Well Readers, after an overnight flight I’ve arrived in Cape Town and met the rest of the group for our Naturetrek plant tour. Unusually, there are three couples and no less than five single female travellers, so I’m not floating around as a gooseberry. Everyone seems really pleasant so far, and we set off for our trip to the town of Worcester in high spirits. As you can possibly just see in the photo above, however, Table Mountain had disappeared behind a blanket of rain, and so the day continued. By the time we got to our lunch stop, the rain was absolutely torrential. And so we didn’t get to the Botanical Garden to see the tortoises after all, though hopefully there will be lots more tortoises in our future.

To get to the other side of the mountains, though we had to go through the Huguenot Tunnel, a rather remarkable piece of engineering – it’s  3.9 kilometre s long, and was completed in 1988. It’s named for the Huguenot refugees who came to Cape Town originally in the 17th century, after the Edict of Fontainebleu outlawed protestantism in France.

I was wondering what these structures were – apparently they’re made by mole rats (not the naked sort). Also known as Blesmols, these little chaps spend most of their lives digging tunnels with their incisor teeth, Rather like the moles in the UK, these animals are rarely seen, though signs of their presence are everywhere.

Blesmol 0r African mole-rat (Photo by By Sharry Goldman – Cropped from: Seney ML, Kelly DA, Goldman BD, Šumbera R, Forger NG (2009) Social Structure Predicts Genital Morphology in African Mole-Rats. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7477. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007477.g001, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8103555)

Tonight we’re staying over in Worcester, at the Habit Guest House. Why it has that name is anyone’s guess, but it’s a very fine building, though the omnipresent window bars and razor wire take some getting used to at first. Plus, this is a first…

So I’m off to make a cup of Roibos tea, and then it’s an early dinner and bed. The weather forecast looks much better tomorrow, so fingers crossed!

Dear Readers, I am sitting in the lounge at Heathrow Terminal Five, waiting for my 22.30 flight to Cape Town. I’ve paid 75 quid for the lounge, but it’s pretty poor to be honest – still, that’s what you get when you’ve delusions of grandeur. There’s some lumpy rice with chilli con carne, and the staff stick a reserved sign on any available chair, even when it’s half empty, so I’ve no idea what’s going on. There is a really splendid view of the run way, so it’s not all bad. And I do have a long wait until my flight, so it’s nice to have a comfy chair.

As I sit here, my thoughts turn to how on earth our cat Abbie is going to cope with just John in the house. As you can see, she likes to keep an eye on me by sitting on the back of the sofa and watching for any sudden movements. John, being a chap, is somewhat prone to sudden movements, which are greeted with a hearty hiss, and a look of utter contempt. But the cat will have to put up with John being her servant for the next twelve days. John already does most of the feeding, so hopefully by the time I retune, a rapprochement will have been reached.

In general, Abbie is settling in very nicely. Sometimes she runs around chasing one of her toy mouse (bought for her by the man next door who was trying to win her over), but then she just collapses, as in the photo above, as if the plug has been pulled out. And although  we’ve never fed her from the table, someone clearly has, as every time we sit down she appears, round-eyed with expectation.

Hey ho. I’m sure that cat and husband will do perfectly well without me to organise everything, and if nothing else, they’ll be glad when I return. In the meantime, there’s a ten and a half hour flight to look forward to, followed by customs/security/baggage retrieval, followed by piling into a mini bus and heading north from Cape Town to Worcester. We hope to go to the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, which has lots of examples of the succulents that thrive in this habitat. Plus there are three tortoise species, and mongoose (or mongeese, I’m never sure). I’m so excited! Let’s see what we see. I do think by the time I get to Worcester I’m going to be well ready for a sleep.

