Dear Readers, I’m sure we’re all familiar with William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Daffodils’ (and if not, you can find it on a previous post here). But I had never come across this rather longer poem by Ted Hughes, with its typical touch of cruelty and eroticism (and indeed narcissism one could say, if one were a punster). I find it intriguing nonetheless, and the descriptions are extraordinary. See what you think!

Daffodils
Ted Hughes

I’d bought a bit of wild ground.
In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned.
A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently.

It was a gilding of the Deeds – treasure trove!
Daffodils just came. And they kept on coming –

‘Blown foam,’ I wrote. ‘Vessels of light!’
They ran under every gust
On the earth-surge, ‘their six-bladed screws
Churning the greeny yellows
Out of the hard, over-wintered cholorophyl.’

I was still a nomad.
My life was still a raid. The earth was booty.
I knew I’d live forever. I had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. I did not recognise
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
My own days!
Hardly more body than a hallucination!
A dream of gifts – opening their wrappers for me!

I thought they were a windfall. I picked them. And I sold them.

Behind the rainy curtains of that green April
I became intimate
With the soft shrieks
Of the jostled stems – the wet shocks, shaken,
Of the girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened Dragonflies, wet and flimsy –

To each bright, scared look
I brought gentler cruelty. A thousand times
Slid my fingers down her slenderness
Felt deep into her chilly fountain of blades –
The watery flicker she peered from,
And nipped her off close to the bulb.

I piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens
(The buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered).
Propped their raw butts in bucket water
(Their oval, meaty butts)
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch. The whole lot went.
Yet they stayed. That night, on my pillow,
My brain was a chandelier of daffodils!

Dressed for Heaven,
Wings pouring light, faces bowed,
The souls of all those daffodils, as I killed them,
Had taken refuge inside me –

I could see right into their flame-stillness
Like seeing right into the eye-pupil
Of a person fast asleep, as if I’d lifted the eyelid –

I could study
That scarf of papery crinkle, fawn and perfunctory, at their throats,
And the tissue of their lips. I learned
That what had looked like a taffeta knot, undone
And re-tied looser, crumpled,
Was actually membrane of solid light.

And that their metals were odourless
More a deep-grave stoniness, a cleanness of stone,
As if ice had a breath –

They began to alarm me. Were these
My free girls, my Saturnalian nunnery,
With their bloomers of scrambled egg-yolk, their flounces,
Their core alive and kicking, their bare shoulders in frills,
That set the cold stars shaking
Loose and wetly
Inside walking, darkly-coated people?

I tried to picture them out there, in the grass –

These rigid, gold archangels somehow
Drank up my attempt.

With a grisly awe
Like the idea of atoms, or like the idea
Of white-frosted galaxies floating apart,
As I sank deeper, each towered heavier,

Cathedral interior lit,
Empty or all-seeing angel stare
Leaning through me –
it was Resurrection,
The trumpet,
The corpse-weight of nightmare!
I wrenched free
I flitted
With my world, my garden, with my unlikely
Baby-cries leached from the thaw –
my shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year –

Photo b By Private individual – A photo taken privately., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4337056

Dear Readers, it’s a new year so it must be time for a new medical procedure (in this case, one I’ve been waiting six months for, but better late than never!) So it was off to the Royal Free Hospital for a Nerve Conduction Study, to see if we can find out why my feet are so numb.

The Royal Free is actually a moderately awkward place to get to from East Finchley, so I got a cab. My cab driver was from Afghanistan originally, and was describing how his mother died of a heart attack aged 65 after the family were attacked by the Taliban. He himself is type 2 diabetic, so we had a great chat about neuropathy, and he recommended a juice made from apple, carrot, beetroot and orange that he’s knocking up for himself every morning. Then he told me that he’d failed a written English test that taxi drivers now apparently have to have in order to keep their minicab badge. Honestly? I can see why you’d want people to be able to speak sufficiently good English, and to read enough to understand road signs, but this chap’s spoken English was as good as any of the London-born cabbies that I’ve been driven around by during the broken leg months. Life just seems to hard for people sometimes.

