Dear Readers, my quiz last week went so well that I thought I’d tax all of your brains some more! Let’s see how good we all are at identifying the various pigeon and dove species that you can find in the UK, not only by sight but also (gasp!) by sound. Several people seemed keen to learn a bit more about bird calls, so let’s start with these most familiar birds of all (at least in the UK). It’s true that we don’t have pigeons as splendid as the green ones that you can see in Asia, but to my eyes they all have a subtle beauty. So, without further ado, tell me what species of pigeon we’re looking at.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

And now for the tricky bit. Below are the calls of the five species shown above. Can you match the call to the bird?

6. This is a very ardent individual, but which pigeon is it?

7. How about this little lot?

8. This is an amazing sound, but have you ever heard it?

9. And who is this?

10. And finally, who is this?

And what do you think are the similarities between the calls of all the pigeons? To me, the calls always sound a bit laboured, as if they’re an effort for the bird, and also a bit muffled, as if they’re being produced from deep inside the body, rather than the cleaner, higher notes of other birds. I wonder if it’s anything to do with the structure of pigeon species? I know that they are one of the few families of birds who can suck up water when they drink, rather than having to take a mouthful and then throw their heads back.

Answers tomorrow! Have fun!

Dear Readers, I wonder if any of you have noticed your local wildlife behaving extremely strangely during this past few weeks? For example, a magpie has been swooping down into my whitebeam tree every morning in a most very predatory way, resulting in all the starlings flying out in a most agitated state. Sometimes I see the magpie chasing the other birds with a steely glint in its eye, but it isn’t the most agile of birds so there is no obvious damage so far. I dread to think what will happen when the fledgling starlings blunder out into the world in a few weeks though, with their wide-eyed innocence and complete lack of common sense.

I imagine that the closure of Kentucky Fried Chicken (and all the other takeaway shops) has had a dreadful impact on the food supply of many critters. What are the foxes doing these days, I wonder? I know that earlier this week I had an entire family of jackdaws in the garden munching on the suet pellets, and they are usually seen eating chips and looking a bit shifty at the top of my road. And what the feral pigeons are eating instead I have no idea. At any rate, it’s open house in my garden, and so that brings me to this extremely confident squirrel who was eating the sunflower seeds from the bird feeder yesterday evening.

You can’t see it in this photo, but I’m pretty sure that this squirrel is a mother – she looked to me as if she had some milk. This would be completely in keeping with their usual patterns – grey squirrels give birth in the spring (from February to April) and the older, more experienced females might breed again in the late summer (July to September). You’ve probably seen those big messy dreys in the top of trees: they are an untidy mass of leaves from the outside, but are often lined with moss and even the mother’s own fur. The babies are completely helpless when they’re born, and while a normal litter is three kits, an unfortunate mother can have up to eight babies, who would certainly keep her busy.

Baby grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) (Photo One)

I love how ‘chatty’ grey squirrels are: they can be extremely fierce and I have often been told off by one for some trespass or bad behaviour that I was completely unaware of. You can hear a slightly irritated squirrel at the link below. I used to hear this and mistake it for a bird.

https://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/British-wildlife-recordings/022M-W1CDR0001470-1200V0

And finally, one of my favourite saints is (of course) St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. He once spoke of a visitation with a squirrel, and this was paraphrased by poet Daniel Ladinsky. I love the way that it seems to capture the essence of the busy squirrel, and of the saint. See what you think.

The Sacraments

I once spoke to my friend, an old squirrel, about the Sacraments—
he got so excited

and ran into a hollow in his tree and came
back holding some acorns, an owl feather,
and a ribbon he had found.

And I just smiled and said, “Yes, dear,
you understand:
everything imparts
His grace.”

Sycamore sapling in Coldfall Wood

Dear Readers, since the lockdown I feel as if my focus has been tending towards the wonder of the common and the unremarked. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I have ever truly ‘seen’ any of these plants or animals at all. Take this sycamore sapling for example, which had plonked itself in the stream in Coldfall Wood, not very far away from its parents. It looks so exotic at the moment that I honestly thought it was an Australian kangaroo paw plant, or maybe some peculiar spider lily, but no. It’s just a little sycamore, gently opening its leaves like so many hands unclasping and waiting to be held.

Tucked in among the hornbeam leaves, with their origami-precise veins, this sycamore is in its element – they love damp, shady places. There are some wonderful examples along the edge of the cemetery by Muswell Hill Playing Fields, and they are full of catkins. I had never noticed them until today – by the time sycamore comes into my consciousness the leaves are inevitably marked with the tar spot fungus that is probably the best way to identify them.

