Spring in England

My hands hurt. In the past I have complained about this because I was working with stone in Spain, but this year we are staying in England for spring and my hands hurt because I have been working with stone in England.

For me spring begins on the 21^st March. That’s potato planting day for those of us who plant potatoes. Years ago, when we had our little farm, I’d couple up the potato planter to the old Grey Ferguson tractor, empty a load of seed potatoes into the hopper, sit a child on each side to put the seed potatoes one-by-one into the chutes and tow the jolly lot along a newly ploughed bed. Nowadays I do it by hand, alone. In those old days I always planted loads of that old favourite Desiree: this year I put in just three short rows of Casablanca, an early variety which is new to me. I also planted carrot seed together with onions, leeks, parsnips and broad beans. The process of germination which I have now set in train for the umpteenth year still fascinates me, as does the complex workings of photosynthesis which will power the seedlings (hopefully) into productivity. For now my job there is done. I left it to the brilliant sunshine and the moisture in the soil to awaken the dry, seemingly inert, seeds.

I then moved on to the real challenge of my week: rebuilding a section of collapsed dry stone wall at the road end of our field in Stow on the Wold. Most people love to see Cotswold stone walls deliniatiating the landscape, but for me they evince mixed feeling.  From a distance I too think that they are lovely, but close up I view them more critically: do they have the right taper, what sort of stone was used in their making, was ungiving and untraditional mortar used to set the headers, were faults introduced between the layers? It’s not that I am an expert, far from it, but I know enough to be aware of the things that I do incorrectly.

Almost done

Don’t be inclined to romanticise the role of that lone and lonely stone laying man working away at the roadside (yet to see a woman doing it so far, but why not). It may seem like a work of art, but it is actually mind bendingly boring and frustrating work. The idea is never to cut a stone to shape. In Spain during the years I spent building my little caseta I spent some time searching for the right stone to fit the next space followed by quite a lot of cutting to shape. In the Cotswolds I do much more searching and rarely any shaping. Remember, these stones are not like bricks that fit neatly together, they are of random shapes and sizes and all surfaces have to link into the wall itself: yes, a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces quite fit. The best part of dry stone walling for me is to finish the job, then to walk far enough away from it so that I can view the overall effect without being distracted by the flaws.

As I paid for a pint at the Stocks on the night of the day that my task was completed, Pete the barman looked quizzically at my finger tips bound with fraying microporous tape.

“Been dry stone walling,” I answered the unasked question.

“You should ha’ worn gloves,” he said unsympathetically.

I smiled, whilst in my head I shouted, “I did, otherwise your bar would now be covered in streaks of blood, as would that twenty pound note I just gave you”.

So, back to Oxford where this blog was typed in pain whilst viewing daffodils nodding in the sun-warmed breeze through the spreading branches of a vast cherry tree with its first green leaves unfurling to expose red flower buds that will soon burst into a gloriously pink announcement of spring in the city. So very welcome.

Words from the Wise?

Just finished the draft of yet another novel and am holding my breath while I await initial comments from my two indefatigable first readers.

But there’s always something to do in Oxford. Recently, I crammed two lectures on very different topics into a single evening. One was on particle accelerators – don’t worry, I’m not going to faze you with the details. The speaker, Suzie Sheeny, was an attractive young woman from Australia and paraded her stuff in a lively presentational style that I found riveting. I have always been concerned about the Hadron Collider in Geneva: it cost so much to build and operate ($13.25 billion) and was so overly hyped that any result short of time travel was almost bound to be a disappointment to the general populace. Oh yes they did find this thing called the Higg’s Boson just where it was supposed to be. Was that it? Apparently so, and life goes on as before.

But Suzie convinced me that there was more. There are thousands and thousands of particle accelerators in the world nowadays and their existence and development do benefit from the work on the Collider. Most of these are used in medicine and they are, of course, much smaller, but they do have significant benefits in, for example, scanning and the treatment of cancer. Suzie’s work is in the development of accelerators that can be used in developing nations where the electricity supply is unstable and maintenance near non-existent. Great stuff.

Then, a rapid pedal from Trinity College to Corpus Christi. Though too late for the pre-lecture drinks, I did manage to get a decent seat at the back where I settled down to listen to Chris Patten’s take on the world. He is predominantly a politician, but also the Chancellor of Oxford University, the last Governor Hong Kong, etc, etc, etc. In deep contrast to Suzie the accelerator scientist, Patten’s main characteristic is gravitas, as befits his wide experience. He is just three years older than myself, but looks more. 

The scope of his lecture was grand – covering much of the last and current century. There were many interesting asides including a book reference which I have followed up, but the nub of his talk was a fairly depressing overview of the present state of the West. He touched on three major points: the 2008 economic crisis caused by excess borrowing and financial deregulation, growing inequality, and the “hollowing out” of political parties. On the latter he attacked his old organization in the UK, the Conservative Party, particularly its falling membership and, he claimed, its consequent move to extremism. A member of the audience, who sounded a lot like me, asked him why the Labour Party demonstrated the opposite effect – more members, more extreme.

He also touched on immigration from a European perspective and in so doing helped to develop my own thoughts when he contrasted the empathy evoked by drownings in the Mediterranean with facts concerning the African country of Niger where women start having children at 15 years and give birth, on average, to 7 children.

There was an elephant in the tiered theater of Oxford’s smallest college that evening, but the chairman drew back the curtains with a last question, the Brexit question. At this Lord Patten cast away his mask of philosophical equanimity and stepped in front of the dais to get closer to the audience and speak of madness and delusion. Phew, and this on the very day that Donald Tusk used the fast famous phrase, ‘special place in hell’. Fortunately, there was a little wine left to calm the frayed Brexit nerves after the show and this fuelled my cycle journey home through the rain to discuss this, and more, with my neighbour Carlos.