Anyhoo, I got to the hospital, found my way to neurology, and was soon chatting to the consultant. What a strange experience a Nerve Conduction Study is! And what a reminder that we basically run on electrical signals. Before I knew what was happening my toes were jumping, and he also tested my hand as I was complaining that I seemed to have developed a tremor there. It’s not at all painful, I feel no side effects, and overall the whole thing was a slightly comic reminder of how easy it is to get us to make physical movements which are not under our control.

Anyhow, at the end of it all he diagnosed mild neuropathy in my feet, and no problem with my hands. The question is, why? I don’t appear to be diabetic (though I might see if the doctor will revisit that), and I haven’t got any of the things that I was secretly worried about (Parkinsons, MS etc) so that’s a relief. My B12 levels are fine (a shortage of B12 can cause neuropathy). So it’s all a bit mysterious, but at least I know I’m not imagining a problem with my feet. Apparently the results will be with my GP within a couple of hours, and I persuaded the consultant to give me a copy of the results. I shall follow up with the doctor and see what we do next. I can live with having neuropathy, but it would be good to know if there’s anything that can be done to stop it getting worse.

I’ve also been seeing a podiatrist, and that was very enlightening – I definitely have a) hypermobility (which explains why the smallest change in the pavement surface seems to trigger a major catastrophe where my ankle is concerned) and b) bunions and c) fallen arches, so I’m getting some orthotics to see if they will help to rebalance my walking. Plus there’s good old pilates for balance and strength as well.

One thing the consultant did say is that I need to be careful in the dark, because in the absence of adequate feeling in my feet, I need to use my eyes to help with balance, which I can’t do if it’s dark. So I will need to be a bit more careful if I do any more visits to caves, and I should also (apparently) be careful if I close my eyes in the shower.

Well, let’s see what happens next, Readers! And do shout if you have any advice/comments/experience in these matters, it’s always good to share knowledge.

Dear Readers, it’s been a very full-on week, what with my uncooperative magpies and endless quantities of cellular biology for my Open University course, but today was so bright and sunshiny that I had to go for a quick gallop around the County Roads here in East Finchley. First up, I always love the tiles on the inside of the porches that some of the houses have – there seem to be a few houses with one kind of tile, followed by another couple of houses with a different style.

I love them, and I’m sorry that my house doesn’t have them, but there we go! You can’t have everything!

And there was lots to admire on this walk, not least this intrepid bumblebee queen feeding on the mahonia in Hertford Road. I must definitely plant some in my front garden, the scent is delicious and it’s so useful for early bees. This one was collecting pollen, so she might be ‘incubating’ her first few worker bees in a nest somewhere. Fingers crossed that there isn’t another long cold snap.

Someone has very sensibly wrapped up their tree ferns, keeping them snug and warm until spring.

And I’ve always really liked this silver birch, especially at this time of year when the shoots are pale purple.

There’s some stinking iris ‘berries’ in a front garden…

…a little patch of snowdrops, positively glowing….

and some periwinkle, which seems to have some flowers more or less all year.

There is a newly-planted Midland hawthorn ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, which will have bright pink flowers in the spring.

And across the road there’s what looks like another hawthorn, but happy to be corrected! I’m amazed that the birds haven’t found the berries yet!

There seems to be a viburnum for every season, and the one below, which I think is Viburnum tinus, is in full flower. I love the way that the blooms change colour.

And so, it’s amazing what there is in flower here in early February, and the bumblebee makes me think that maybe spring is around the corner after all. Plus, if you have clear skies, there is a wonderful view of Venus just above the crescent moon at the moment, well worth a look. I might try to get a photo later.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I’m currently conducting an experiment to see whether the birds in my garden prefer orange or yellow doughballs, having ascertained two years ago that there was a definite preference for red. Well, all I can say is that the birds have been a lot less cooperative this year. In total I’m supposed to do twenty trails, ten where orange balls are in the majority, and ten where there are more yellow ones. This is to check that the birds are selecting by colour, not just picking out the commonest colour or in fact just choosing at random.

