Watched

The Grey Mare is sulking.

I thought yesterday's "I'm really not pleased with you, mother" attitude was because she had spent the day inside. With the worst storm since 1987 forecast and the gale starting to gather momentum when I fed her in the cold light of dawn, I thought she would appreciate it. She loathes spending the day with her head down, bum to the wind, simply surviving the elements, and I loathe the thought of it. However, the great storm did not hit Northumberland: by the time I arrived home there was an eerie calm of the kind where you find yourself breathing quietly, listening, waiting for something to happen.

I took her out for some grass, I chattered away inanely as is my wont, sorted out her bed, her dinner, her hay and her magnetic boots. I then sorted out the dark prince, who along with my sister's other three is my responsibility while she is off Nessie-spotting for a couple of days. The poor lad is lame and is staying in through necessity rather than non-arriving storms. I gave him some carrots and had a chat with him.

The force of the evil eye assailing me along the line of stables compelled me to turn around. "What are you doing, giving him my carrots!" she seemed to be saying. I had forgotten just how possessive the Grey Mare can be. She gets rather upset if I have anything to do with another horse in her sight as she thinks - quite rightly - that she is the centre of my universe.

She spent today outside, came in when I called and ate her tea while I went down the field to feed more of my sister's horses. But once I returned, I was searched thoroughly for carrots (in case I was hiding any for him) and watched intently while I sorted him out for the night.

I don't know how my sister manages to have four horses and keep them all happy. One spoiled little madam is quite sufficient for me.

Starry, starry skies

Northumberland’s giant skies are rightly renowned for their lack of light pollution and the clear views afforded to those who want to gaze at the stars. Walking through a 5 o’clock field this morning, the sky was a little girl’s Disneyified dream: it looked like someone had grabbed generous handfuls of diamonds and hurled them across a backdrop of black velvet. Having recently finished reading Stardust, shooting stars were on my mind. Within minutes, there had been two to wish upon.

The bright, shiny, fake modern world makes us forget just how enveloping and dark real darkness is. Once, caught in a power-cutting storm while going to fetch the Grey Mare for her dinner, I was reminded of just how total it is. It’s surprising how much difference light from the village makes in the middle of a field. When they’re all switched off, you’re bent double against horizontal rain and your only illumination comes from the occasional flash of lightning, it would be very easy to become disorientated. Just the searching beam of a car’s headlamps on the coast road and the comforting three red buttons of the Chatton Mast at the foot of the Cheviots keeps you grounded.

Another more pleasant elemental experience also happened to me while walking back through a New Year horse field about two winters ago: my first, and so far, only view of the Northern Lights. The shifting and stretching colours dancing across the darkness left me transfixed. For once, I felt that over-used soubriquet awesome was justified.

Changes

Things have changed so much in the month that the Grey Mare has been lame. I have missed the subtle changes I normally notice while we hack around the quiet roads and through the fields. I feel I have been cheated out of the best bits of autumn.

Suddenly, now that I have started noticing things again, I see there are crunchy brown leaves on the ground. Small children jump, kick and stamp upon them, while bigger ones freewheel through on their bikes with grins on their faces. The conker trees that stand sentinel along the A1 have changed into clothes of red, yellow and rust. The scarlet scattered berries amid the thorn hedges have ripened to a deep, bloody and squashy red. The marshy field at the bottom of the lonnen is riddled with toadstools. I counted 10 heron silently sitting on the other side of the reeds. Sometimes, I think there is something otherworldly about that place.

The Grey Mare, too, has changed. Gone is the sleek coat of summer; now she is fluffy as a teddy bear. But there is no point in clipping until she’s back in work. The enforced break has also affected her belly. Never the most svelte of horses, she is now as round as a barrel. I hope I can fasten her girth when the time comes to get back on and see what else we’ve missed.

