Good morning Readers! We were in the garden this morning, planting yet more plants for the bees and trying to keep on top of the duckweed, when my husband yelled out that he’d found a lizard. Well, not quite, but just as much fun – this is a smooth newt, a female, and she was very keen on getting back into the pond but came a bit of a cropper with the frogspawn. You can hear a very enthusiastic starling in the background too…

As you might expect, we had to rescue her, and soon she was swimming away, and not alone – we spotted at least one more newt, and I think there could be at least three. And the starling is still chattering away in the background.

I haven’t seen a newt in the pond since the very first year that we we built it, and I’m always a bit puzzled as to how they arrive, what with their teeny tiny legs. However, I think that they probably arrived as eggs on my pondweed – the female lays up to 300 eggs and wraps each one individually in a leaf. The males apparently do a very elaborate courtship dance, but no sign of any males yet. This might possibly be just as well, as newts and their tadpoles prey on frog tadpoles and can be very efficient – I’ve heard of ponds losing all their frogs once the newts are established. Anyhow, let’s see what happens. For the moment, I am delighted to see these little water dragons, and will put back some of the weed we’ve just taken out in case of any eggs.

The frog tadpoles are just starting to escape from the spawn, and it looks like a bumper year – you can just make out the tiny newly-hatched taddies as a mass in the middle of the photo.

Dear Readers, I have visited Golders Green Crematorium several times now, and every time I am amazed by how peaceful it is. On this bright spring morning we saw exactly three other people, and everything looked at its most fresh and new-minted. On the way in, I was pleased to see a fine array of charging points for electric vehicles, and my husband was very impressed that they seemed to fast-chargers pulling 22 kilowatts. I did wonder if some of the more progressive funeral companies are switching over to electric hearses, which would be a very fine thing.

Electric charging points in the crematorium car park.

Every time that I visit I end up taking the same photos of the ‘cloisters’ of the crematorium building from different angles. I find the symmetry most pleasing, and there is always something new to see in the memorial plaques. All those lives encapsulated on a piece of stone the size of a piece of A4 paper at best! I think we should return to the Roman habit of including a summary of someone’s entire life on their headstone. How interesting that would be! Though clearly we would need more room in our cemeteries and crematoria, which would be a problem.

Many of the trees, including this cherry, were in blossom, squirrels were growling at one another, a green woodpecker yaffled from a distant horse chestnut tree, and the great tits were yelling ‘teacher, teacher’ from all directions.

I was delighted to see a ‘new-to-me’ weed too – this is spring beauty, or miner’s lettuce, and it might be familiar to some of my North American readers, because this is where it comes from originally. I shall say no more as it is likely to be a Wednesday Weed at some point soon.

Spring Beauty (Claytonia perfoliata)

The pieris were also in flower, and very fine they were too.

A pair of ducks were keeping a very low profile in the pond…

And look at this wonderful magnolia! These are such ancient plants that they were around before there were bees to pollinate them, and so they relied on beetles instead. The very earliest magnolia plants could date back to 95 million years ago, which plonks them in the Cretaceous period, so the flowers could have been munched upon by dinosaurs, and soared over by pterosaurs. Quite a thought.

The crematorium building itself contains a columbarium, which has niches into which the caskets bearing ashes can be placed. It has two chapels, the west chapel which seats 140 people and the east chapel which has room for 45 people. The building and grounds are owned by the same company that own East Finchley Crematorium, and is in the same Italianate style – on a sunny day you could briefly convince yourself that you were in Siena.

East Finchley crematorium building

Well, after all that wandering we were in need of sustenance and a sit down, and so we decided to see what the café in the tiny local garden centre was like. The answer is ‘very nice indeed’, so if you’re in Temple Fortune and the weather is nice enough to sit outside, I recommend this place highly. I had smoked salmon and avocado on rye-bread, and there was enough for two hungry people, so be warned.

Clearly you can also go on a floristry course here, which would be fun!  You can find all the details here – just scroll down to ‘Hampstead Garden Suburb’ for details of the shop, the café and the flower school.

And now it’s back to the Open University to do some more writing about Alzheimers, and to consider my final project on my other course, which will be on pollinators. More soon!