The tricky bit is that you have to end the trial when there are between fifteen and thirty five doughballs left. I have set my timer to check what’s going on every ten minutes (after all, I do have other stuff to do, like shower and eat), but the little devils either ignore the doughballs altogether or swoop down en masse and gobble the lot. So frustrating! At this rate I’ll have to make another kilo of doughballs.

Fortunately I have managed to get eight trials where orange balls were in the majority, so I’ve swapped to putting out trials with mainly yellow balls, so hopefully I can get at least eight trials of each colour. Then there’s some antsy-fancy statistical work, and then I’ll know whether they actually do prefer orange or yellow, or if they’re just hungry and not at all picky. My report has to be in by Monday 10th February, so it’s very tight.

And it’s not as if that’s all – I also have lots of genetics questions to answer (Transcription! Translation! Quaternary folding of proteins! Don’t ask! But then, it is year three so I’d expect it to be hard-ish, and I can feel my brain creaking open with all the new ideas, so it’s all good. And furthermore, there’s nothing riding on this except my own sense of accomplishment, so I should really relax and just enjoy it.

Now, where are those blessed woodpigeons?

European Rabbit (Photo Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Readers, teeth are one of those things that are taken for granted until they rebel, at which point they become the most important things in the world. Is there anything more infernal than bad toothache? And who looks forward to a trip to the dentist? I’m fortunate enough to have my father’s teeth (and I can hear him in my head saying ‘isn’t it about time you gave them back?), which means that I have exactly one filling, and that put in by a lunatic evangelical dentist over forty years ago when I lived in Dundee. Well I remember him asking me if I had a relationship with Jesus while I had a mouthful of dental swabs. But anyhow, I was amused to have come across a trio of tooth stories in New Scientist in the past week or so, so here we go!

First up, rabbits apparently eat their own teeth in order to supplement the calcium that they need to grow new ones. Rabbits eat a very coarse diet, and their teeth are constantly wearing down – if they get too short, the rabbit can’t eat anymore. So, it seems that their teeth produce a fine calcium dust as the rabbit chews, and this is absorbed back into the rabbit’s body and digested much more easily than calcium supplements. It seems like a very sensible way to recycle a precious mineral, and who knew? Maybe not rabbit keepers, some of who have been feeding their rabbits calcium supplements that it turns out are unnecessary, and could, indeed, cause kidney stones.

Wild Bottlenose Dolphin from https://whalescientists.com/barataria-bay-bottlenose-dolphins-march-2022/

Next up, there is some speculation that dolphins can hear with their teeth. For a long time, scientists have wondered why dolphins have so many teeth – most of them aren’t used for chewing, and in addition they sit very loosely in the jaw. Scientist Ryo Kodera, of Tsurumi  University in Japan, suggests that the teeth might act as antennae, helping the dolphins to echolocate under water. The cochlear nerve, which processes sound, extends right into the lower jaw in dolphins, suggesting that vibrations felt in the teeth could be passed on to the brain. The teeth also sit in spongy, porous sockets which are connected by a thick bundle of nerves.

Other scientists are sceptical about this, but that is their job – Kodera acknowledges that there needs to be further research in future. At any rate, it seems that that beaming ‘smile’ of Flipper the dolphin might be about more than just healthy teeth.

Sabre -toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) reconstructed at the Natural History Museum in London (Photo John Cummings, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

And finally, why were sabre-toothed animals so successful, and why are there none today? When we think of such carnivores, we tend to think of the canonical sabre-toothed tiger, but actually these teeth evolved at least five times in different groups of animals. There were sabre-toothed reptiles some 270 million years ago, a sabre-toothed marsupial related to the extinct thylacine, and, of course, those cats.

Scientist Tahlia Pollock, of the University of Bristol, investigated the teeth of no less than 95 carnivorous mammal species including 25 sabre-toothed ones. The teeth were categorised, and then each set of teeth was 3D printed, and plunged into a block of gelatine that mimicked animal flesh.

The sabre teeth could puncture the block with 50 percent less effort than any other kind of teeth, and the Smilodon (pictured) had the most extreme teeth of all. However, there is a trade off to weaponry of this kind – the teeth were prone to breaking off, and some of the specimens found in the La Brea tar pits had lost teeth while they were alive.