Summertime blues

We are quite blessed with the weather in this little coastal pocket of Northumberland. Thanks to the salty air, it’s never too hot or too cold. Snow rarely sticks around for very long and the baking heat they allegedly sometimes feel inland is tempered by the breeze. I’m thankful, too, that we haven’t had the floods that have done more than simply ruin summer in some parts of the country. But I can’t help feeling cheated.

Already, the long, lush verdant grass is gone; in its place are yellowing stalks and dry heads of seed. Look closely, and the red berries are starting to appear in the hedges and the first flush of ripe brambles, deep and black, are dotted amid the thorns. The fields are turning to gold; tractors are trundling along the lane. Soon, the swallows will stop swooping after flies and gather on the telegraph wires ahead of their long journey to Africa.

The thick, creamy skies of June and July with their texture of shiny blue gloss paint have gone. Instead, the blue is now a watercolour wash; at least when it’s not a swirling dark mass carrying the threat of thunder. There is a nip of autumn in the air and the nights are drawing perceptibly in.

To paraphrase my Dad, if that’s our summer, we’ve had it…

Little luxuries

My shower is on strike. Apparently it’s just too big and powerful for the fuse box and it won’t work again until a new one is installed. As I’ve said before, I am a bath person; but I have a lot of hair and I like to rinse the conditioner off with the shower.

Instead, I am pouring beakerfuls of water over my hair to rinse it. It puts me in mind of my teenage years before we had a shower fitted. I must’ve been about 14 or 15. We had central heating installed around the same time: the radiators were an utter luxury. They meant the end of freezing mornings dressing with the airing cupboard door open, socks and knickers warming on the tank. It was also the finish of the feathers and fronds left by Jack Frost’s fingers on the windowpane; of warm, white breath blowing a window within the window to see if it had snowed overnight.

Until last year, I spent almost five years in a house with an open fire and no central heating. I coped fine with two oil filled radiators that plugged into the electricity socket. My current home has storage heaters but I am too mean to switch them on. Instead, I heat the room I’m in and put on an extra jumper. I think my generation was the last to grow up without central heating as the norm.

Where I live, there is no mainline gas. I remember approaching a gas cooker with trepidation when I first left home. Now I would love a gas cooker. I’d like the option of gas central heating too. But what I really, really want is my shower back. It can be grim up North, you know …

Dear tourists …

Do you leave your brains at home when you go on holiday? That’s the only explanation I can offer for the idiocy I have witnessed from tourists this weekend. Either that, or those I have encountered are just imbeciles.

I have ridden on the beach twice this weekend. It has been windy on both days and people have decided it would be marvellous fun to fly kites. Fine; just don’t swoop them down so they frighten the horses, and don’t stand in the middle of the beach so I don’t know which side you’ll chose when you bring them horse-scaringly down to earth. In addition, if you have a yappy, rat-like terrier that enjoys chasing things, keep it on a lead when there are horses cantering by. I don’t enjoy being chased.

I also would advise fathers with toddlers to look where they are going and not stare at the sand when they decide to walk up the beach from the sea. Then you will avoid being ploughed into said sand by a galloping horse. That’s what nearly happened to one poor dear today. He awoke from a dream when I yelled: “Watch out!” as he ambled across my path. There is no way I, or the two riders behind me, would’ve been able to stop in time.

Climbing down the main access route to the beach through the dunes, must, it would seem, be arduous work. I can come up with no other explanation why a family would set up their seats, yellow inflatable boat and child’s buggy across the main thoroughfare like an Everest expedition’s base camp. Such behaviour is tantamount to sitting down in the middle of the pavement. And don’t look at me like I’m an idiot when I ask you to move it. It’s not me that’s blocking the only horse-friendly route off the beach.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I am no fan of caravans. My hatred is ratcheted up another notch when caravette drivers with white hair and indecipherable gender decide to reverse without bothering to look what’s behind them. I offer no apology for going into full shouting, arm-waving Basil Fawlty mode when they narrowly avoid hitting a pony.