Amyloid plaques (stained brown)

Dear Readers, it might not seem like a cheerful subject for a sunny Easter afternoon, but as I come towards the end of my Cell Biology course with the Open University, we are being asked to investigate various neurodegenerative diseases. I opted for Alzheimer’s disease – while Dad had vascular dementia rather than classical Alzheimer’s, there are many reasons to suspect that the division between these two forms of dementia is not as clear cut as we used to think.

Traditionally, Alzheimer’s disease was blamed on two types of malfunctioning protein. One, known as beta-amyloid, is usually an inoffensive little molecule that helps with passing signals between various parts of the brain, but in Alzheimer’s it doesn’t fold properly, and instead of being a little short chain it becomes a ‘plaque’, an aggregation of cells that finds its way into the synapse, which is the gap between nerve cells (neurons). This gap is essential for signals to pass properly, but if it’s blocked the signals can’t get through, and the neuron degenerates and eventually dies. These plaques were first seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients back in 1911 when they were first identified by Alois Alzheimer. Of all the routes to immortality, being named after this dreadful disease must be one of the saddest.

The second protein is known as tau. Typically, this helps to stabilise the structure of the cytoskeleton within the cell – you might remember my little film of a motor protein making its way along the ‘roadways’ of the cytoskeleton a few weeks ago. However, in Alzeheimer’s disease these proteins malfunction and form what are known as ‘neurofibrillary tangles’ (or NFTs for short). So, instead of forming handy transport pathways so that nutrients and waste products can be moved about in the cell, the tau proteins form a knotted mass, which again results in the death of the neuron.

Neurofibrillary tangle

However, as usual things are not quite as simple as they seem. In a long-standing project known as the Nun Study, a group of nuns kindly agreed to donate their brains to science after their deaths. The nuns were visited regularly, and performed a range of cognitive tests to see how they were doing. When scientists looked at their donated brains after they had died, they found something surprising – some of the nuns who had performed very well on cognitive tests had a high incidence of beta-amyloid plaques and NFTs, while some of the nuns with the worst cognitive results were relatively clear of these features.

What was going on?

One clear factor that impacted on those with the worst cognitive results were incidences of ‘vascular events’, such as strokes or heart attacks. It’s not well-known that one of the many, many side-effects of smoking is vascular dementia, because of its long-term effects on the blood supply to the brain. As my Dad smoked 20 a day until he was in his eighties, it’s highly likely that the smoking was a key factor in the stroke that he had in 2004, and that this was a key factor in his dementia.

Image from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-019-0357-9

However, clearly this isn’t the whole story either – fortunately, many people who have suffered strokes do not go on to develop dementia, and not everyone who has Alzheimer’s has had a stroke. Another area that scientists are looking at is the whole science of bioenergetics, and if the very name makes you want to move on to something less taxing, let me explain.

Our brain in general, and neurons in particular, require a great deal of energy – although our brains only account for 2% of our body weight, they use up to 25% of our energy. As we get older, the parts of our cells that make most of our usable energy, the mitochondria, become more prone to damage and less efficient, so our neurons start to struggle to find enough ‘fuel’. The neurons also become less efficient at dealing with what are known as ‘Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) – I was more familiar with them as free radicals, chemicals that are implicated in all sorts of cell damage and inflammation. Finally, the damaged and dysfunctional mitochondria would normally be cut up, packaged and removed from the cell by a bunch of proteins called proteases, but these also become less efficient as we get older. All in all, it’s not a pretty picture, though it is a very variable one. For example, there’s a theory that women (who make up two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients) might be protected from a lot of this damage by oestrogen and progesterone, until we enter the menopause. On the other hand, women also tend to live longer than men, so it might just be that, as Alzheimer’s is overwhelmingly a disease of older people, we live long enough for it to develop and become apparent.

