Chestnuts not Pumpkins

I haven’t been able to take country walks for a few months now, owing to my faulty foot. 

It has made me feel disorientated. 

Every year I monitor the seasons closely, marking the time of year by what is coming into bloom, what going to seed.

I am delighted when a sunny weekend summons a cloud of butterflies from their pupae, or when a wistful breeze in late summer has the swallows congregating on the telegraph lines. 

I’m even happy when oncoming Autumn means all the blades of grass are hung with spiders’ silk hammocks.

But this year, deprived of the usual signs of the turning seasons, I feel stranded back in the early summer.

“Wait, it can’t be Autumn yet – I haven’t had my summer.”

Thanks to the buses, I have been better at getting to the town centre than to the country.

But in the shops, the seasons are weirdly distorted.

In the shops, seasons start and end long before the weather and daylength mark the actual season.

In the shops, a season only exists AT ALL if it presents a merchandising opportunity.

Now, for several weeks, it has been orange pumpkins and tinsel - Halloween with Christmas trimmings. No mention of Autumn.

I was desperate to find some reality and begged Nigel, Carenza and Will to take me gathering chestnuts in the woods, something I do most years. 

We had missed most of the sleek brown nuts in their prickly cases, but gathered just enough to put by for the chestnut stuffing to serve with Christmas dinner in a couple of months’ time.

More than that, it was a relief to see sun shining through the yellow and bronze leaves of the wood and to encounter Autumn in her considerable beauty.

This Cornish hairdresser was celebrating Halloween,
but I'm not sure it would make me want to get my hair cut there.

People’s Vote

I had plans for Saturday.  Perran and Carenza were joining us and we had tickets for the Space Shifters exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

But there was something else going on that day – something that hadn’t been part of the plan, but that we all really cared about.

The train up to London was bulging with people dressed in blue, trimmed with yellow stars.  One small boy was carrying a blue banner saying “I missed football for this.”

It was the march for a people’s vote on the final deal for BREXIT – a chance to vote when we really knew what we were voting for.

“But we couldn’t march anyway, Clare, because you’re still on crutches,” said Nigel.

The Space Shifters exhibition was excellent, playing with our senses, the sculptures making us feel unbalanced, as if we might float away or trip over into an abyss.

Thing is, since the votes for BREXIT and Trump, I have felt like that anyway, disorientated and stumbling on shifting ground.

As we came out into the sunshine, I said “We could still get to Parliament Square in time for the rally.”

So we did – I clunked along the South Bank and Westminster Bridge and found a sunny wall to lean on outside the Houses of Parliament as the marchers surged in.

I spotted at least three people in wheelchairs, one breathing through a tube. Made crutches seem a pretty minor problem.

Carenza kept winding me up that we were going to get “kettled” but there was no sign of that and the fact that in the UK we can still demonstrate peacefully against government policy began to help me feel I was standing on solid ground again.

Votes for Women – Triumphant Banner

A thread running through my year has been Annabel O’ Docherty making a suffragist banner to hang in our old college, Girton.  It is a replica of the hundred-year-old original, carried in marches for women’s votes and shared by Girton and Newnham, the Cambridge women’s colleges. 

Newnham has the original, but thanks to Annabel, Girton now has a stunning and extremely accurate replica. 

In April Annabel took me on the initial trip to Newnham to measure the banner (click through for story).  She also had me along in July to the Women's Library at the LSE, where Gillian Murphy showed us some similar banners. I was never quite sure why she was kind enough to include me but thought that perhaps it was because I was good at research.

But best of all, even though I was on crutches, and a complete liability, she included me as her “plus one” when invited to the Founders’ and Benefactors’ dinner at Girton. 

We were excited to discover that we were seated at the High Table and a little overwhelmed by the extraordinary women who surrounded us, their CVs glittering with public honours and with “first”s (e.g. Baroness Higgins, first female president of the International Court of Justice).

After scary ladder work,
Annabel with Jeff from Mantenance

But to my delight, I was opposite my long-ago tutor, Marilyn Strathern, whose tremendous career I had watched from afar.  It was great to catch up.

The banner looked stunning and both The Mistress, Susan Black, and Baroness Hale made speeches in front of it.

It is also a concrete representation of our college friendship group which has lasted thirty-five years and many of whom contributed to the cost of making the banner, and a commemoration of the three of our friends who died young – Malcolm, Steve and Hugh.

So why, when so many were involved, did Annabel take me along? Was it, as I had supposed, for my prowess in research?

In fact she revealed the true reason in an email to our friends afterwards:

“Clare was my emotional support person (like those tortoises, peacocks and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that some people have started taking on board aeroplanes).”

Vietnamese pot-bellied pig?!?

Journey into Technicolor

Ten weeks after my foot surgery, it was my birthday, and Nigel and I made a trip to meet Perran and Carenza at the Turner Prize Exhibition at the Tate Britain.

Life on crutches has been limiting, but on the journey, I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, when the world changes to Technicolor.

In the tunnels of the London underground, I spotted a young woman carrying in front of her a homemade birthday cake topped with glistening white icing and silver balls.  She obviously lacked suitable tupperware as the cake was uncovered. Her face was shining, and I wanted very much to see the end of her journey when her friend received the cake, hopefully unharmed.

But the press of people carried her on.

Then on the platform were two young men.  One was showing the other a gift that he had wrapped for their friend.  Inside the parcel was a large piece of art.  I couldn’t see the picture, of course.  However, I could admire the way he had carefully cut and folded several different sheets of colourful paper to make an ingenious pattern.

When we met Perran and Carenza, I told them about these Birthday-themed sightings.

And after the Turner prize exhibition, there was one more.  I thought I had left it too late and missed Anthea Hamilton’s mischievous Squash, creating havoc in the main hallway.  

But there it was, a performer dressed as a gourd, loitering and lounging among the older Tate exhibits. 

Carenza said that when she saw the Squash before, it had been much more lively.  We wondered whether it was perhaps a hung-over Squash today. 

Maybe it had had a birthday too.

Passive aggressive bluebells

I am still on crutches, but this weekend managed to clump as far as a lovely bluebell wood within the new forest of Heartwood.

Increased numbers of visitors have meant that the magical narrow tracks which once wound through the hornbeams are now flattened muddy runways. 

The Woodland Trust has clearly decided that gentle nudging is the way to prevent further damage.  Lining the path was a series of wooden posts.  On each was a rhyme:

“Help us beat the bluebell blues,

a problem caused by boots and shoes.

Keep to the path, enjoy the view

and let the new green leaves push through.”

or

“As leaves unfurl and buds hang free,

they hint at beauty we’ll soon see;

but if dogs or walkers go off track,

we may never get that beauty back.”

Having seen young families running amok in the woods, I’m not convinced they will be sensitive enough to respond to this.

I have emailed the Woodland Trust to suggest they stop shilly-shallying and protect the bluebells with electrified barbed wire.

I think the rhymes on the posts could also do with being just a tad more direct:

“When you’re in the woods,

spare the bluebells’ life;

Or we’ll cut your ears off

with a rusty knife.”

(There was a second verse about posting the severed ears to their mother, but I couldn’t make it scan.)

However, in spite of all this, it was lovely to be out again, back in the woods, and I took special care not to whack the bluebell bulbs with my crutches.

photo by Rosie