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplanatus) leaves with Tar Spot (Rhytisma acerinum) fungus

But look how pretty they are at this time of year! The sycamore has a most complicated sex life, with both female flowers (shown here) and male flowers, which are smaller. On any given tree, either the female or the male flowers will open first, so that the plant avoids pollinating itself. Furthermore, a tree might start with female flowers in one year, and start with male flowers in another year. To add to the complication, the change from one sex to another may take place in different areas of the crown at different times.

The female flowers produce lots of green-grey pollen and profuse, sweet nectar, which is attractive to pollinators, and is used by honeybees to make sycamore honey.

Sycamore is such a familiar sight that it’s easy to forget that it was introduced to Britain as recently as the sixteenth century from mainland Europe, probably as a timber tree. Their samaras (those winged ‘helicopter’ seeds that we loved so much as children) seem to germinate at the drop of a hat, and so sycamore has a reputation as a weed tree. Furthermore, although it is a woodland species it has a high tolerance for pretty much everything: it laughs at wind and exposure, and thumbs its nose at pollution. Indeed, it is so hardy that it is pretty much the only wild tree of any size on the Shetland Islands. It supports a pretty good population of insect species considering that it hasn’t been here for that long: 58 species of moth, 16 species of beetle and 25 bugs, which is less than the alder but, surprisingly, more than the ash (according to ‘Alien Plants’ in the New Naturalist series by Clive Stace and Michael Crawley). Furthermore, aphids love it, and hence at the moment the branches are full of blue tits plucking the greenfly and looking for caterpillars.

It’s also easy to forget that sycamore is actually a member of the maple family, and apparently it is possible to tap the bark to obtain the sap, which resembles my favourite sweetener, maple syrup. This seems to me to be a major reason for growing it, but I do note that in Scotland it was a popular tree for hangings, because the lower branches rarely broke, so maybe it isn’t as sweet as all that. Like all trees, your average full-grown sycamore has ‘seen’ a whole lot of things in its life. I wonder what the ones in the cemetery are making of the strange current season? We will never know.

Dear Readers, the front gardens in the County Roads are not very large, and it can be quite a challenge to know what to do with them. Of course, my heart is always with those who have gardens that are both kind to pollinators and kind to people, and so I am kicking off this occasional series with a garden that is always full of interest, whatever the time of year. At the moment, the wisteria is just starting and the wacky yellow shrub/tree next to the gate is almost finished.

At the side of the house there is a very pretty perennial wallflower (not Bowle’s Mauve for once) and some bluebells that look the right colour for English ones to me, at least in this photo. And there is some green alkanet. Yes, it can be a bit of a thug, but if it wasn’t so common we’d all be out at the garden centre buying some. Look how blue the flowers are!  I love forget-me-nots too, but for sheer outrageous, decadent blue, green alkanet takes the prize.

Green alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens)

There is a patch which is full of wild strawberry, green alkanet, dandelions, white comfrey, and a tiny bit of yellow corydalis. Honestly, if I was a bee I couldn’t be happier. I suspect that as the council weed killing has ground to a halt, all the local wild plants are taking advantage. I will do a post soon on the mysterious things that are appearing in our local walls and crevices. But again, the combination of blue, yellow and white really is most appealing.

White comfrey

Now, I know that the lady who lives in this house will probably say that the garden is a mess, and I suspect that it’s not what she intended. But nature is a splendid gardener, and takes advantage as soon as our backs are turned, or as soon as a pandemic crops up. All i can say is that as i march past on my daily walk, it always brings a smile to my face. And as I have just started back at work and am battling daily with spreadsheets, that’s something to cherish.

Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum)

Dear Readers, I love it when I find a ‘weed’ that I’ve been looking out for for a while, especially when it pops up in the most unlikely of places. Alexanders, a member of the carrot family, was growing in profusion all over some fly-tipped crates on the edge of Muswell Hill Playing Fields. I have never seen it before, and so I was delighted to make its acquaintance, even on this most unpromising of sites. When it gets going, it has big, blousey roundels of yellow-green flowers, and the glossy green leaves are most attractive.

