Home is where the Frog Is

 

As I leave the car, I often go back and peer in through the window.  I am checking the handbrake.  It is always on.  I set off down the pavement again.  After a few paces, I take the key controls from my pocket, point them at the car, press the ‘locked’ symbol.  The car flashes to me that it was already locked.

After eighteen months of working at home (and in fact doing everything else at home too!), I am unused to going out anywhere much and I react to the strangeness by over-checking the car. 

As I’ve already said, getting away on holiday was especially momentous in a year when there were so many obstacles.  We were so fortunate to get away for a week, but it felt weird. It was hard to leave the house and garden with which we have become so much more intimately involved.

But the flipside of this is that homecoming means so much more.  We exclaimed at the fresh blooms on the rudbeckia, the tomatoes reddening in the greenhouse and the young squabs in the dovecote.  at the birdfeeders were the fluffy offspring of bluetits’ and coaltits’ second broods.

But once the car was unpacked, the thing I most wanted to do was to sit beside our little pond.  A gang of the most miniature new froglets were hopping about while a larger one skulked patiently amongst the waterlilies, waiting for a passing fly.

‘Ah!’ I called to Nigel, ‘Home is where the frog is.’

Enhanced Reality

 Pascoe showed me a phone app which gave an enhanced reality view of the world - extra information about whatever he pointed his phone at.

But I’ve been finding that taking an interest in wildlife has the effect of enhancing my reality.
The other day we walked along the Northumberland coast near Low Newton.

The dunes were more colourful than the Chelsea flower show with bloody cranesbill, burnet rose and cinquefoil.

An area of beach had been cordoned off for ground nesting birds. At first it looked to us empty, the sand broken only by hummocks of maram grass. Yet as we watched, something moved.  Finally, we made out a family of ringed plovers, the parents with their natty, black-banded plumage, the chicks brownish and fluffy yet agile, able to run and hide.
Beneath Dunstanburgh castle, a parabolic cliff magnified the onomatopoeiac cries of the kittiwakes and the cackles of the fulmars nesting there, while a raft of razor bills looked on from the water beneath
Later on, I played the RSPB app birdcalls on my phone and duetted with firstly a sedge warbler and then a reed bunting.

And last of all, the thing that set the crown on the afternoon. Nearly back at the car park, I cast a casual eye over a brackish pond and saw an avocet with its immaculate black and white plumage and its unique upturned bill.  Once nearly extinct in the UK, this was a special sighting.

Really nothing at all had happened to us that day on our eight mile hike, but the wildlife made me feel as if it had been an incredibly eventful day.

Pre-holiday tension

We had been planning a trip to Bamburgh – a chance to combine a holiday with our grown-up children with visiting Nigel’s family in Northumberland.

A week on the English coast seemed like a very down-to-earth option.

But in the ten days beforehand I realised the holiday was in fact a preposterous proposition.

How on earth could six of us, including three from London and one from Edinburgh hope to escape the surging new wave of Covid?

And even if we escaped Covid itself, how could we possibly avoid getting pinged and told to self isolate?

I began to have a mental picture of Bamburgh Castle surrounded by clouds – we had built a castle in the air.

The solution should have been to undertake as little social contact as possible for ten days before the holiday.

But we all had various long-standing commitments - in Nigel’s case, a trip into central London.

A couple of days before the holiday, Nigel sounded a bit wheezy. 

‘It’s hayfever!’

The next day, still wheezy.

‘My hayfever has triggered my asthma.’

Finally, he took a test.  I had so many parts of my anatomy crossed that I nearly strained myself.

It was negative.

And miraculously, all the youngsters were also in the clear.

I still can’t believe we all got to Bamburgh!

And the other thing I can’t believe is how quickly the long-awaited week rushed by.

Photo shows us with David & Carolyn - Pascoe's godparents