11 June: Going Viral LXXX, Summertime

Westgate Gardens, Canterbury, May 29, 2021

There have been two times this year when I breathed more freely, both occurred when the weather was fine, but that was not the only reason.

We go back, first of all, to the Monday when schools reopened for all pupils. I don’t know if any homework was set that day, but I was walking through the city around 5.00 p.m. and there was a tangible air of joy around the place. It felt as if every teenager had gone home and dressed in their best and now they were gathering in the parks, on the steps of the theatre, in the disused car park – now adopted by skate-boarders, roller-skaters and people too young legally to use the electric scooters scattered around the town.

Everywhere though, the buzz of face to face chatter. It was so good to witness the love and solidarity bubbling up all around the town.

There followed weeks of inclement weather, a cold, dry, April, a cold, wet May. Dedicated walkers ventured out, many people did not seem to. Then the last long weekend in May that came with a bank holiday Monday was endowed with sunshine and warmth. This picture was taken quite early in the Saturday in one of the big city centre parks. The building in the background is Tower House, official residence of the Lord Mayor. The River Stour flows along the left of the picture behind a stone wall. It is liable to flood in wintertime but now entices young and old to look for fish or feed the ducks. When my grandson was 18 months old he ran across the grass to join some Italian students playing rugby. The lawns are also popular for picnics.

I wonder when we will be welcoming language students again, but that weekend it was good to see our own young people and families enjoying each other’s company. Long may it continue.

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30 January: Going UN-viral! At the Edge of the City: Manchester.

I came upon this three year old post when raiding the Will Turnstone blog for a picture of snowdrops for Mary Webb yesterday. A walk in the pre-pandemic park which I hope you enjoy!

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Recently Mrs T and I were at the southern edge of Manchester, in Didsbury, and walked away from the houses, across the main road, into Fletcher Moss Park. I expected Fletcher Moss to be a wetland, as in Chat Moss and other boggy areas around Manchester, but it is named after Mr Fletcher Moss, who gave his house and estate to the city of Manchester early last century.

The land does slope down to the River Mersey, and the lower areas were too wet for our city shod feet, so my expectations were not altogether dashed.

Before we arrived at the park, we crossed the tramway by this Poppy Bridge, remembering the fallen of the Great War. Nearby children from three local schools have scattered poppy seed, to flower this summer, 100 years since the end of that war. (And flower they did, in profusion.)

After walking through Didsbury Park, well populated by young children and parents off to meet siblings from those three local schools, we came to the edge of Fletcher Moss Park, with its sports fields and fine benches including Rory’s Bench, covered in carved creatures, and a formidable lacrosse player. The game is more popular in these parts than most of England.

Mr Moss’s garden had been a little neglected in recent times, until a voluntary group was formed to undertake many of the City Council’s responsibilities. We admired the hellebores in the beds near the house, including this one, thriving in the cold.

Also near the house were witch hazel bushes, worth seeing silhouetted against the grey sky as well as in colour on the dark background of walls and branches. This computer cannot share the scent, clean and sharp.

More scent, sweeter this time, at ground level from snowdrops and oxlips, a hybrid between primroses and cowslips.

A little further and we were at a corner of rainforest – well most English people know that if you can see the Pennine Hills from Manchester, it is going to rain; if you can’t see them, it must be raining.

It wasn’t raining yet … and just around the corner a bank of heather – erica – a plant that shuns our alkaline soil in East Kent.

How’s this for early March?

We wandered down to the next level; as I said, it was too muddy for city shoes to approach the river, but there was a clump of young willow ablaze in the afternoon light. I’m told by my colleagues at L’Arche that for weaving and basket making, the golden-green and the dark red not only contrast well when woven together, they have slightly different properties. I must learn more.

And I must come back to Fletcher Moss next time I’m visiting family in Manchester, and see how it looks in other seasons. Many thanks to the volunteers who are helping the City council care for this treasure.

(This post was scheduled before the Mersey flooded much of this area in January 2012.)

