leaked. The smell dissipates but I check the oil levels with the dip stick anyway and realise that I will have to place another expensive order soon.
The sun sets with the sky still clear, and the air feels abruptly cooler as if summer is also retreating below the horizon.
22/9
Equinox! It makes me think of the long teaching semester ahead, each day slightly darker than the next. It will be midwinter before we break for Christmas. Samhain, that old festival of seasonal transition, falls roughly in the middle.
I mow the lawn in what I hope will be the last cut before winter. It rains heavily just after I finish.
In the afternoon the weather clears and we break from marking and reading to set out into the Sunday-quiet lanes. I see a girl, perhaps aged eleven or twelve, wearing what appears to be a traditional Anabaptist costume in a passing car. Her white bonnet and pale face are turned towards me. Ceci doesn’t see her. The sun still feels strong and, despite the rain, the ground underfoot looks baked hard in places along the tracks. A kestrel hovers above the hedgerow close to the old farmhouse but moves away when we walk closer, gliding in zigzags over the field pond before dropping out of sight. The footpath that bisects the big field behind the next village’s church was ploughed out last week. It has only taken a few days for the path to mark the soil again in an assertion of an ancient right of access. It’s somehow reassuring to see it—the legacy of all those centuries of church going and dog walking feet.
Welcome and thank you to any new subscribers to This Party’s Over! The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial. I’m playing with this form alongside other pieces of non-fiction in this Substack.
Tombland is the area of Norwich close to the Cathedral. It has some great second-hand bookshops.
Enclosure acts were laws passed by Parliament in England and Wales between 1604 and 1914 that permitted landowners to claim property rights over land previously held in common. The acts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries meant that huge areas of land which had once been free for ordinary people to use for grazing livestock, gathering firewood, or hunting, were fenced off from common usage.