Alexanders is said to be native to Macedonia, birthplace of Alexander the Great, and there is a legend that he discovered it. I have always been intrigued by the tales of Alexander, in particular the part where he tames his horse, Bucephalus, by understanding that it is afraid of its shadow. When I contracted chicken pox a few years ago (and a right bundle of laughs that is) I got through by reading a young adult novel called ‘I am the Great Horse’ by Katherine Roberts, which is a thumping good read, though I am not altogether sure about its historical accuracy. And then there is also the 2004 film ‘Alexander’, featuring Colin Farrell in a blond wig so terrible that I’m surprised he didn’t sue.

I rest my case (Photo One)

But to return to the plant. Alexanders does have classical origins in the UK, having been brought here by the Romans, who called it parsley of Alexandria, and are reputed to have carried it with them as a tasty snack on their long marches. I have also read that the Romans used it to feed their horses, hence the alternative name of ‘horse parsley’. It was was quickly identified as a useful medicinal herb, and was planted extensively in monastery gardens: it can often be found in the ruins of abbeys and castles. Whether there was once a monastery abutting the playing fields remains to be seen. It is also a plant of the shoreline, and it can be badly damaged by frost, hence its preference for warmer areas.

Alexanders was largely used as a medicinal herb, for staunching blood flow and treating sores. Strangely enough, it was used to stimulate menstrual bleeding. It is high in vitamin C, and was used as a preventative against scurvy long before people knew that the disease was caused by not enough fruit and vegetables – sailors off the coast of Wales used to disembark to collect Alexanders for just this purpose.

The carrot family as a whole has a Jekyll and Hyde character: some of our most useful and delicious vegetables are here (carrots, celery, parsnips, angelica, caraway) but so are some of the most poisonous plants in the UK, such as hemlock. Fortunately, Alexanders is one of the former: the leaves, upper parts of the roots and the flowers were all eaten until celery came along and took over. In Ireland, the plant was used, along with nettles and watercress, as part of ‘Lenten pottage’, a gruel made during Lent. There are some rather nice recipes on the Eden Project website here. And, though I’m not sure that my Dad would have approved (he liked his gin to be Gordon’s and if anyone was going to mess about with it, it was going to be him), there is a rather fine blog post about making gin flavoured with Alexanders here.

The Latin name Smyrnium refers to the plant’s myrrh-like odour. Sadly I have no earthly idea what myrrh smells like, but apparently the musky smell of the flowers helps to attract pollinating insects, particularly hoverflies, those underappreciated little creators of new life. The smaller flies are often spotted on the flowers of the carrot family, and there is a lovely collection of species here. I wonder if Alexanders might be particularly attractive because of its yellow colour, however? There is one study on a very common hoverfly, the drone fly (Eristalis tenax), which shows a clear preference for golden flowers, and I have noticed that my marsh marigolds are largely ignored by bees, but are very popular with flies.

What an interesting fly the drone fly is! For one thing, the males hold a territory for their whole lives, and will attack not only other male flies but bees, butterflies and even dragonflies (though that would probably make for a shortish lifespan). This is exhausting for the male, and when he can he zips off to an area outside his territory (and presumably not part of anyone else’s ‘manor’) for a rest. The black line down the body of the fly is right above a very important blood vessel, and as black is a colour that absorbs heat, it helps the insect to get going in the morning. Furthermore, this little chap is pretty much universal, on every continent except Antarctica, and has even been found in the Himalayas, so you’ll all know what he (or she) looks like. In fact, the male and female look different, so here are some photos for comparison.

Female Drone Fly (Photo Two)

Male drone fly (Photo Three)

So, Alexanders is not only medicinal and tasty, but it provides food for hoverflies too. Now that I’ve found it once, I wonder if it will crop up everywhere? And what other ‘common’ weeds will I find that I’ve not seen yet? Pellitory-of-the-wall is supposed to be a London specialist, but not around here (though if you’re an East Finchleyite and have a secret patch of it, let me know!). In the meantime, I shall be keeping a very close eye on our unweeded gardens and roads to see what I can see. While we don’t yet have deer in our gardens or wild goats munching the wallflowers, we do have rather a lot of sow thistle.

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://historycollection.co/history-film-historical-accuracy-8-classic-movies/8/

Photo Two by By Charles J Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51349218

Photo Three by By Alvesgaspar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3211670

Dear Readers, very shortly we will get onto the answers to the quiz, but firstly I need some advice.