And it’s only the second weekend of the holidays …

School's out

At this time of year, I wish I were a primary school teacher. How I would adore six weeks free from the daily grind … then I remember that I’m not particularly fond of children (I wish some of my teachers had had the decency to consider that fact when choosing their careers) and that actually, primary school teachers work damn hard. Probably.

In truth, I haven’t had the freedom of a six-week stretch of summer holidays since I was 13. The holidays between leaving middle school and going up to the scary high school were bookended by a week at an aunt’s and a week with a friend at her grandparents’. In the middle was the heaven of other people’s horses, sea and sand; days of fresh-air tiredness, of appetites sharpened by salty air and satisfied by guilt-free fish and chips.

After that, my summer holidays were spent working. I worked in a green grocer’s, where I learned to count the correct change into people’s hands; I worked in shop, where I learned it was politic to wait until the foul-smelling person left before blasting the air freshener; I worked in a chippy, where I learned to tell the difference between haddock and cod; I worked in an hotel, where I learned chefs enjoy a pint and making a mess, but are far too important to clear up after themselves.

Overall, I learned that, like children, I’m not overly keen on tourists and the service industry was not for me. I learned that if wanted something more out of life, I’d better get me an education. Then one day, pallid, indoor teenagers may be waiting on me as I enjoyed my moment in the sun.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...

The weather gods may have forgotten that we are supposed to be sizzling amid a globally-warmed June, but at least the hedgerows know their place in the world order. As the Grey Mare and I meander around the quiet back lanes, she snatches surreptitious mouthfuls of frothy cow parsley from the verge and I gaze at the cornucopia of plants jostling for space in the hedges.

At the moment, the hedgerows are at their very best: stuffed with pink dog roses, red and yellow honeysuckle, and the various hues of different green shrubs. One year, I spotted gooseberries; when I returned in the car, I couldn’t find them again. Later, more obvious fruits will appear: a sprinkling of purple brambles, then a scattering of scarlet hips and the occasional half-hidden handful of green crab apples as we move towards autumn.

Our route often takes us over a disused railway line, now choked with long grass and weeds of triffid proportions – all the better to hide the occasional rubbish that fly-tippers think no one will ever notice. There are plenty of things to be seen from horseback that you would never register speeding past in a car. Growing amid the tall trees at the side of the abandoned track is a pear tree that produces a few golden, out-of-reach fruit each year. I often wonder who tossed that pear core from a train all those years ago.

Mists and mushrooms

There is something radically wrong with the wheel of the year. It appears some wag has given it a shove and it has skipped summer altogether. Why else have we been shrouded in mist, soaked with continual downpours and chilled with temperatures that forced me out of bed at 1am to seek tea and thermal socks? Circumstantial evidence, perhaps, but it’s the mushrooms that swing it for me.

A glut of mushrooms appears in the Grey Mare’s field towards the end of August each year: buttons, pink and brown-gilled field mushrooms, the occasional flat horser, as big as a steak, and sometimes a puffball, divine sliced and fried in butter. But they’re here already, admittedly in much sparser quantities, yet still sufficient to pick a couple of handfuls each night.

In our pre-packaged world, there is something deeply satisfying about eating something you have found, gathered, prepared and cooked. I risk scratched arms, snagged and sticky-budded sleeves and purple fingers to retrieve glistening brambles from the hedge, so I can savour the custard-coated crumble later. I clamber onto wobbly fences and avoid stout, sharp thorns to reach the best sloes, which will be combined with gin to be sipped in the glow of Christmas and on crisp hunting mornings. Plums and apples are collected from the garden to create chutney to accompany Stilton on thick buttered bread.

No, I have no quarrel with autumn; I just wish we’d had summer first.

Weather eye

Rainbows bring out a childlike sense of wonder in me; especially double rainbows, and I have seen two of those this week. Because they are so rare, I feel they simply have to be auspicious.

To be rewarded by the rainbow, however, it is necessary to first have the rain. After a global-warmed and dried early spring, there hasn’t been much of that around here recently. The ground has been hard as concrete and scored by deep cracks like the lines on an octogenarian’s face. If that isn’t a demonstration of the aging effects of the sun, I don’t know what is.