Sabre-toothed predators were really designed to hunt giant prey, such as mammoths or giant sloths. But when these started to die out, the sabre-toothed animals were likely to have been outcompeted by carnivores with smaller teeth which were better adapted to smaller, more numerous prey, such as deer or rabbits.

So, today the sabre-toothed animals are gone, and instead we have smaller predators with smaller teeth to hunt smaller prey. Though if you’ve ever seen a tiger yawning, you might consider that the teeth are not that much smaller.

Links below:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2464105-rabbits-may-eat-their-own-teeth-to-boost-their-calcium-intake/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2461513-dolphins-may-use-their-teeth-to-hear-underwater/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2463406-why-sabre-toothed-animals-evolved-again-and-again/

Marsh Tit (Parus palustis) Photo By Sławek Staszczuk (photoss [AT] hotmail.co.uk), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1550036

Willow Tit (Poecile montanus) Photo By © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30949154

You can see why these two species would be hard to tell apart on sight – although they inhabit slightly different habitats they are both shy, and both are mostly found in pairs rather than in larger groups. The Marsh Tit generally takes over nest holes frequented by other birds, but the Willow Tit excavates its own nest, though you’d have to catch a bird in the act for this to be useful.

My Crossley Guide suggests that the Marsh Tit is much perkier than the Willow Tit, ‘noisily drawing attention to itself’. Let’s listen to the calls and see what we think.

First up, here’s the Marsh Tit, recorded in the North of England by Peter Stronach. There’s a definite touch of the ‘chick-a-dee’ call of the bird’s close relations in North America, the chickadees.

And here’s a Willow Tit, recorded in Yorkshire by David Pennington. Sounds a little higher and sweeter to me.

How I envy people who have a really good ear for bird song! I can probably identify ten to fifteen species now, but that’s my lot.

Marsh tits are unusual amongst tits because they cache their food, hiding it in tree stumps, under lichen, in leaf litter and under the soil. The birds seem to remember where they’ve left the seeds, finding the oldest cache sites first and then searching systematically rather than randomly. The part of their brain that’s concerned with spatial mapping, the hippocampus, is 31% larger than that of the Great Tit, even though the Great Tit is larger, and has a bigger forebrain.

Marsh Tit from https://animalia.bio/marsh-tit

So, what’s the story with the Marsh Tit? In other places in Europe it seems to be doing well, but in the UK its breeding population has declined by 80% since 1967. This could well be linked to the loss of its woodland habitat, particularly woods with a well-developed understory. When I think about our local patch of ancient woodland here in East Finchley, it’s clear that when coppicing of the woodland stopped way back in the 1930s and 40s, the tree cover grew to make the wood too dark for all but the most robust of plants to survive. In this wood, as in many others, when coppicing was done in a few places in the 2000s the understory regenerated from seed left in the soil from all those years ago. It’s been found that Marsh Tits will gravitate towards woodland areas with a healthy understory, that chicks raised in these conditions are heavier and have a better survival rate, and that more adults survive the winter.

Overgrazing by deer can destroy forest understory, and without predators to keep herbivores in check this can also change the nature of a forest, as has been seen in other places such as the classic story of Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced and kept the deer population moving, preventing overgrazing (though later studies have shown that things were a bit more complicated than this). Still, a superabundance of a large plant-eating mammal is bound to change the balance of a habitat, be it sheep or deer.

Surprisingly for such small birds, each pair of Marsh Tits needs a whole half hectare as a territory in order to raise their young, and so fragmentation of woodland can also be a problem.

Finally, it’s thought that increased competition from Blue Tits and Great Tits at feeding stations where these birds co-exist with Marsh Tits is also to the detriment of the smaller, more subordinate Marsh Tit. The Marsh Tits can choose to come to feeding stations when the other species are not about, but they can’t avoid the other birds altogether. It’s a conundrum that is being increasingly talked about – there’s no doubt that more Blue Tits and Great Tits are surviving because we’re feeding them, but is this at the expense of smaller, rarer, shyer species? The jury is currently out, but it will be interesting to see what emerges from studies over the next few years.

