Another Country Diary #65
With smoke and drought
17/7/26
The weather is cooler, slightly overcast with hazy skies. We drive to the coast, skirting Norwich, then up to Holt, and the short drive north to Cley-next-the-Sea. I insist on pronouncing Cley, clay, though the fashionable way to pronounce it is Cl(eye) in a cringingly gentrified version of the Norfolk pronunciation. We park in the Norfolk Wildlife Trust visitor centre car park, picnic on the picnic tables, then set out on a wide circuit along the path that borders the NWT reserve, runs along the beach, then back along the coastal path to the village of Cley. I want to pause by the marshes to watch the avocet, which seem numerous today, but my family are keeping a fast pace, and every time I raise my binoculars I fall further behind. The pace slows as we reach the beach. A fresh breeze comes off the sea, pleasant after the weeks of heat. We wander the shingled shoreline, skipping out of the way of the reach of larger waves. I end up with the hem of my trousers soaked, but I’m beyond caring much. The sea always feels joyful to me. We spend some time watching a large vessel manoeuvring close to where the windfarms begin. It looks like some sort of service vessel, its deck covered with machinery of some sort, yellow cranes and such like. The sun breaks through the cloud for a moment, and the sea dazzles briefly, before returning to a flattish grey. We leave the shoreline and trudge up the shingles to lie on them. The sound of the wind and waves becomes muffled. It is comfortable on the pebbles, but we march on, past the submerged pillbox, and behind the fisherman crouched on stools in the cradle of their shelters.
19/7
The rooks and jackdaws that had been gathering in the copse over the last couple of weeks have moved on. I guess that they were here for food, and now that the harvesters have done their work they have moved on. It is quieter without them, and I begin to hear the smaller song of birds that had been drowned out by the clattering of the jackdaws’ stony calls.
After breakfast I set about digging up the second earlies. The ones planted between the rows of runner beans have faired reasonably well, considering they were planted from some sad looking small potatoes that had gone to seed from last year’s crop. The ones planted in the furthest raised bed have faired less well. This bed has been used mostly for runner beans for the last few years, and although I thought I’d dug it over well, when I come to fork up the potatoes I find that the soil is still bound up by the roots from the beans. This bed is also a favourite of the muntjac. It offers a quick escape through the hedge. Most of the plants have had their leaves chewed off at some point, and although they’ve continue to push forth growth, there isn’t much to show in the way of a crop from the first two rows. Finally, and perhaps more significantly, the bed is overshaded by a cherry tree, and had a large laurel hedge to one side of it, both of which sap up the groundwater. I plant courgette plants between the runner beans; there is just enough time for these to grow and crop. They are already strong looking after a month of growing in the greenhouse, and should enjoy having fresh soil to spread into.
20/7
We walk up to ‘barking woods’ after work. The mountain of manure has gone, the ground where it sat for months is dark brown and flattened by the movements of the diggers. The field where the rape seed was has been lightly harrowed, enough to break the surface and striate the ground with even rows. Some of the manure has been dropped on the field. Perhaps they’ll return to plough it in properly, or harrow it further. The soil is hard and dusty. We kick up little puffs of it as we walk, like cowboys in a western.
22/7
Two days of cooler weather. The skies gauzy, but no rain. A brief respite from the monotony of heat.
We go to watch The Odyssey as a family. A brilliant adaptation by Christopher Nolan. As ever he uses sound as an integral part of the cinematic experience. You feel the roar of Poseidon's waves through the seats. It is a transporting, visceral, strangely moving film. Both my daughters, who have studied it at school, point to what Nolan misses out. I’m more interested by what he leaves in, and what he adds. Like Emily Wilson’s translation, there is a (slightly) more sympathetic representation of the women in this story than you might find in other adaptations, though it feels like Odysseus gets off a little lightly; necessary perhaps for the viewer to maintain empathy with him. The Homeric style of foregrounding everything needed for the story is maintained with Nolan’s use of multiple flashbacks. That Ithaca sits on the precipice of civilisational collapse as a result of Odysseus’s actions feels prescient to our contemporary situation. Though as I often tell my students, the end is always and ever will be nigh.
When I go to lock up the hens a half moon is low on the southern horizon, blood orange, like an omen. A harvester drones somewhere in the dark fields.
23/7
Hummingbird Moths have been visiting the flowers at the front of the cottage. It is easy to see how they got their name. They hover and move from flower to flower much like a hummingbird. The only hummingbirds I’ve ever encountered was in Mendoza, Argentina on our honeymoon. I hadn’t anticipated how tiny they would be, how brightly coloured. I learned recently that they migrate extraordinary distances across the Americas, moving with the seasons from Central America as far northwards as Canada, and presumably in South America, southwards to the cooler climes of Argentina and Chile. When I saw them in Mendoza it was mid-April, so the beginning of Autumn. Their namesake moths in our Norfolk garden are a bit larger than a bee and are a daytime moth. I think that I’ve only ever observed them at our cottage (though possibly I saw them in my childhood) at roughly this time of year.
In the evening there is a blackout due to an electricity pole falling over somewhere in the village. It lasts a few hours, enough time for the boardgames to emerge. I play monopoly with my daughters (and lose).
24/7
I am official on my summer annual leave. I pack away my work laptop; if only it was as easy to pack away my work mind.
The apples have been dropping off the tree in our little orchard over the last month. It has been too dry, and despite my efforts to water it, the tree has been rejecting its fruit. The apples that are left are ripening too early, or getting pecked at by birds looking for an easy meal . They will be smaller that most years, and I’d be amazed if their are any that haven’t fallen by the end of the August.
At the end of the day we walk to ‘barking woods’ and back, pursued by the buzzing of insects.
25/7
We wake to the smell of smoke, the pungent smell of vegetation burning. It has crept in through the window we left open at night. It is probably from the large woodland fire near Great Yarmouth that was burning all day yesterday. It is a reminder that everything is now tinder dry. It hasn’t rained in weeks. A reminder also of the fires raging in France, Spain, and Canada, of the habitats destroyed and the lives disrupted and lost. The whole of the northern hemisphere seems to be cooking, and yet still the climate change deniers bleat on about net-zero in their sad little culture war, and it feels as if fewer and fewer world leaders are willing to take the necessary political action to mitigate the impact of what is already the defining catastrophe of this century.
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On ‘This Party’s Over’ I publish my creative non-fiction, personal essays, place writing, and a country diary. My ‘Another Country Diary’ pieces are my most regular posts (about three or four a month).
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, oddball in its specificity.
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Another Country Diary #64
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“When I go to lock up the hens a half moon is low on the southern horizon, blood orange, like an omen.” Lovely writing, and I often feel that way about the red sunrises we get when wildfire smoke hangs in the air. But they can’t ALL be omens, or so I hope.
We get hummingbirds here in Canada at 48.5’N in the summer, and we always point and gasp. They are SO tiny. They winter in my sister’s area in Tucson, and she says they are FEISTY at feeders.
Compared to Canada geese, which (so it feels) go only a little south (they wintered in Colorado when I lived there), how much more must migration wear out hummingbirds! Like a toddler walking vs an adult.
Oh no... Cley pronouced 'Cl-eye' is gentrified? Surely not, that's how I've always pronounced it and I'm definitely not gentry!