Jonathan Bailey

Dear Readers, last week I toddled along to the Bridge Theatre for a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II. This is a very fine theatre, though for those of us who are still a little unsteady on our feet, getting into one of the high seats in the bar was a bit of a performance in itself. More low seats, please!

Richard II was one of my A Level plays, and personally I have never known works as well as the ones that I studied for this qualification. You needed to go deeply into the analysis of the text (it was taken as read that you knew the words) and so there would be a lot of time spent looking at themes, comparing different critics etc. So, I was well primed for taking a fairly nuanced view of this tricky play. I’d also previously seen David Tennant take the lead role when the Barbican were doing the ‘Cycle of Kings’ back in 2014, and I’d loved his performance.

The lead in this production was taken by Jonathan Bailey. He is a serious Shakespearian actor, but these days he is better known for his role in Bridgerton, where he is a serious hearthrob instead. Indeed, the audience contained a fairly high proportion of young women who were, I think, more interested in Bailey than in Shakespeare.

On taking my seat at the end of row B, a young woman a few seats into the row leaned forward.

“When I booked this seat, it was on the end of the row”, she said, pointedly.

“Ah, they sometimes change the seating once the final rehearsals are done”, I said. “But why did you want the end of the row?”

“Well, I thought that maybe Jonathan Bailey would move along the aisle to get to the stage”, she sighed.

“Ah!” I said. “Maybe a few skin cells would have wafted off and you could have cloned him for your own personal use! But don’t worry, we’re close enough here to be spat on”.

She gave me the look that I probably deserved, but all was not lost, because at the interval (Jonathan Bailey hadn’t wafted past, but John of Gaunt and several flunkies had).

“Do you know anything about Richard II?” she asked.

“A little bit”, I said modestly.

“Do you think he was bi-polar?” she asked.

And, uncertain where to even start, I was still explaining about how Richard II had come to the throne when he was only 9, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, how he was convinced of his own absolute power, and how relevant all this was to Certain Autocrats today when the lights went down and silence was blissfully restored.

But anyhow, the performance. The play is worth seeing for sure: all the individual actors are good, the staging is interesting, and Bailey is great at portraying the sheer capriciousness of the King. In other performances, the ‘favourites’, who are the coterie of yes-men and also the King’s bedfellows, are seen as being the reason for the king’s terrible kingship. There is even a speech where the queen speaks of the favourites usurping her marriage bed. None of that here! One of the favourites is a woman, and there is never a whisper of the King’s homosexuality. When Tennant played Richard II, he was able to make us sympathise with Richard, whereas Bailey didn’t. But honestly, I think the Tennant Richard II was probably one of those once in a lifetime performances (and I’m not the only one to think so).

So, this Richard II was entertaining. Who can resist two topless men wrestling in a pit, or an artillery gun on stage? The language is as beautiful as always, and it’s gotten people who might not otherwise come to see a Shakespeare history play into the theatre, and thinking about what it all means. But there is a depth and nuance to this play that this particular version didn’t do justice to, and that’s a shame.

If you want to go and see the play, you’ll need to get a move on – it finishes on 10th May.

Dear Readers, it’s been ages since I’ve done a garden post: we’ve been having our windows replaced and then painted, and in a moment of madness I also asked the painters if they’d paint our bedroom (so the screaming monk is now gone). It’s all lovely, but I’ve been mostly living in Caffe Nero on East Finchley High Road to try to get away from the racket, and the disruption, and the dust. Oh lordy, the dust. Anyhow, my thoughts have finally turned to the garden. The lilac is the best that it’s been in years, the scent in the garden is delicious. The plant must have known that I was giving it a sideways look, as I consider how hard to prune it. Maybe a little bit of a hair cut is called for, but nothing too drastic.

Now, I have plans for the pond. If you look at the first photo, you’ll see that the pond is surrounded by a ring of stones. This was all the rage a while back, but it’s actually not very good for wildlife – little critters can actually roast to death on the hot surface. So, my pal Matt at Green Ravens Horticulture is going to help me remove the stones (well, he and his new sidekick are going to do all the heavy lifting while I make tea) and replace them with wildflower turf – this will make a much softer, more friendly edge, and should provide a bit more cover for the little frogs when they enter/leave the pond. This is all going to happen in early June, once my exams are over for the year (4th June! Keep your fingers crossed for me!)