What you see in the photo above are not two Jamaican ginger cakes with mould on them, but two Christmas presents. Each one is a bar of compost already loaded with bee and butterfly seeds:  scabious and valerian, hyssop and lavender, verbena and thyme. They have exploded into life in my sunny south-facing window with great enthusiasm, and I am watering them gently and turning them round and, I confess, talking to them (such are the perils of lockdown). However, I am not sure at what point I should be repotting them. The advice that came with them suggested that they should be potted on when they have four leaves, but I’m assuming that it meant four proper leaves, not the baby ones that they all seem to have at the moment. How do you judge when they are big enough to pot on? If I do it too soon I fear that they will be too delicate, but if I do it too late their growth will be stunted.

Oh the responsibility! My Dad would have known what to do: even after he had dementia he was still ordering them all about in the nursing home garden. Sadly i think he is now too busy having a gin and tonic in the garden with Mum to attend to my pleas, so I am turning to you lot instead – you feel like family to me, after all. So let me know what you would do. I’m thinking that they’ll probably need potted on twice before they’re strong enough for my slug-infested garden? Please assume that I know next to nothing, and you won’t be far wrong.

Anyway. Back to the quiz.And the winners, with a stunning 24 out of 26, are Fran and Bobby Freelove – very well done! And a hearty hug to Alittlebitoutoffocus and Joanna Smith, who both got 19 out of 21 on the photos, but Alittlebitoutoffocus just nudged ahead on the bird calls. Thanks also to Gibson Square for a very respectable score of 14, and to sllgatsby for making me laugh.

Was it fun? I apologise to my non-UK readers, maybe I’ll knock together a North American quiz at some point in the future but I fear that unless you’d like Bornean or Costa Rican birds from my recent trips, folk in other countries might be out of luck for the time being. There are lots of other quiz possibilities though – plants spring to mind and I could definitely do a quiz on frogs. All suggestions welcome.

So, here are the answers.

One – Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)

Two – Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto)

Three – European starling (Sturnus vulgaris)

Four – Great Tit (Parus major)

Five – Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

Six – House sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Seven – Rose-ringed parakeet (also known as ring-necked parakeet) (Psittacula krameri)

Eight – Grey heron (Ardea cinerea)

Nine – European blackbird (female) ( Turdus merula)

Ten – Female chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs)

Eleven – Woodpigeon (Calumba palumbus)

Twelve – Jackdaw (Corvus monedula)

Thirteen – Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus)

Fourteen – Magpie (Pica pica)

Fifteen – Song Thrush (Turdus philomelos)

Sixteen – Siskin (Carduelis spinus)

Seventeen – Pied wagtail (Motacilla alba)

Eighteen – Greater spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)

Nineteen – Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

Twenty – Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla)

Twenty One – Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes)

And for bonus points, see if you can identify these: all the birds are pictured above.

22. Wren

23. Blackbird

24. Sparrowhawk

25. Jackdaw and wrens

26 – Blue tit

How did you all get on? Let me know if it was fun, and maybe I’ll do some more.

Dear Readers, to shake things up a bit I thought I’d do us a little quiz on British birds and their calls/songs today. This is just for fun: I will publish the answers tomorrow, but will give a special shout out to the first person to get all (or the largest number of) the answers right (just pop them into the comments).

So, for starters, what birds are these? All photographs are taken in my East Finchley back garden, and, just to make it more challenging, not all of them are my best work :-).

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty One

And for bonus points, see if you can identify these: all the birds are pictured above. All recordings are from the Xeno Canto website 

22. Who is singing their head off here?

23. Who is raising the alarm here?

24. Which bird makes this sad little call?

25. Who is responsible for this jolly call? You can hear one of our earlier bird calls in the background towards the end…

And finally, who sounds very cross here?

Have fun, and I’ll ‘see’ you on Tuesday with the answers, and a request for some advice from you proper gardeners out there….

Dear Readers, what ever time of year we go on holiday, it always seems to be the wrong time. Last year we went in April, and 90% of our adult frogs were eaten by a heron. This year, we headed out on 13th March (remember the days when you could actually go on holiday?) and on the morning that we left, the frogs were mating  but in the shallowest part of the pond.

‘That’ll cause trouble, mark my words’, I thought to myself.

Ten days later and, as I feared, the long dry spell had caused the water level in the pond to drop, and many of the eggs had dried out. All I could see was a sad layer of jelly and the little black specks that would have been tadpoles smeared across the stones. It was one more sadness in the middle of a desperately sad time.

‘I think the frogspawn has failed, for the first time in ten years’, I told my husband.

‘You might still be surprised’, he said.

And,  when I got back from Dad’s cremation, I had another look in the pond, and discovered that life is rather more resilient than I thought.