Image from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443909002427

So, all in all we have learned a lot about the possible causes of Alzheimer’s disease, but not what to do about it. For a long time, scientists hoped that something that would prevent the formation of the beta-amyloid plaques would also stop the development of the disease, but this proved not to be the case (as we’ve seen, the causal relationship between the plaques and Alzheimer’s is sketchy at best). Currently, there is a lot of interest in the area of malfunctioning mitochondria, and if anything can be done to either reduce this, or to improve the way that the body deals with the problem. There is also one particular gene which massively increases a person’s chance of contracting Alzheimer’s, so there is concentrated work going on look at how this can be rectified. At the moment, though, the best way to try to stave off Alzheimer’s, and the other forms of dementia, seems to be to do the things that will help with everything else – keep active, keep interested in the world and keep engaged with friends, family and the wider community. A key finding of the Nun Study was that where there was a high level of complexity, fluency and vivacity of the writing of the nun, there was a lower level of cognitive decline, which I find rather hopeful – an optimistic attitude also seems to have staved off the worst symptoms of dementia. Of course, we all know lovely, positive, happy people who have ended up with dementia, so this is not an absolute, or a preventative, but I do suspect that the mental stimulation that comes from the exchange of ideas may at least help to keep the wolf of Alzheimer’s from the door for a little longer.

None of us know if we’re going to end up with dementia in one form or another, but there is much to be said for living the richest, most meaningful life that we can while we can still live it.

An Underground Mouse (Photo by Sam Rowley)

Dear Readers, you might remember that last year I did a piece on mosquitoes on the London Underground system, and how they were actually starting to develop into a separate species. But what’s happening with our old friends, the Underground Mice? I remember watching them from when I was a small child and first travelling on the ‘Tube’, and being fascinated with how quickly they moved. They tucked themselves into the tiniest of spaces when they heard or felt a tube train approaching, and no doubt gorged themselves on all the debris from the sandwiches and burgers that people eat while they’re travelling. I am full of admiration for photographer Sam Rowley, who spent five nights laying on the platforms of various underground stations taking photos of the rodents, much to the bemusement of passers-by.

Photo by Sam Rowley

There are about half a million mice living in the tube system, and they lead lives that are often brutal and short – mice often have missing tails and feet following rather too close encounters with the trains, and clearly their food isn’t of the highest quality. Back in 2016, when tubes on some lines started to run all night, Professor Bill Wisden of Imperial College London was worried that the rodents might be adding sleep deprivation to their woes – previously, there had been a gap of about six hours when there was no tube service, which meant the mice could forage in peace and get some well-deserved shut-eye. Then there was the pandemic, when I suspect that no trains and far fewer passengers with their messy food must have led to a population collapse. It would have been interesting to monitor what went on.

Although mice are technically vermin, many Londoners have affectionate feelings towards the Underground Mice – there’s something about their tenacity and feistiness that reminds us of how necessary these qualities are to survive in the Big City, and I think it’s no wonder that the photo below (again by Sam Rowley) won the ‘People’s Choice’ award at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in 2020. These miniature dramas are going on around us all the time, if we have the time to ‘stop and stare’.

Dear Readers, while I was waiting for my friend S for our regular walk around Walthamstow Wetlands, I realised that I’d never really looked at the mural on the corner opposite Blackhorse Road station. Today, the red ‘welcome’ sign was glinting in the sunshine, and I was intrigued by range of objects shown, so I thought I’d do a bit of research.

It turns out that the mural was created in 2014 by artists Chris Bracey and Jon Blake, and was commissioned by the London Borough of Waltham Forest and the Greater London Authority (GLA). Mr Bracey was the owner of God’s Own Junkyard, which was a showcase for his neon art, and is quite the destination in its own right. He died on 1st November 2014 at the age of only 59, which was surely not  long after this sign was completed. A life-long Londoner and Walthamstow resident, he made neon pieces for everything from Raymond’s Revue Bar in Soho to films such as Blade Runner and Eyes Wide Shut.

God’s Own Junkyard (Photo by JRennocks, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

The mural depicts images of local Walthamstow industry, such as the shaving brushes, pipes and leather goods made by Dunhill at their local factory, plus images of artists. After all, Walthamstow was also the home of William Morris and the birth of the Arts and Crafts movement, so this is a very fitting tribute to the many artists and makers of all kinds who have lived in E17. I note that in one article about the mural, it mentions that it has a life expectancy of ten years, and it’s now nine years old, and still looks good to me!

In other news, the weeping willow catkins are in full flower at the Wetlands now…

…the geese are all getting very antsy with one another, with much hissing and honking, though many of them can’t be bothered to do any actual attacking (thank goodness), so there’s a touch of ‘handbags at dawn’ about some of the palaver. These two Egyptian geese were very vocal, but it was hard to work out what exactly they were annoyed about. There was a single coot in the mid distance, but no other geese that I could see. Clearly these are very feisty critters.