Typical Robertson Karoo ecosystem (Photo By Abu Shawka – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36580561)

Angulate Tortoise

Leopard Tortoise (Photo By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE – Leopard Tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40724152)

Parrot-beaked tortoise (Photo By frank wouters – originally posted to Flickr as Beaked cape tortoise, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3773517)

Photo By Paul Danese – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141414631

Dear Readers, the American poet Wendell Berry died on Monday, so it feels only appropriate to share this, probably his best known poem, with you all. I feel as if I need this today, and maybe you do too.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Dear Readers, it’s strange, but when I’ve got a trip coming up I always feel neither here nor there, as if I can’t really concentrate on anything. But a good remedy for that is a walk around St Pancras and Islington Cemetery – it’s one of the few places around here where you can really see the sky (which always reminds me of being in Africa, where the sky seems to go on forever). I was also curious to see how the place was holding up following the drought.

Well, the clay soil is cracking open in lots of places, and many of the paths, even the recently-laid tarmac ones, are full of  cracks. I’m guessing that trees will get the blame for much of the subsidence and heave in London, but actually it’s mostly down to the geology. In fact, taking trees out can make the soil rebound as there’s nothing to soak up the rain when it does come. But there we go. The only winners here are the insurance companies.

My favourite swamp cypress is doing very well, and is even producing seeds this year.

And many of the rose bushes also seem to have done very well, especially the native dog roses and many other species too. The hips will be much appreciated by the Redwings and Fieldfares when they get here shortly.

The grass is still looking very sad, but we’ve had a few showers over the last few days, and some patches are already greening up. I’ve noted before how resilient some of the native daisy plants are, and there are lots of examples of plants that, although smaller and more stunted than usual, have managed to produce flowers.

And where there’s been a little  bit of rain, the birds-foot trefoil has sprung into flower.

So, although the plants look a bit tired and sad, there’s still plenty of life here. There were lots of green woodpeckers yaffling too – I imagine digging for ants (their usual food) has been hard, but a bit of rain will loosen everything up. Talking of ants, I’ve had several incursions of the little chaps into the house when the summer was at its hottest, maybe scouting further afield because of the lack of food. But there’s a definite whiff of autumn in the air already, and the prematurely-fallen leaves are scrunching underfoot all through the cemetery. By the time I get back from South Africa, my thoughts will definitely be turning towards the end of the year.

Dear Readers,  I am very excited to tell you about an upcoming adventure that I’m hoping to share with you all. Later this week, I’m off on a group tour of the Western Cape in South Africa – as this is mostly concerned with plants, my husband is staying at home. Our route is above, and I’ll be gone for about 14 days in total, including two long flights.

I am  slightly apprehensive, as this will be my first ‘solo’ holiday since I broke my leg back in 2024. In fact, I was originally planning to go to Svalbard, but the combination of rough seas and slippery icy landings made me think this wasn’t the most sensible plan. On the other hand, walking amongst the flowers of the Cape in spring is a very pleasant alternative, and I will be fascinated by the variety of ecosystems that we explore. I am ready to learn a lot, and to make friends with some other plant fanatics. I have been to South Africa before, but only for work (with one brief expedition to the Kruger many years ago), so I am looking forward to acquainting myself with this magnificent part of the world.

I am hoping that I’ll be able to blog as I go along, but please don’t worry if I miss a day – there’s always the chance of no Wi-Fi, exhaustion or, indeed, too much of the Cape’s delicious food and wine.

In the meantime, there’s packing to do, and last minute ‘things’ to sort out. But here’s a taste of what I hope to see…

Dear Readers, while I was in Austria this year, I was berating myself for knowing enough German to order a ‘black tea with milk’ and not much more. But many of my friends had been extolling the virtues of Duolingo, and so I thought I’d give it a go. Well, Readers, clearly it isn’t designed for exactly my demographic, as I find myself having a ‘video call’ with a bear called Falstaff, and another with a chippy teenager called Lily. But it is rather a lot of fun, and I find I can now say all sorts of useful things in German. I can ask where the airport is, and  say that I’ve lost my passport. I can tell someone that their apartment is bright and empty. Who knew that the German for ‘bright’ is ‘hell’? I can say that my brother is nice and also funny. I can say that I’m hungry, thirsty and have a fever. And a cough.

But what entertains me most is making up unlikely sentences. I could tell you that my sick rabbit is in the bathroom, that your various relatives are cheap but athletic, and that my horse likes to hike and to do yoga. I can tell you that the doctor is small but expensive. I could even tell you that the bakery is in Canada. Whether I’d remember any German at all in the face of a real German or Austrian person, who wasn’t a bear, I have no idea.