Look at all these tadpoles! At the moment they are vegetarian, and are getting stuck into the algae on the rocks. Some of them appeared to be trapped in tiny rock pools, so I have rearranged some of the stones so that they have access to the main pond when they’re ready – we don’t have any rain forecast, and I don’t want to top the pond up with tap water if I can avoid it. Later on, when they get little legs, they’ll become tiny predators, munching up the  invertebrate life in the pond. I am a bit concerned that it’s still pretty bare around the edge following my major tidy-up last year, but I am trying to remedy that (more on this later in the week).

The replanted marsh marigold is doing very well too, and often attracts hoverflies.

And my water hawthorn is tentatively popping out a few leaves and a single flower.

The water, which went bright green after the work that I had done in January, is gradually clearing, and I hope that my oxygenating plants will soon be bouncing back. One thing I am definitely thinking about doing is planting some pale-coloured flowers like nicotiana by the pond to attract moths, which will also help feed the bats – we had at least three regular visitors last year, and I want to encourage them.

There is such solace in sitting in the garden and seeing what’s going on, even if the tadpoles are so full of activity that it isn’t exactly restful. They have only a short period of time to grow up, and lots of competition, so I don’t blame them for getting stuck in. And here they are, the tadpoles that I didn’t think I’d see this year. How they lift my spirits!

Zebra jumping spider (Salticus scenicus.)

Dear Readers, in this time of lockdown it is usually delightful when someone from the outside world comes to visit me (though not if the visitor is a mosquito) and so I was very pleased to see this jumping spider advancing along the edge of my desk. Jumping spiders are able to see the outside world in a way that other spiders don’t and so, although I did my best to get a decent photo of this spider, s/he kept edging away to the other side of the desk if I got too close. At one point s/he peered over the edge with just two enormous eyes showing. I can see why some arachnologists consider them their favourite spiders.

Jumping spiders and I go a long way back. Imagine, if you will, a pocket-hanky sized garden at the back of a tiny house in Stratford, East London. A six-year old girl is laying on her stomach in her best party dress, for which she will get ‘a right old telling-off’ in a few minutes, but she doesn’t care, because all her attention is focused on a jumping spider a few inches in front of her nose. The spider is crouching behind a tiny crenelation in the concrete slab that holds up the fence, and it is paddling its legs just like her cat does before she pounces. A fly is washing her hands a few inches away, and then starts to ‘clean behind her ears’, rotating her head a good 180 degrees on the string-like neck.

And then, the spider springs into the air and lands on the fly.

Truly, I (for it was me) had never seen anything so thrilling in my entire life. You could keep the lions of the Serengeti – who knew that such life and death struggles were going on in a city back garden? I  watched as the fly struggled, and then leapt up to go indoors to tell my parents what I’d seen. Sadly, they were less impressed with the spider, and more horrified that I’d now have to be positively hosed-down before I was fit to be presented to my grandmother.

And yet, that one incident opened my eyes to the sheer abundance of fascinating events and creatures that were right there, waiting to be experienced. I honestly believe that my love of nature and the natural world became turbo-charged in that moment – I had always preferred books about animals to books about people, but now my whole focus turned to the garden and what was living in it. No wonder that in these times of lockdown, I am finding my focus both narrowing and deepening, and I suspect that that’s the case for others, too.

Female zebra jumping spider (Public Domain)

One thing that makes the faces of jumping spiders so much more appealing to humans that those of other arachnids are those huge front-facing eyes. To the side and just above are two smaller eyes – these give the spider its peripheral vision, and enable it to detect its prey. Those enormous front-facing eyes enable it to lock on target, but also mean that it can see the movement of, say, a large late-middle aged female wafting a camera about. No wonder they seem to interact with us much more than most invertebrates.

It is also the case that jumping spiders appear to capable of learning: an experiment taught the spiders to associate a food reward with colour or location, and they quickly picked up where the tastiest titbits could be found. When the placements and colours were reversed, they soon unlearned their previous associations and formed new ones. Furthermore, the spiders, in the words of the scientists,

‘ show differences in their learning success and in their preference of which cues they used (colour vs. location) as a reward’s predictor’

In other words, these tiny creatures, with brains smaller than a poppy seed and a life span of only 1-3 years, have intelligence and personality.

