Glacial Galtees

Week after week, the frost has held fast; on some days, the sun can chase it from the grass, but rarely from the shade. Below the sun's reach, the ice is creeping deeper into the earth; mud has set like cement, and the ice reaches a full foot below the ground. Freezing fogs turn bare branches into a freezing filigree, every twig heavy with ice crystals. Apart from the fog, the sky stays clear, and the stars shine bright and hard, the colours more brilliant than I can remember, with Mars a brooding red, Sirius a really cool and brilliant blue. All over Europe, the snow is thick - but not here.

Serious frost foils local arachnid

Now, a weather front rolling in from the east has delivered the coup de glace; at dawn, a weak sun cast a rosy light on the Galtees, covered at last in a deep blanket of fresh snow, smooth and dangerous. I can resist anything - except tempation; packing for the mountains takes fifteen minutes. My walk starts in an oak wood, as fresh snow begins to fall, whitening a path that had been bare. Beyond the last trees, sheet ice makes the lower mountain treacherous and adds an extra frisson to fording streams. Higher, knee deep snow lies beneath an icy crust that nearly supports my weight. Unfortunately, I have no snow shoes; and so the going, on a trackless mountainside, is brutally hard.

Icy stream, the Galtees

Then, a devastating disappointment; reaching the slope that I wanted to sled down, blades of grass rising above the snow have collected thick sheaths of ice. They form an endless forest of finger-thick spikes, glittering like glass as the sun breaks through. Gorgeous, but totally un-sledgable. I am getting tired; the going is too hard, the snow too deep, the ground too rough; I need a way out. There is my own trail up, but even that will not be easy going. Suddenly, sunset seems all too close.

At exactly the right moment, walkers appear higher on the slope, moving very quickly and easily; the ground allows me only a waist up view, but I can see they have found a better way. More slogging gets me higher, to a mountain trail; here, the snow is well trodden, and at last I can walk easily, and look beyond my next step. After the slog of the deep snow off-trail, the relief is incredible. The air is very clear, and I can see a great distance over a completely frozen landscape. At this height, no stream can flow, and the only sound is the crunch of the snow beneath my boots and the whistle of an east wind carrying arctic overtones. It lifts and flips my improvised sled (a bodyboard) and numbs my face, so that when I call my wife, I stumble over my sibilants.

This high place is wild, beautiful, and killing cold; reluctantly, I turn to descend the path as the valley below sinks into shadow, muscles already two-thirds spent, fresh bruises darkening. I am exquisitely happy, intoxicated with the magic of deep winter in high places.

Remembrance

On a chilly November 11th, red flowers on lapels bring my mind back to a sunny August evening in Normandy, when I stood on a low hill carpeted with golden fields and striped with lush green hedgerows. On that summit stands a circle of stones, each pointing a to each nearby town or village, and naming it. Besides the name, a number has also been engraved into each stone; the price, in lives, paid for each village. Even the single-digit numbers seem terribly big.

Nearby, I walked a perfectly manicured lawn, reviewing neat ranks of very clean tombstones. Each has a name and an age, and usually a simple but heartbreaking message from a spouse or parent. The men beneath the stones are all very young.

These places are old now; but somewhere, new holes are being dug and a mason cuts new stones. Here is hoping that in some years, he will need to find other work.

Probable Pippistrelle

A furry stranger arrived in our garden this evening; he was found clinging upside down to a shrub. We watched as he began to scramble from twig to twig. Now and then, he would flutter a couple of feet, but couldn't quite get into the air.

Pipistrellis pipistrellis

A quick look at the small ears and nose and some leafing through my wildlife guides, I had him down as a Pippistrelle (Latin for "I squeak" - and I can confirm first-hand that they do). These little guys eat maybe two or three thousand insects in their nightly four-hour hunts, finding their prey with FM sonar - catching a fresh victim as often as every 4 seconds.

The trailing edge of his last wing seemed a little damaged; I took him from our cat-haunted garden, and left him hanging upside-down (the right way up, for a bat) from a tree.

Together, harmony

Sitting at the piano, tinkering with the motifs and fragments that might one day gel into a soundtrack, I rattle through variation after variation, evolving note by note the music I will need to accompany the landscapes playing in my memory's screening room. As a freezing desert and a distant mountain range float before my eyes, I search higher into the treble, trying for the phrases that will wrap the chill of distant glaciers around my viewer's skin.

Suddenly, an unexpected chord lifts me from the frozen wastes and drops me back in a cosy sitting room, where a warm weight, 11 kilos or so, rests on my lap; the chord sounds again, and I look down at the keys past a huge mop of blonde hair. Two chubby little index fingers descend again, and the chord rises for the third time. Then, a really gappy imitation of a scale... two huge blue eyes look up at Dad, and a huge gappy smile rewards my applause. 13 months old!

p.s. I love being a Dad

Not getting wrecked

I wish I had read this post a couple of months ago. Reader, you cannot be too-well moored.

Time traveller?

Who is Alex Boote?

Rescue

My wife bellowed, then shot past the window, accelerating so fast that she assumed a reddish tint. I followed her out, and found her standing in front of the gate which guards our neighbour's yard, faced off against our very angry cat. Behind the gate, a very frightened juvenile starling huddled against a wall, shivering. No wonder: apart from being soaked in cat saliva, each and every tail-feather had been extracted from a now-naked behind.

Manouevering carefully to keep myself between the bird and any effective cover, I raced to catch it, expecting at any moment to be overtaken by the assassin (now using the cover of a high wall, to attempt a flanking manoeuvre). The little starling hopped and fluttered away from me for a few yards, then became hopelessly entangled in a dwarf pine - ouch! Seconds later, it was secured (in a former cat-carrier, the one we used for our cat (Sox) until he developed the muscle to simply shoulder his way through the door).

~

Google got me some key bird facts: starlings need lots of protein, and birds generally tail-feathers regrow in 4-6 weeks, their loss being a common defensive mechanism. I read that minus tail-feathers, flight should still possible (which made sense - not much survival value in sacrificing a tail if you have to walk away afterwards). Excellent news.

~

Our violently shivering little patient enjoyed a couple of hours resting and warming up in protective custody (our shed); fortunately for its peace of mind, it couldn't see our rascally cat as he tried, in succession, to tunnel through shed floor, to pry the doors open, to deglaze the windows. The would-be murderer was preparing to peel back the roof when I removed the patient to my car, and took off at speed, braking hard once or twice to shake any furry fiends from the undercarriage, and following up with a few hand-brake turns, just in case he was pursuing in another vehicle.

In a quiet lay-by between a small river and some exceptionally beautiful parkland, I put the cat box on the ground and opened the door for a flight test. With no homes close by, I could assume there weren't too many lurking housecats, and with plenty of bare ground, a flightless bird could easily be recaptured, while a flying one could soon reach good cover and good hunting. There was a momentary pause: then, with an explosion of beating wings, the patient shot from the box, and made an almost immediate lift off, climbing in a straight and steady line to a perch in a nearby a tree. The thrill of flight was amazing, as if I had taken to the air myself. I stayed a minute at the tree-lined river bank, enjoying the golden light of early sunset on the mass fresh green foliage and the warmth of a June evening; and then I drove home, to be sulked at by my rascally cat.