When I was desperately learning French  for my trip to an ape sanctuary in Cameroon, I used Rosetta Stone, an altogether more grown up app, but I supplemented it with real classes, with a real teacher. I had been terrified out of learning any languages at school, where our French teacher, Mr Partridge, was rumoured to have occasional bouts of malaria. He also had a ‘friend’ in Morocco that nobody talked about. The slightest confusion between la and le, and you were toast. As a result, we all spoke French in an indeterminate mumble, in the hope that our transgressions wouldn’t be picked up. Alas, Mr Partridge was like a mistaken-noun-gender-seeking rocket, and we would be humiliated roundly. No wonder we all hated French. At one point we had a rather lovely French teaching assistant, who was  actually French. Instead of making us feel small, she would praise us for what we did get right. On one occasion, she brought in Brie and Camembert for us East End kids to taste, and we loved her so much that we actually tried it. Sadly, she left after only a few months, and we all dropped languages at the first available opportunity. I so hope that language teaching is better now, because I can think of few things more useful than having several languages under our belts.

So, I am rather enjoying Duolingo, even though my conversations are all bear-based. At least the bear listens carefully and corrects gently, so I don’t feel too much of an idiot. Is anybody else out there learning a language, through an app or by any other method? Let’s give one another a pat on the back. After all, in addition to being good for entente cordiale, learning a new language is one of the things that most helps to stave off creeping cognitive decline, according to multiple sources.

Well, Readers, having thought about how some of my reading time has been ambushed by doom-scrolling instead, I have been getting stuck in to both fiction and non-fiction this month. I am really enjoying ‘Homer Haunted’ by Henry Power – in the midst of all the excitement about Christopher Nolan’s film, I was glad to read a book which explains many of the different ways in which Homer’s epics have influenced subsequent writers. It starts with George Chapman, who translated the Odyssey and the Iliad back in the 16th century, and ends with living authors. He shows how the times in which the translators, authors and poets lived influenced what they took from the cornucopia which is Homer’s work, and how Homer continues to influence us to the present day. It’s very readable, and I’ve found myself learning all sorts of things, which is always refreshing. Highly recommended if you have the slightest interest in Homer.

Now, for fiction I’ve been piling through the Booker Longlist, so here’s the verdict so far. First up is Elizabeth Strout’s ‘The Things We Never Say’.

I like Elizabeth Strout’s work – she writes about a small community in Massachusetts, and about the relationships between the people there, but this makes her books sound cosy and domestic. They are domestic, but existential rather than cosy – behind the straightforwardness of the events, there’s a whole world of pain, loneliness and confusion. And yet, there’s always hope, of a sort. I enjoyed this book a lot, but while I’d like to see Strout win, after being short-listed several times, I’m not sure that this book is ‘different’ enough to tip the balance this year.

Next up was ‘The Vivisectors’ by Missouri Williams. I was pleased that it wasn’t about actual animal experimentation, but it is a campus novel, of an extremely strange kind. The protagonist (we don’t learn her name until about half way through the book) is a young woman working for one of the professors at the university. It feels a bit like one of Italo Calvino’s imaginary cities, but here the vegetation is always threatening to take over, and is only held back by The Gardeners, who are an idiosyncratic lot. There are individual scenes in this book that really gave me pause, images that are striking and moving, but I’m not sure that it all adds up to a coherent whole. I admired it, but I’m not sure I was involved with it. Like the protagonist, I felt as if I was watching from the outside, and maybe that’s the point.

I’ve been interested to see that way that science fiction has been becoming more mainstream  over the past couple of decades, following Margaret Atwood’s cry that she didn’t write science fiction, even though she clearly did. ‘The End of Everything’ was my first M.John Harrison, and what a strange, dystopian novel it is. The world has been invaded by aliens known as the I-Ghetti, and they seem to play with everyone’s memories and sense of reality in a way that seems strangely familiar, what with all the gas-lighting and misinformation that’s currently flying around. The coastal towns of Kent and Essex, where much of the action is set, feel both familiar and utterly strange. And then there are the ‘artefacts’, who in some ways seem more human than us. Very disquieting and thought-provoking, with moments of violence described in such a deadpan way that I had to go back and check that what I thought I’d read had actually happened. The reader is wrong-footed and confused, but so are the characters in the book.