This was a very striking hybrid goose, but hybrid with what I’m not sure. Plus he or she wasn’t cooperating on the photography front. The bird is clearly mostly greylag, but I’m not sure what else is going on.

And I loved the way that this greylag goose was rising above all the shenanigans and getting on with the serious business of grazing amongst the red dead nettle. At least some creatures have their priorities straight!

Weeping Willow (Salix babylonica)

Dear Readers, weeping willows seem to be so much part of our riverside habitats that it’s difficult to imagine them not being part of the landscape. However, this is not a native tree: weeping willows come originally from China, but have been traded along the Silk Route for millenia, and probably arrived in the UK as early as 1730. To add to the confusion, traditional weeping willow has then hybridised with the native white willow to give us the majority of the trees that we see today (Salix x sepulcharis). How elegant they are! I make no apology for posting last week’s short film of them blowing in the wind again…

One of the commonest cultural references to the weeping willow is from the King James Bible, Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

Aha! Said some arbiculturalist, the trees by the Euphrates river were not weeping willows, but were in fact Euphrates weeping poplar (Populus euphratica) because there’s always a smartass somewhere (and to be honest it’s usually me). And in the New International Bible, it’s corrected to:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion

There on the poplars we hung our harps.

So one-nil for poplars. On the other hand, we’ll always have Boney-M….

In a way, it’s a shame that such a beautiful tree has been associated with sadness: maybe it’s the way that the stems drift down in a melancholy fashion, falling like tears into the water. Shakespeare had a great fondness for the weeping willow: here is ‘The Willow Song’ from Othello, sung by Desdemona as she prepares for bed, afraid that she has been unjustly accused of being unfaithful, as indeed she has. Click on the link to hear the song.

The Willow Song

“The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,

(Sing all a green willow, willow willow willow,)
With his hand in his bosom and his head upon his knee.
(Oh willow, willow, willow
Shall be my garland.)

He sighed in his singing and made a great moan…
I am dead to all pleasure, my true love she is gone…

The mute bird sat by him was made tame by his moans…
The true tears fell from him, would have melted the stones…

Come all you forsaken and mourn you with me…
Who speaks of a false love, mine’s falser than she…

Let love no more boast her in palace nor bower…
It buds, but it blasteth ere it be a flower…

Though fair and more false, I die with thy wound…
Thou hast lost the truest lover that goes upon the ground, sing…

Let nobody chide her, her scorns I approve…
She was born to be false, and I to die for her love…

Take this for my farewell and latest adieu…
Write this on my tomb, that in love I was true…”

And then there’s poor old Ophelia of course….

‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream:

There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.

There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.

Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.

But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

John Everett Millais ‘Ophelia’

In China, the weeping willow is said to represent the tears of Kuan Yin who was the Bodhisattva and goddess of compassion, as she weeps for the suffering in the world. It also has an association with Alexander the Great – as he rode under some weeping willows (in Babylon, so probably poplars), the branches swept his crown from his head in a nice piece of foreshadowing.

On a more cheerful note, how about ‘The Wind in the Willows?’ What an interesting book this is, with its tales of Ratty and Mole and Mr Toad and then that single chapter about ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, who looks after the lost baby otter until Ratty and Mole find him. Ancient prog rock fans like me might remember that Pink Floyd’s first album was called ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. The name of the book, ‘Wind in the Willows’ is slightly mysterious, as willows are never mentioned in the text itself: apparently the book’s publisher, Sir Algernon Methuen, said that it had been chosen because of its ‘charming and wet sound’, a phrase that I’m not sure gets us any further forward. Apparently ‘the wind in the willows’ is also thought to be the sound of elves chattering in the branches, but that’s not very helpful either. Suffice it to say that this is a book with hidden depths, which has been seen at various times as a ‘gay manifesto’ (there is only one woman in it (a barge lady) and Ratty and Moley have a very ‘intense’ relationship), as a conservative and nostalgic look back to the ‘good old days’ of rural life, and as a story of addiction (Mr Toad and his obsession with his motor car) which is only ‘cured’ by an intervention by his friends. Like all great books, it can be read in many different ways, and is clearly not just a book for children. There’s a very interesting analysis by Kate Cantrell here.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Paul Bransom

And finally, who amongst us does not have a piece of willow pattern pottery stowed away somewhere or other? The blue and white pattern is so well known, so ubiquitous that I for one have almost stopped looking at it, so here it is. It became popular at the end of the 18th Century in the UK, and I think almost everybody’s grandmother had a willow pattern tea set lurking somewhere.