And the hawthorn and the whitebeam are finally starting to put out shoots and leaves, after an anxious few months when I was convinced that the very hard prune that happened last year had killed them. Fortunately not, but it will definitely take a couple of seasons before they’re back to their former glory. In the meantime, the woodpigeons and starlings are very happy, perching above it all like vultures in the Serengeti….

So, Readers, what’s happening in your garden? Do share¬

I like this, though I had to read it through a couple of times. You can listen to Carol Ann Duffy reading it aloud here, highly recommended. I love how words come to life when they’re spoken.

FOREST

In fact, the trees are murmuring under your feet,
a buried empathy; you tread it.
High over your head,
the canopy sieves light; a conversation
you lip-read. The forest
keeps different time;
slow hours as long as your life,
so you feel human.

So you feel more human; persuaded what you are
by wordless breath of wood, reason in resin.
You might name them-
oak, ash, holly, beech, elm-
but the giants are silence alive, superior,
and now you are all instinct;
swinging the small lamp of your heart
as you venture their world:

the green, shadowy, garlic air
your ancestors breathed.
Ah, you thought love human
till you lost yourself in the forest,
but it is more strange.
These grave and patient saints
who pray and pray
and suffer your little embrace.

Carol Ann Duffy

Butcher’s Broom (Ruscus aculeatus)

Dear Readers, it’s always a pleasure to come across a wild, native plant that I hadn’t noticed before, and during a damp walk in my friend L’s patch of woodland last week, I discovered Butcher’s Broom, an indicator of ancient woodland. This is a most unusual plant in some ways – it’s a member of the Asparagus family, and just like that toothsome vegetable, what appear to be its ‘leaves’ are in fact extensions of the stem, called cladodes. Each leaf has a sharp, spikey point on the end of each ‘leaf’, and there are rather attractive bright red fruits. The flowers are tiny and yellowish-green, and grow out of the middle of the true leaves.

Butcher’s Broom flowers (Photo by By Benjamin Zwittnig – http://www2.arnes.si/~bzwitt/flora/ruscus_aculeatus.html, CC BY 2.5 si, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40879806)

All in all, this plant looks much more exotic than something you’d usually find in a patch of hornbeam and beech forest, but it just goes to show that we have some very interesting plants right under our noses. We also have to be a little bit careful about the wild provenance of any plants that we find, as the cultivar of the plant is becoming increasingly popular in gardens: the RHS has given the variety ‘John Redmond’ an Order of Merit. Butcher’s Broom is dioecious, meaning that individual plants are either male or female, and can also reproduce via rhizomes.

Butcher’s Broom ‘John Redmond’ – Photo by By Dominicus Johannes Bergsma – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38358922

Why ‘Butcher’s Broom’ though? The stiff, wiry stems were used for cleaning butcher’s blocks, and interestingly the plant has been found to contain a number of antioxidants. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey reports that butchers also used to build a kind of miniature hedge of Butcher’s Broom around meat in their shops to keep mice at bay. I’d have thought it would take more than a few twigs, but Butcher’s Broom also contains saponins, chemicals which have foam-forming qualities, and which are often used in soap, so perhaps that discourages the little rodents.

As it generally grows quite low, Butcher’s Broom also has the vernacular name ‘knee holly’. Mabey remarks on the plant’s habit of growing around the base of trees, as if to form a protective fence, and points out that sometimes the Butcher’s Broom is older than the tree itself.

Culpeper describes the plant thus in his Herbal:

‘a plant of Mars, being of a gallant cleansing and opening quality. The decoction of the root drank, and a poultice made of the berries and leaves applied, are effectual-in knitting and consolidating broken bones or parts out of joint. The common way of using it is to boil the root of it, and Parsley and Fennel and Smallage in white wine, and drink the decoction, adding the like quantity of Grassroot to them: The more of the root you boil the stronger will the decoction be; it works no ill effects, yet I hope you have wit enough to give the strongest decoction to the strongest bodies.’

Shame I didn’t have any handy when I broke my leg last year!

Butcher’s Broom (Photo by By Meneerke bloem – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128179222)

Now, as you might expect from a plant with lots of saponins in it, Butcher’s Broom berries are poisonous. The shoots have been used as an asparagus alternative, and over on the EatWeeds website, Robin Harford has noted that in Tunisia the seeds are roasted and used as a coffee substitute. It seems like quite a lot of work to me!

On the Plant Lore website, it’s noted that street cleaners in the Azores still use brooms made from the plant. If only I’d known when I was there last year!

And here’s a poem. Nothing to do with the plant, but a little bit to do with a butcher, and his son. See what you think.