Experiments have also showed that jumping spiders are very interested in one another: in one test, they were more fascinated by one another than by a delicious food item being dragged past on a tiny cart. I shall hold that image in my head for quite some time, I must say. There is even some evidence that they can learn from watching the behaviour of other spiders. If we really paid attention to the little creatures around us, we would probably learn some extraordinary things.

Perky jumping spider (Photo One)

I love how alert these creatures always seem to be, as if they are spring-loaded. Their Latin species name means ‘theatrical dancer’. They can jump at a speed of up to 2.6 feet per second, not bad when you consider that they are about the size of my little fingernail. The power to jump comes from a change in their body pressure, which results in the  fourth legs suddenly straightening, sending them flying into the air.

The love life of a jumping spider involves the male doing an energetic courtship dance, involving  waving the front legs and waggling the abdomen up and down. If you want to see the courtship display and mating of two North American jumping spiders, there is a rather nice video here. I listened with the sound down to avoid the usual silly music and cliched voice-over, but you may have a higher tolerance than I do.

Photo Two by Alex Wild

These tiny tigers can be found all over the place at the moment: in East Finchley, they seem to like warm, south-facing walls, and I often greet one who lives beside my front door. If you want to meet a spider who truly ‘looks you in the eye’, this is definitely the one. And finally, for those of you with a very, very high tolerance for cuteness, have a look at this animation of ‘Lucas the spider’. You’re welcome.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Fotonfänger – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11135039

Photo Two by Alexander Wild at www.alexanderwild.com

Dear Readers, some of you have been following the story of my parents’ last years since way back in 2016, when my Mum was taken into hospital while she was staying with me in London, so it seems appropriate to bring you with me to closing of the chapter. Dad was cremated yesterday in the crematorium at Weymouth, on a glorious spring day. This is not an occasion that you want to be late for, especially when there will only be two mourners actually at the event (my brother was self-isolating with a fever), and so we were there an hour early. It was so peaceful in the crematorium grounds: the only sounds were the cawing of crows in the cypresses, and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ which was chosen by the previous party as their music for saying goodbye. How idiosyncratic these choices are! I don’t know what anyone who didn’t know Dad would have made of ours (of which more later).

You would not have to ask from which direction the prevailing wind blows in the cemetery – every tree, every sapling, is leaning decidedly to the left. I idly wonder how some of them are standing up at all. Trees have a lot of sense, though: they ‘know’ that they need to adapt or get blown over, and so they sacrifice perfection for survival. This may be a metaphor.

I watch as the coffin bearing the next person to be cremated is driven to the door, and then the hearse drives away. At 1.30 it returns with another coffin. This one contains the earthly remains of my dear old dad. Of course, he isn’t actually here: that much was clear within a few moments of his death. The carer and I both went to the window to open it, as if to let his spirit out, just as I’d felt compelled to do when Mum died.

I had to get up and take a quick walk to regain a vestige of composure, and I found myself under those cypresses. People who are grieving are strange, otherworldly creatures who do peculiar things, and so it was that I found myself touching the trunk of one tree, almost as if I expected it to be breathing. It took me back to when I lay my hand on my Dad’s stilled chest, but at the same time it reminded me of when he was alive, this big, solid, reliable man, as dependable as a great tree. And I found myself taking off my shoes and standing in the grass, toes among the daisies, as if rooting down into the soil. Such a feeling of peace came over me, as if I was being held, and maybe I was, though by what or who I cannot say.

And then it was time. There are so many restrictions around the rites for the dead at the moment – no more than ten people, hand sanitizer as standard, no hugging people from other households. And yet, as we walked in to Concerto de Aranjuez (Adagio), to honour Dad’s love of Spain (and also the way that he used to whistle along with less than complete accuracy), I could feel all the people watching the webcast from home – Dad’s sisters and their families, some of my friends, and of course my brother – and it was comforting in a way that I hadn’t expected. The vicar’s eulogy managed to catch the essence of Dad in all his variety. And when we walked back out into the sunshine, to the sound of the theme tune to ‘Last of the Summer Wine‘, I felt as if we had done the best that we could for Dad, for now. 

Some of the peace of the day stayed with me as we started on the long trek home. It may not last, but then nothing does. My brother and I have often coped with the last few years by using humour, and this week we were remarking that we were orphans, but not the wide-eyed, sad Dickensian variety. Which kindly benefactor will adopt us, I mused, since we are grey-haired (and getting increasingly more so), old and a little on the podgy side? A friend of mine had the best answer:

‘Nature seems to be your nearest kindly benefactor’ she said.

And so it is.