Willow pattern plate – Photo By James Yolkowski. – Photograph taken February 20, 2005 by James Yolkowski., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2810575

It’s actually quite an odd pattern when you look at it closely – I’m assuming that the ‘willow’ is the tree in the centre, which looks as if it has manicured nails and a couple of horse’s tails attached to the upper branches. Then there’s what appears to be an outhouse bursting into flames on the lower left, and two birds facing off in the centre. Plus there appears to be a steaming teapot on the roof of the temple to the centre right.

I’m sure this is all just down to my lack of understanding of what’s actually going on, but the design is actually English, and a ‘legend’ involving star-crossed lovers who were transformed into birds by the gods etc etc was invented to help with sales. Well it certainly worked, and various operas/plays/films use the design, including an episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’, and you can’t get any more iconic than that!

A 19th Century Willow Pattern set (Photo By Wmpearl – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51653825)

Hairy-footed flower bee (male)

Dear Readers, this little white face is a sure sign that spring is finally on its way – this is a male hairy-footed flower bee, and they have a great fondness for the flowering currant in my back garden. There are lots of males about, and also some females, who are jet-black, furry and extremely difficult to photograph, as they spend a lot of time trying to evade the males who hang around the flowers.

I have two flowering currants, the ‘mother’ plant above, and her daughter, who grew from a seedling and is absolutely magnificent, and a much paler colour.

The grape hyacinths, fritillaria and wood anemones are starting to show their faces too.

And I suspect we’re in for a bumper ‘crop’ of flowers on the climbing hydrangea too.

The tadpoles haven’t emerged yet, but the frogspawn has gone from looking very plump to rather more diffuse, a sure sign that the taddies will soon be emerging.

And there has been much excitement in the magpie nest. Late last week it was a very wet, blustery night and we were sitting in the living room watching a CD of the TV series ‘Raffles’ with Antony Valentine at his reptilian best when I heard the magpie calling in a very agitated fashion. Out I went into the rain with a torch and my binoculars, and I could see the bird scrambling about but couldn’t see what all the fuss was about – I suspect maybe a squirrel was trying to break in to what was originally a drey that has been commandeered by the magpies. Anyhow, the stramash went on for about twenty minutes, with me getting wetter and wetter, until eventually I admitted defeat and went indoors. The next day things looked much as normal, and both magpies are still around, so hopefully nothing untoward has happened. Only time will tell.

And in the meantime, the buds are appearing on the whitebeam, the sun is shining and all is well.

Before and after Botox for forehead wrinkles Photo by Jessemichael225, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, New Scientist is always a source of interesting dinner party snippets (or indeed, snippets to interject whenever someone starts droning on about something tedious), so here are a few highlights from this week.

First up, scientists have discovered that having Botox to paralyse your forehead muscles may actually affect the way that you process other people’s emotions. Mitchell Brin, who works at both the University of California and at AbbVie, which makes Botox, scanned the brains of 10 women before and after they had the cosmetic injections. While they were undergoing the scan they were shown photographs of happy, smiley people and angry people, and specific regions in their brains lit up. After the injection, the brain activity was altered. Bear with me here. Normally, when we see the expression on someone’s face we unconsciously mimic it, and this sends signals to our amygdala (in the case of happy faces) and a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus if the face that we’re mimicking is angry. It’s the action of the facial muscles that helps us to interpret the emotions of the other people. A fellow scientist, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, explains that if we can no longer perform these micro-expressions, “you might not be able to experience someone else’s emotions as intensely or as vividly as you would like to”.

Well. This does accord with other studies that have suggested that Botox injections can make it harder to recognise and process emotions, and fortunately I am unBotoxed as my eyebrows are raised so high that they are practically on the top of my head. I do note that the sample size is extremely small, and also I wonder if the women were asked for their perceptions. Still, I found it extremely interesting, and it’s yet another indication of what complicated little creatures we are, with feedback loops from the physical to the emotional that I would never have thought of. You can read the whole article here.