Michael Longley at Corrymeela Peace Centre. Photo by By Andrewincowtown – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34849973

Dear Readers, Northern Irish poet Michael Longley died a few days ago at the age of 85, after complications following hip surgery. Seamus Heaney called him ‘a custodian of griefs and wonders’, and so he was. He was a man who loved the classics, and who wove them into his work with consummate skill. His most famous poem, ‘Ceasefire’, was published just days after a ceasefire was called in Northern Ireland.

Ceasefire

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

Michael Longley Saturday, July 23, 2016

And I love this poem – the recitation of the ice cream flavours, the carnations left on the doorstep, the recitation of plants.

The Ice Cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

But the poems could also be tender and deeply personal.

The Pattern

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride’s dress,
Complicated instructions for stitching bodice
And skirt, box pleats and hems, tissue-paper outlines,
Semblances of skin, which I nervously unfold
And hold up in snow light, for snow has been falling
On this windless day, and I glimpse your wedding dress
And white shoes outside in the transformed garden
Where the clothesline and every twig have been covered.

I think this is my favourite, written for Longley’s grandson. It makes me teary, and I love, yet again, the classical illusions – pram as chariot, baby as hoplite.

The Leveret

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor,
A bumpy approach in your father’s arms
To the cottage where, all of one year ago,
You were conceived, a fire-seed in the hearth.
Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?
Do you hear the wind tonight, and the rain
And a shore bird calling from the mussel reefs?
Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the sea,
Little hoplite. Have you been missing it?
I’ll park your chariot by the otters’ rock
And carry you over seaweed to the sea.
There’s a tufted duck on David’s lake
With her sootfall of hatchlings, pompoms
A day old and already learning to dive.
We may meet the stoat near the erratic
Boulder, a shrew in his mouth, or the merlin
Meadow-pipit-hunting. But don’t be afraid.
The leveret breakfasts under the fuchsia
Every morning, and we shall be watching.
I have picked wild flowers for you, scabious
And centaury in a jam-jar of water
That will bend and magnify the daylight.
This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.

If you would like to hear Michael Longley read these poems, skedaddle over to The Poetry Archive here. Highly recommended!

Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Dear Readers, first up a round of applause for the folks at the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) for getting the results of all the plant surveys that were done for the New Year Plant Hunt collated and analysed within a few weeks of the event closing. Well done! No mean feat. But with the results in, what does it show?

As usual, daisy was the plant most often seen in flower, followed by dandelion and groundsel – out of a total of 1,499 surveys, these plants were seen in 1,000 of them. In total, 647 species of plant were found in flower. Of these, 340 species were flowering later than expected, with about half of the remaining species flowering early. It seems that the effects of climate change mean that many plants find conditions conducive to a longer flowering season, rather than bringing them into flower early. The remaining plants, such as the ‘top three’ listed above, flower all year round, whenever conditions are suitable.

Dandelions in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

There were a few surprises in the plant count, though. First up, Little Robin, a rare plant usually associated with Cornwall, was found blooming in Peterborough. Any resemblance to Herb Robert is completely understandable, as this little plant is another wild geranium.

Little Robin (Geranium purpureum) Photo By Franz Xaver – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7394991

The traffic wasn’t just from the West Country to east though: a specialist plant from East Anglia, Bur Chervil, was found in flower in Cornwall.

Bur Chervil (Anthriscus caucalis)  Photography by Curtis Clark, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=921598)

Annual Buttonweed is a rare non-native plant (from Australia originally), but it appears to have jumped over the wall and was found in Lincolnshire this year, only the second record for the county.

Annual Buttonweed (Cotula australis) Photo By Macleay Grass Man – https://www.flickr.com/photos/73840284@N04/8423170956/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26714979

In general, during the Plant Hunt coastal areas (which tend to have less frost) had longer plant lists than inland areas, southern locations had more plants than northern areas, and urban areas had more exotic non-natives in flower, largely due to the wide range of novel microhabitats that can be found in cities, and the heat island effect, which keeps things warmer. But all in all, the trend is definitely for longer flowering seasons for many plants, and early flowering for some. How this will play out with the rest of the ecosystem, finely balanced as it is, only time will tell.