The rain has returned with a vengeance. Northumberland already boasts the best skies in Britain: big, bold and expressive. This week, the skies have surpassed themselves in their dramatic, Turner-esque turmoil. I always imagine Wagner would provide the ideal accompaniment to the movement of a stormy sky.

Today’s rain also seems to have stopped my sneezing. Bring it on!

Yellow peril

The look this spring is bloodshot eyes and a dripping nose, accessorised with a barking cough. But get it while you can – it only lasts while the oilseed rape is in flower.

I feel as if someone has sprayed pepper up my nose. I am sick of sneezing. I am not alone in this affliction; I know lots of people who have never been affected before who are cursing the yellow peril this year. One of my friends reckons that oilseed rape is banned in America because of health concerns. I don’t know how true this is, but I wish it were banned in my vicinity.

Apparently, eating honey made by local bees can build up your immunity and protect you against oilseed rape pollen. I considered buying ‘rapeseed honey’ from Aldi, but I don’t think it was made by Northumbrian bees.

In bed at night, as my nose drips into the pillow, I fantasise about another cure for my ills. If I could start a clandestine campaign, just like the Luddites of old, with an army of the afflicted equipped with blowtorches …

That would sort it.

It's a jungle out there

I saw three deer this morning on the way to work. One strode elegantly across the road and hopped through a gap in the hedge; further on, two stood stock still in a field, heads raised, watching my car.

The 10-mile drive to the A1 is fraught at this time of year as my foot hovers constantly over the brake pedal. The road may be quiet as sensible people slumber in bed, but the verges and hedgerows are teeming with life: baby rabbits basking in the early sunshine, hares lolloping in the field, squabbling yellowhammers and chaffinches getting much too close to my windscreen as they show off their aerial acrobatics. Fat blue-grey wood pigeons whirr away at the last moment; likewise, the doves, their cousins. The pheasants, less lust-driven than in early spring, nonetheless remain a liability near the road. Partridges, in my experience, are much more circumspect.

On to the A1, and the wildlife changes. This time, the creatures are harder, more streetwise: I suppose they have to be to survive. This is the country of crows and magpies. Occasionally, Charlie slinks across the carriageway. A couple of times last year, I saw the undulating tails of red squirrels as they scampered to the safety of the other side. Kestrels hover above mice. At night, traffic-hardened rabbits, like the Owsla of Efrafa, closely graze the verge.

In the winter, I used to see the creamy apparition of a barn owl in the same spot most mornings as he returned home from a night’s hunting. It was winter too, when I saw the not-fox illuminated in my headlights.

We should bring David Attenborough up here. He’d love it.

Who needs Hollywood?

I like to tell people I went to school at Hogwarts. It’s not actually very far from the truth – my Latin room was but a stone’s throw from the cinematic version. Sometimes, my mind wandering from Caecilius or Pliny, I would gaze through the glass and see a Roman soldier walking up the road. I’d blink and shake my head, then reality would return. Obviously, someone was filming at the castle again.

I met my first famous person standing in front of the castle. At the time, I had no idea who Brian Blessed was. To me, he was great bear of a man wearing a crown. I knew who Rowan Atkinson was, though; I’d seen him on Not the Nine O’ Clock News. The filming of The Black Adder added further texture to my first term at high school.

The following summer, it was the turn of Robin of Sherwood. Michael Praed gave me his autograph: he wrote like a girl. But that was the only girlie thing about him; he made my teenage hormones quite giddy. Shortly afterwards, he decamped to Dynasty and I knew I’d been in the presence of greatness.

Northumberland’s castles have starred in numerous films and TV dramas. Alnwick also made an appearance in Disney’s The Spaceman and King Arthur when I was small, and more recently, featured in Elizabeth. Bamburgh – my favourite castle – was also a location in Elizabeth.