Incidentally, the front page article in New Scientist this week suggests that wrinkles make you old, rather than getting old giving you wrinkles, but it’s made my head explode so I shall return to it when I can separate out the ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg’ aspects of the whole thing. If you want a pre-emptive look, the article is here.

3 D Printed Cheesecake (Photo by Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia University)

And what, you may ask, is this thing in the photo, which looks a bit like a stack of edible shoe insoles? It is, in fact, a cheesecake made by a 3D printer. Well, it makes a change from people using 3D printers to create little lethal plastic guns. Graham crackers (yes, this is an American cheesecake), peanut butter and strawberry jam were blended into seven different pastes, and then extruded from the printer in seven layers, before the whole lot was given a light browning with a laser beam. It’s cheesecake, Jim, but not as we know it. I am left curious about what it tasted like, and also what on earth the pink stuff on the top is. These wacky scientists have surely done enough damage with their molecular gastronomy without venturing on the territory of the world’s most calorific dessert, but I can just imagine how much fun they had, so I’m letting them off. The whole article is here.

Dormice are luminescent! Who knew? Photo by Karmel Ritson and Grete Nummert

And finally, it appears that dormice are photoluminescent, but no one knows why. Many invertebrates, marine animals and some birds contain pigments which absorb ultraviolet light and then emit it at a different wavelength so that it’s visible to the naked eye. A small number of nocturnal mammals do it too, including flying squirrels and springhares (an extremely neat South African jumping rodent).

Springhare (Pedetes capensis) Photo By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE – Spring Hare (Pedetes capensis), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40782729

Grete Nummert, who works at Tallinn Zoo, heard about the springhares and the flying squirrels and decided to have a quick look at the dormice – she bet a colleague that they would ‘glow’ under ultraviolet light, the prize being a cake. Presumably not a 3D printed cheesecake. Anyhow, the photos prove her right – dormice do show photoluminescence, glowing blue under normal uv light, and red if a  yellow filter is applied. In the springhare, the theory is that the luminescence helps to camouflage the animal as some of the plants that it lives amongst also glow, and some animals seem to use their ‘glow-up’ to make themselves more attractive, but in these little rodents we just don’t know.

Nummert says that the cake was ‘delicious’.

You can read the whole article here.

Peregrine falcon passing food to a fledgling (Royal Courts of Justice, 2021)

Dear Readers, I have been asked several times over the past few weeks if I feel as if things are ‘falling apart’, in the context of work, or the UK, or the world in general. There is a certain dramatic appeal about the notion that we are all going to hell in a handbasket, and there is much to support the idea – climate change is running rampant, poverty is rife, the NHS is pushed to its absolute limit and clouds are gathering in many corners of the world. Was W.B Yeats right? His poem is so often misquoted (not least by my husband ahem) and so I include it here in its entirety. Am I the only person who cannot read it without a frisson of fear, or anxiety?

The Second Coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And of course, he was right. The poem was written in 1919, and while it clearly has shadows of what was to come in the Second World War, and also of the specific situation in Ireland, it was composed while Yeats’s pregnant wife was convalescing from the Spanish Flu, in the midst of a time of great fear and anguish. I must say that for me, I sense the shadow of the pandemic in the poem, and even of bird flu and its possible mutations, but maybe ‘The Second Coming’ is a work for all ages. It plays into our anxieties and fears, and so much can be read into that ‘gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun’.

We seem to be transfixed with the idea of the apocalypse – there are so many books and tv series about the end of the world as we know it, of varying quality. We like to play with the idea of annihilation, without engaging with it. Sometimes it all just feels too much, I know. But then, the plants in the meadow that we’ve planted in the playing fields next to Coldfall Wood are germinating and today I noticed that there are meadows springing up everywhere for the Coronation. These will feature native plants, and in some areas they are specifically including local plants, which will make for a varied and interesting set of habitats. Let’s hope that they’re well managed after the coronation is over, and for years to come. As we’ve lost 97% of our meadows in the UK it will be good to see them making a comeback. I think it says something that the best image of a meadow that I currently have is of the one below, taken in Austria. Let’s hope that we get our act together here in the UK too.

An Austrian Alpine meadow, soon to be (hopefully) found all over the UK

So, let’s not be blinded and paralysed by the enormity of the things that are happening. There are good things happening, as always, on a local, national and international scale. I for one can’t wait to see what our little local meadow will produce, and which creatures will come as a result of it. Watch this space!