27 June: Intergalactic Exploration XXXVIII: Alien or Englishwoman?

Image from CD

The following day found the three of them walking under the trees in the park, escaping some of the evening wind and keeping a weather eye open for parrots and squirrels. At least Ajax and Alfie were thus occupied, T’s face lit up when he saw a familiar face, Greta from the coffee shop in the old bus near the railway station. She’d been out of work and out of sight for weeks and now here she was, striding around the park in black leotard and pink floral tights with matching trainers.

‘Hello Mr T’, she said, slightly out of breath. ‘I thought you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.’

– ‘What does she mean?’ Alfie flashed. ‘Does she know we are aliens?’ ‘Even more alien than Asian sailors,’ growled Alfie. ‘How can she know?’ ‘Maybe she’s an alien too.’

Greta glanced at her wrist. ‘9, 563 steps so far on this walk. That means I can get my 10,000 before I get home. I have to be there for 5.30 this evening. I’ve been doing at least 10,000 steps a day ever since we were closed.’

– ‘No alien would be walking 10,000 steps, Alfie.’ ‘No? What about the treadmill and weights in the pod?’ – ‘Will you two be quiet!’ flashed T, then let them off the lead.

‘A delivery coming?’ he asked Greta.

‘No, we have an appointment to read bedtime stories to our grandchildren in Gibraltar. We haven’t seen them for months, and we don’t know when we will see them, so three nights a week we read their stories. 5.30 here is 6.30 there, time for bed. I’d better keep moving!’

‘She’s got to be human. No alien that I’ve ever known would obsess about getting 10,000 steps in, and then sit down to read bedtime stories to faraway grandchildren,’ T said to himself.

January 26: Witness against nature, Browning I.

Here is Elizabeth Barrett, writing to her fellow poet Robert Browning – the man who would become her husband. He lived at New Cross in South London, then – in 1846 – being developed for housing and industry complete with railways into London itself. Browning lived at the bottom of Telegraph Hill, sufficiently high to have held a signalling tower to semaphore military messages between Whitehall and the naval yards.

“So you really have hills at New Cross, and not hills by courtesy? I was at Hampstead once—and there was something attractive to me in that fragment of heath with its wild smell, thrown down … like a Sicilian rose from Proserpine’s lap when the car drove away, … into all that arid civilization, laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,’ as you say!—and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with its witness against nature! People grew severely in jest about cockney landscape—but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off?”

This bridge leads to one of Manchester’s green spaces, Fletcher Moss Park. In the Brownings’ time the River Mersey there was all but dead, since it was used as a waste disposal system by mills and factories. The upper photograph shows how the cemetery at Mile End has become a precious haven of nature. Even in Canterbury, the river flowing under the Franciscan chapel in this was once an open sewer. Much has changed for the better, there are trout there now, but the smoke Elizabeth Barrett marvelled at has been replaced by a less visible cloud of pollution from vehicles. A witness against Nature indeed!

This is the first of an occasional series of reflections based on the letters between the Brownings.

(Quotation from “The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846” by Robert Browning) Available from Project Gutenberg or Kindle.

October 7. In the park: what would you do?

This story turned out not to be about a beggar, but I have since seen the same woman walking by, talking to herself, but always wearing clean clothes. The last in this short season.

It was high summer, and what T and I saw lying on the grass was not a broken branch but a woman, who we thought might have been broken. More than once I have seen drunk and incapable people lying next to the cycle path. There was cause for concern.

T and I were indeed concerned but hesitated to approach the woman. She was warm and in a safe place after all. I said I would see if she was still there when I walked the dogs, Ajax and Alfie.

She was still there, but before we had done our round of the park, the Cathedral bell, Great Dunstan, announced five o’clock. The lady sat up, gathered her belongings and walked away.

T laughed when I told her the next day. It’s good when your fears are shown to be groundless. And no need to see the lady home, which would have been a challenge with two chihuahuas!

Thanks to NAIB for the photograph.