The county’s cinematic successes are nothing new: when my mum was young, they filmed Beckett at Bamburgh. It starred Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. Elizabeth Taylor was there with Burton and she gave Mum her autograph. Burton, however, refused because he was “busy”. I have never liked the man.

Our Friends in the North was shown when I was living in Norfolk. It made me dreadfully homesick. Daniel Craig played the drunken bum Geordie; unfortunately that means that, tight swimming trunks or not, I can never consider him to be a sex symbol.

Scarecrow

I spotted a rather funky scarecrow this morning. At least, I think he was a scarecrow: transplant him to the Tate Modern and he’d easily pass for one of the exhibits. Standing around 5ft tall, he has a face and body made from black Guinness cans and white Stella Artois cans. I wonder if his creators drank them all in one go, or whether they saved up the cans, Blue Peter-style? I reckon I know what his artistic interpretation is though: Newcastle United-supporting farmer turns to drink due to single payments scheme cock up…

There is a scarecrow festival held not far as the crow flies from where I saw this splendid specimen standing stark in the early morning sun. Each August Bank Holiday, Rennington is taken over by tableaux of scarecrows in a variety of attitudes. There is a bride and groom, a farrier, dancers, even a scarecrow cop with a gatso gun.

I am very fond of scarecrows. I like to think that, Worzel Gummidge-like, they awaken when the sun goes down. Unlike the sinister china dolls that pretend innocence, then spring to life the moment the door is closed, I believe scarecrows are benign. Just like the Jolly Green Giant, I find it comforting to imagine them striding across the night-time fields, keeping the crops safe from harm.

Town and country

I am nowhere near the first and no doubt I won’t be the last to remark on the lack of understanding frequently exhibited betwixt town and country. Unlike some, I have never considered the country to be inhabited by barely literate, fundamentalist Christians (the North) or peasants doused in a touch of Archer-esque charm (the South). Nor, curiously, do I believe that Britain’s towns and cities are solely peopled by modern-day Fagins and gun-toting or knife-wielding yobs. Having spent almost a decade and a half living and working in cities before escaping back to this glorious realm, I think I am qualified to make a judgment.

It’s a shame the people that govern us don’t appear to have had adequate experience of the countryside, though. A town Government, voted into power largely by town people, will understandably play to its audience. That’s probably why Gordon Brown is reportedly planning to punish everyone who drives a 4x4 in tomorrow’s Budget. Heaven forbid that he could make them economically less viable for those who don’t actually need them, but curiously, seem best able to afford them.

I have long considered 4x4s to be wasted if they don’t have a tow bar, don’t belong to farmers or to those who live in remote places accessed by single-track roads. But why should those who do live in the wilds or who actually need a powerful tow-vehicle be chastised because of those who run them as ‘gas-guzzling’ status symbols? I am not a city-based ‘yummy mummy’, so perhaps I misunderstand the subtle nuances of needing a 4x4 for the school run. Personally, I can’t see what is wrong with an ordinary car, or even the school bus.

Mr Brown would have us believe that he’s acting against 4x4s as part of the Government’s current obsession with green measures to combat global warming. I wonder if the equivalent of 4x4 drivers were blamed for making it warm enough to grow grapes in Roman Britain...

The Chancellor has been dubbed ‘Stalinist’ in reports today. I wonder if he prefers that to being considered a pursed-lipped puritanical killjoy?

A house, a house, my kingdom for a house...

I had been ‘lucky’ to get the flat of the phantom, floods and pestilence - or so everybody kept telling me. I suppose I was, because affordable, rented accommodation isn’t that easy to come by where I live.

When I rang the local council to say I was being made homeless in three months and to ask whether they would help, I could almost hear the suppressed laughter humming down the wires. As I was not pregnant, did not have a drug or alcohol problem, or a child, I was not considered a priority.

When I was put through to the housing officer, he fairly snorted with mirth. “Ms M&M,” he said, “we don’t let houses where you live, we sell them.” “So what do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Pitch a tent in the garden?” His advice? Change the locks, then the landlord would require a court order to remove me and that would buy me a further six months. It was not a route I was prepared to follow.