The Butcher’s Son

Mr Pierce the butcher
Got news his son was missing
About a month before
The closing of the war.
A bald man, tall and careful,
He stood in his shop and found
No bottom to his sadness,
Nowhere for it to stop.
When my aunt came through the door
Delivering the milk,
He spoke, with his quiet air
Of a considerate teacher,
But words weren’t up to it,
He turned back to the meat.
The message was in error.
Later that humid summer
At a local high school fete,
I saw, returned, the son
Still in his uniform.
Mr Pierce was not there
But was as if implied
In the son who looked like him
Except he had red hair.
For I recall him well
Encircled by his friends,
Beaming a life charged now
Doubly because restored,
And recall also how
Within his hearty smile
His lips contained his father’s
Like a light within the light
That he turned everywhere.

Thom Gunn

Dear Readers, there used to be lots of nesting sites for House Martins in our rural towns and villages, and even in our more urban areas. My Aunt Hilary used to have about a dozen nests under her eaves in her house in Broadway, Somerset, which she allowed to stay with relatively good grace, in spite of the ‘mess’. And this house, in Milborne St Andrew where Mum and Dad used to live, surely wins an award for the highest number of nests on one house ever…

But alas, the ‘little orcas’ that I love so much are, like the swift, suffering from a multitude of problems – not enough insects, not enough places to nest, degradation of the habitats both where they used to overwinter and where they stop off en route. The birds use mud for their nests, and one of the loveliest sights in Obergurgl in Austria, where I usually holiday every year, is the House Martins swooping down to collect mud from a puddle, then taking it ‘home’ to one of the chalets with their convenient over-hanging eaves to make some repairs.

Mother House Martin feeding her young (Photo by By Michael Palmer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37001960)

One reason posited by the British Trust for Ornithology for the fall in House Martin numbers is the use of PVC in house building. Nests built on PVC facings are much more likely to fall off than those built on wood or brick. Overall, the BTO estimates that there has been a 44% decline in numbers between 1995 and 2022.

Photo by By Andreas Trepte – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40871453

House Martins appear to mate for life but as in so many cases, this is not as straightforward as it may appear. Up to 15% of nestlings who were genetically tested have a father that isn’t the ‘official’ mate. Apparently, the male guards the female very closely when she’s incubating the eggs and he only has her to feed, but as the chicks hatch and things get a bit more hectic, unpaired males will often sneak in for a quick liaison. It’s usually the youngest chick who has a different father, and this is probably why.

Photo by By Claus Ableiter – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2588978

Fortunately, House Martins are classified as ‘least concern’ from a conservation point of view across their very wide range. But it seems awful that, here in the UK, we’re losing our birds at such a rate, and it’s doubly terrible that it’s happened on our watch, if you’re in your sixties like me. We can all do our bit for sure, and I have no intention of despairing, though sometimes I feel like it. Let’s bin the pesticides, put up nest boxes, and do whatever we can to keep, and hopefully increase, what we have. Before it’s gone.

Image of a Colossal Squid ((Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) Image by By © Citron, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7757015

Dear Readers, if you were asked what the heaviest invertebrate in the world was, you would probably guess (as I did) that it might be some huge beetle, or a massive stick insect. But in fact we would all be out by a factor of about 1,000, because the heaviest invertebrate on earth is in fact the Colossal Squid, which is thought to weight in at about 1,500 lb (700 kilograms), to be between 33 and 46 feet (10 –  14 metres long), and to have the largest eyes of any creature yet discovered – one specimen had eyes that were 16 inches (40 cms) across.

Alas, this creature of the abyssal depths has only previously been seen by humans when dead or dying animals have been found, sometimes when the squid are taking fish from fishing lines and getting themselves entangled. The beaks of the squid were also often found in the stomachs of sperm whale  – they’re thought to make up a large part of the diet of these cetaceans, and the size of the squid was estimated from these indigestible parts. The depth at which the squid swim depends on their age and size, with the largest and oldest squid being found in the bathypelagic zone, 4,000 metres below the surface. No wonder the squid have such huge eyes – it’s dark down there, but it’s thought that the squid can detect such things as the disturbance in photoluminescent plankton caused by either prey fish or predators as they move through clouds of the tiny organisms.

Beak of a Colossal Squid (Photo by By GeSHaFish – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26210490)

So, you all know that I love cephalopods, and one reason for mentioning the Colossal Squid today is that a juvenile has actually been filmed in the wild for the first time. Not part of a squid. Not a pale and wasted adult at the point of depth. Not a disintegrating corpse. An actual live teenage squid, going about its business unmolested (well, apart from an automatic deep-sea camera of course). I love that we know even less about the depths of the ocean than we do about the surface of the moon.