Now, I am really enjoying ‘John of John’ by Douglas Stuart. Stuart won the Booker Prize in  2020 with ‘Shuggie Bain’, and  I suspect he could be on to another winner with this book. The story tells of the return of John-Calum Macleod, a down-on-his-luck art student returning to the island of Harris, where his father John is a fierce Presbyterian minister, and his granny Ella, a Glaswegian with plenty of opinions of her own,  lives with his father. The whole sense of island life, the weather, the landscape, is all beautifully evoked, but it’s the characters and the dialogue that really makes this book sing. The sense of both community, and the claustrophobia that comes from everyone knowing everything about you makes this tale feel like a pressure-cooker, just about to explode. What secrets will be exposed, and how will the story resolve?  Well, I won’t spoil it for you when I find out, but just to say that of the books I’ve read so far, this would be my highest recommendation.

Four books down, nine to go. And two not even published yet! You can see the whole longlist here. But do let me know what your recommendations are! I love a good book….

Well Readers, as I headed off towards Coldfall Wood for a late night spider walk (of which more later this week) I was interrupted by the sound of magpies. I’m used to seeing family groups around, but this was more of a magpie convention.

At one point I counted twelve magpies, all chattering away to one another, and clearly engaged by something in the gardens behind Durham Road.

Now, I’ve seen family groups of magpies gathering in the autumn before, and I’ve seen them trying to force wood pigeons or even pairs of crows to leave their nests, but this was the biggest gathering I’ve ever seen. Or maybe I’ve just not been paying enough attention.

A few thoughts occur to me. One is that there is less imperative to be territorial for birds once breeding is over for the year, and there might be a big advantage in banding together to look for food. A lot of food sources have diminished this year, what with the drought, and this could lead to larger groups of birds – many eyes are better than a few when it comes to spotting an opportunity.

Another theory is that birds spend the ‘off-season’ sizing up one another as potential mates for next year, in which case this gathering is the equivalent of the school discos that I used to go to, though with less crying in the cloakroom and snogging in dark corners.

Birds, especially corvids, will also often band together if there’s a predator around, particularly a bird of prey, a heron or an owl. In fact, locally one of the best ways of spotting a buzzard or a red kite is to watch for lots of crows heading noisily in one direction. This seemed much more like a social gathering, however, and my bet is that some lovely person on Durham Road had either deliberately or inadvertently popped out some food, which the birds had just spotted.

Whatever the reason, it seems that animals that live in large social groups are often more able to solve problems than animals of the same species that live in smaller groups – I imagine that having more complex situations to deal with helps to develop the part of the brain that needs to adapt to and take advantage of what’s going on. There’s some evidence that urban animals, particularly foxes, are also becoming more ‘intelligent’ because they have more challenges to deal with. I am a bit uncomfortable with the whole notion of ‘intelligence’ when applied to animals, because all too often it means that we value animals that seem to think like us more than animals that are more alien. Plus, how on earth do we judge? I remember that tortoises were thought not to be as intelligent as some other animals until the scientists realised that they needed wider mazes with less acute angles, at which point their performance drastically improved. Also, looking at the state of much of the world at the moment it would be difficult to argue that we’re an intelligent species, but there we go.

Harrumph! Rant over.

And over to you, Readers. Have you noticed anything unusual with your local fauna, and if so, what do you think is going on?

‘Creation of Light’ by Gustave Dore, Public Domain

Dear Readers, this is the third and last poem that I remember my Mother reciting for me when I was a child: she knew it as ‘On His Blindness’. There is some debate over whether the ‘talent’ that Milton is talking about is his poetic talent, or his ability to translate documents from foreign languages, which was his job at the Commonwealth Office (and would have been impossible to do without sight I imagine), but clearly blindness is a theme. And the last line has been used so many times, in so many contexts, that it’s almost a shock to find it here. See what you think.

Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent

By John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”