Departure lounge ramblings on music, places, climate change and stuff outdoors

Archive for ‘May, 2020’

Starting to know redstarts

I didn’t know a redstart from a robin a year ago, but thanks to lockdown I’ve been getting to know a pair of them that have taken residence half way up the bridleway at the back of our house. The size of robin but with longer wings and tail, and with a similarly arresting, but slightly more rusty, splash of red on their breast, the male redstart also sports a white crown, black throat and boisterous, insistent call. One might call them noisy neighbours, but I have loved having them nearby.

A cloud of unidentified leafish objects

Hearing unforecasted rain hitting the tarmac the other evening, I ventured outside anyway, having been looking forward to a nightwalk. Beyond the sound-proofing of the door the noise was cacophanous and I almost retreated back inside. But, belatedly, I noted the absence of moisture in the air and, slowly, realised that what I had assumed to be the patter of raindrops was in fact the flutter of a thousand leaves being blown up the drive. Venturing further out, I spent a pleasant but futile few minutes trying to catch some, before settling for scooping up a handful from the floor. They were unlike any leaf I had ever seen and it has taken me a week of stolen minutes with the markontour “library” to derive their origin, such is my city-boy lack of basic wildlife knowledge. But it has been fun learning and, in the end, it turned out that buried deep in my brain was my Mum introducing me to the parent-tree as a boy.

The Nanny State Made Me

If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything it is the life-saving difference between good and bad government, and why the foundation of a successful society is strong, well-funded and universal public services. This, of course, shouldn’t have needed reaffirming. As Stuart Maconie points out in ‘The Nanny State Made Me’, a book that is both wonderfully entertaining and annotate-every-page informative, “The people who complain about the ‘nanny state’ are the people who had nannies”. Nevertheless, in most parts of the western world the public sector has been on the receiving end of a forty year battering. Perhaps this pandemic will be the moment when it bounces back off the ropes.

In celebration of cuckoos – Britain’s naughtiest bird

Our neighbourhood cuckoo returned on 16 April and has been rewarding us with his song ever since, which reminded me of a blog post Ms Markontour wrote last year about Britain’s naughtiest bird which I never got around to publishing. One of the upsides of lockdown is having time to be in one place and appreciate the changing of the seasons, so it was lovely to read this again today and I hope you enjoy it too.