You can see the Colossal Squid (only 30 cms long!) here. Maybe one day a submersible will see an adult Colossal Squid. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up like the scenes from Jules Verne’s  ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’. In fact, I suspect that the squid would disappear off into the darkness at speed. They are intelligent animals, after all.

Original illustrations from Jules Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ by A. de Neuville and E. Riou [1870], from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-original-monster-from-Twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea-Despite-its-name_fig2_267732069

Bottlenose Dolphin with young, Moray Firth, Scotland (Photo by By Peter Asprey, http://www.peter-asprey.com/ – Cropped version of a picture from the English Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2005-05-n2-001-3118.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1962216)

Dear Readers, for those of us brought up on a wholesome diet of the Flipper TV show, it’s been interesting to see that the smiley, friendly Bottle Nose Dolphin of our childhood is, in fact, an animal with a range of habits that include infanticide, porpicide (the killing of porpoises) and, this week, the killing of a young Common Dolphin in Cardigan Bay. This last attack was witnessed by a boatload of nature lovers – four adult dolphins targeted the baby and threw into the air until it was dead. This must have been so distressing to watch. But what’s going on?

Flipper (actually one of five female dolphins used for the 1960s TV show)

Dolphins are far from being the only animals to practice infanticide. Male lions will kill a lioness’s cubs when they take over a pride, so that she will come back into heat. The new male will then be sure that any ensuing offspring are his. Many other mammals do something similar, and this theory hasn’t been ruled out in this case – although the dolphin was of another species, it may be that its small size triggered the behaviour. A female dolphin will come back into heat within three days of losing her calf, so, repugnant as it seems to us, it makes sense for a new male to kill any existing babies.

Bottle Nosed Dolphins are prone to what looks very like coercion in their mating behaviour, to human eyes at least – they will separate a female from her pod-mates in order to mate with her. In this situation a female will often mate with as many males as she can – this muddies the waters as to who the father of the ensuing calf might be, and presumably acts as an extra protection for the infant. However, this won’t save the calf from males from outside this group. It’s a very unfortunate behaviour from a sea mammal that is becoming increasingly rare. It would be interesting to see if infanticide is more common in the smaller pods that are the norm as populations diminish and become more isolated.

However, as we’ve seen, Bottle Nosed Dolphins don’t only kill the young of their own species. The Bottle Nosed Dolphins around the UK, in the Moray Firth and in Cardigan Bay, are the leading cause of death of the much smaller Harbour Porpoise. The porpoises tend to be rammed and bitten with such force that they die.

Harbour Porpoise (Photo By Ecomare/Salko de Wolf – Ecomare, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53967849)

You might remember that I watched a talk about UK cetacean strandings by Rob Deauville, project manager for the wonderfully named ‘CSI of the Sea’ (Cetacean Stranding Investigations). Deauville noted that the attackers tended to be sub-adult males, and he was working on a theory that there was some kind of hormonal/sexual context to the attacks. Certainly the ferocity of the injuries seen seemed to point to some kind of testosterone-fuelled rage, and again it might be that, because the pods are smaller and there are less females, the aggression is taken out on other convenient animals. I am reminded that, as the big adult male African elephants were killed for their tusks in some parts of South Africa, the resulting imbalance in the elephant groups led to a lot of undisciplined younger males on the rampage, who ended up trying to mate with surprised rhinoceros and other animals.

The kinds of attack also make me wonder if there’s some kind of play-hunting going on – we’ve all seen the David Attenborough films of sea lions being hunted by Orcas off the beaches of Argentina. Orcas are the largest of the toothed whales (the group to which dolphins and porpoises belong), and when I see them throwing sealions into the air, or working together to rock a seal from an ice floe, I can’t help thinking that they’re having fun, in addition to gathering a meal.

Most of all, though, it reminds me that the smiley face of the Bottle Nose Dolphin is really just a trick of physiognomy. Behind that grin there is an animal of extraordinary intelligence and complexity. I am so pleased that, as a species, we’re moving away from a) killing them and b) locking them up in tanks for our entertainment, so that they can go quietly mad (have a look at Blackfish ). There will be much, much more to discover from watching them in the wild and trying to understand what’s going on. We can only do this by accepting them on their own terms, even when what’s happening is hard to watch.

Common Dolphins (Photo by By NOAA NMFS – http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/anim0916.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11138397)

Dear Readers, the painters were finishing off in our house on Good Friday, so we decided to go out for a walk to leave them to it. What a great job they’ve done! The screaming monk on the wall has completely disappeared, our windows are freshly painted, and they’re going to come back to give my kitchen cabinets a new lease of life. But it will be nice to get the house back, lovely as they are. Anyhow, off we went to Waterlow Park, where we discovered Humpty Dumpty (see above). Hopefully nobody will knock him off his wall.

There are some really splendid specimen trees here. Have a look at this horse chestnut.

And there’s this amazing red tree, probably a copper beech (but feel free to correct me)…

And then there’s this Weeping Ash – look at the lovely flowers!

There are lots of new borders, some of them full of bluebells – hybrids for sure, but still pretty.

I love the red valerian against the acid-green of the euphorbia…

But I am a bit puzzled by this, and I’d love to know what you think. Clearly something has been pollarded, but I’m not sure what, or why. Could these be willows, and if so are they taking a leaf out of Wisley’s book? At Wisley they are doing all sorts of exciting things with live willow by plaiting it/turning it into living frames for climbing plants to clamber up, so maybe this is something similar. If nobody knows, I might drop them a line.

I always think of Cherry Laurel as being a bit of a pain-in-the-butt invasive, but when allowed to be a tree, and properly managed, it can be rather impressive. The hoverflies certainly seem to love it.

And finally, there’s this Pittosporum – it’s a variety called ‘Tom Thumb’. I almost mistook it for a holly.

And while we were here, we bumped into a couple walking the most extraordinary pack of well-behaved dogs of all shapes and sizes, from a floppy-eared Ibizan Hound lookalike to some small furry elderly bundles of fluff and an ageing labrador. Both humans and dogs looked happy, and the latter were well-behaved and relaxed. It’s so nice to see dog owners who understand their dogs, and know how to set boundaries for them. By contrast, one owner spent a good twenty minutes shouting at his dog, which paid no attention whatsoever. I think people sometimes forget that dogs have much more acute hearing than we do, so if your dog isn’t paying attention, it’s not because they can’t hear you. Sigh. Still, all in all we had a lovely walk in Waterlow Park. London as a city is so blessed with green space. We are very lucky.

Hanuman Langur in Ranthambore, India

Dear Readers, when I was in India nearly twenty years ago, one of my favourite animals was the Hanuman langur. They were so elegant, with their long tails and black heart-shaped faces, and they were always curious and ready for every opportunity.

So it came as little surprise when I read that at the Dakshineswar temple complex near Kolkata, where the langurs are regarded as holy, they’ve come up with a whole range of tactics to persuade visitors to give them food. There’s no snatching or biting or misbehaviour. Instead, the monkeys either sit in front of someone and gaze up at them beseechingly, or cuddle their leg, or stand up, often in front of food stalls. The most effective mechanism was leg cuddling or clothes tugging, maybe because this method of gentle persuasion means that it’s more difficult for the humans to get away from the monkeys.Who could resist? Plus, 81% of the monkeys who ask for food in this way are fed – devout Hindus believe that feeding the animals will bring good karma.

One interesting observation from the study is that the monkeys show the same behaviours as the human beggars in the area, which makes me wonder – are the monkeys mimicking the humans, or have they simply learned what works by trial and error? Or is it a bit of both?

You can watch a film of the monkeys persuading people to feed them here.

Typically, the monkeys doing the begging are adult females, and they are not satisfied with cauliflower or carrots, but will hang on until they get some sweet buns. Not very good for them, sadly. Maybe sugar is addictive for monkeys as well as humans.

Interestingly , the monkeys never steal from the vendors (unlike the much cheekier macaques). Maybe their dignified demeanour is another reason that their tactic works so well!

You can read the original article here.

Dear Readers, it has been a woodland-y kind of week, and so today I thought I’d share this poem by Pam Ayres. She’s much better known for her whimsical, comic poetry, but I found this unexpectedly touching. Plus, when it comes to burial, this would work for me too (though hopefully not for a while). See what you think…

Woodland Burial by Pam Ayres

Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall
Where the dust of ancient bones has spread a dryness over all,
Lay me in some leafy loam where, sheltered from the cold
Little seeds investigate and tender leaves unfold.
There kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree
To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me.
The roots will not disturb me as they wend their peaceful way
To build the fine and bountiful, from closure and decay.
To seek their small requirements so that when their work is done
I’ll be tall and standing strongly in the beauty of the sun.