Let’s face it, lots of local people can’t afford to get on that hallowed property ladder in a rural community that’s full of ‘desirable’ (at least in the summer) houses. If you’re not in a position to buy, you need to rent. But finding somewhere to rent can be equally competitive and ultimately heartbreaking.

I can quite understand why someone would prefer to let out a house to tourists for £350 a week in the summer instead of £350 a month all year round. It makes perfect economic sense. But it also makes me want to stamp my feet with frustration and do my Violet Elizabeth impression.

When plans were put forward for housing association, affordable property for rent, the NIMBYs circulated a petition. They didn’t want rented houses near them; heaven forbid, it would bring down the value of their homes. The council ignored them, the houses were built and filled in a flash. The waiting list is now so long, the housing association is refusing to add any more names to it.

Vacant council houses are as rare as rocking horse poo. As the housing officer says, they’ve mainly been sold. Quite a few are with their second generation of owners …as second homes for affluent folk who fancy a weekend on the coast.

Haunted house

My cats are so much happier since we moved house. They’ve always been a purry pair, but now you can’t shut them up. They seem very pleased with themselves - quite literally the cats that got the cream - and I don’t think it’s just because they have a garden to romp in again.

The reasons why I didn’t like the flat were multitude; I didn’t want to move in the first place but had no choice in the matter as the rug was pulled from under me when the landlord announced he was selling up. I arrived at the new place with the wrong attitude and was wont to sit on the kitchen floor and weep. But in addition to feeling resentful, there were genuine niggles.

It seemed sometimes the very fabric of the place was conspiring against me: the bath was too short and the water wasn’t hot enough; it was also impossible to persuade the shower to reach a reasonable temperature, while the water from the kitchen tap trickled and tasted odd. I didn’t like the darkness of the yard at night and I became incandescent with rage when people parked over the opening, so I couldn’t get in or out. Then there were the fleas. Then there was the flood. Oh, and then there was the ghost …

I first became aware that we were not alone in the dimness of a mid-autumn morning, when the world and I were still half asleep in the pre-dawn twilight. I stumbled out of bed and along the narrow corridor to the kitchen to feed the mewling cats. They had been shouting as if they were starving but then, as one, they lifted their heads from their breakfast and stared intently along the corridor at something I couldn’t see. This happened on a number of occasions. More than once, my little black cat, who doesn’t like anyone but me, also ran to hide from someone at the door. Only there was no-one at the door.

After a while, I mentioned it to my sister. Her friend, who’d known the people there before me, had dropped hints about crashes in locked rooms and dancing candles. “Don’t you want to know what it is?” she asked me. “Not really,” I said, “it was there first and it can stay as long as it doesn’t bother me.” But I wished I didn’t having the feeling that there was someone peering around the bedroom door when I put the light out at night.

Last week, my mum was talking to someone whose daughter had lived there years ago. “I didn’t like being there by myself,” she said, “Because I always thought there was something along the corridor.”

“Funny you should say that …” said my mum.

Roadkill

Tis (almost) the season of slammed brakes, swerves and sweaty palms. I’ve already seen two dead badgers on the roads this week, innumerable squashed rabbits and now that the shooting season is over, the cock pheasants are starting to sniff the pheromones on the air and dandify themselves as they prepare to go looking for love.

No one taught them the Green Cross Code at school. Strutting around, their pea-sized brains overcome with lust, they don’t care if there’s a car coming – if there’s a likely lass on the other side of the road, they morph into a bloke in a club when the slow music comes on.

I have a friend who taught himself not to swerve to avoid rabbits. But I hate killing anything. My first roadkill was a duck on the A47 in Norfolk. I was doing 60mph; there was nothing I could do. I felt sick and for about five miles afterwards, my heart thumped like it does when I’m battling another bidder on eBay in the final few minutes of an auction.

But I’m not as sick as people who stop, pick up the poor unfortunate and take it home for tea. There’s a whole list of roadkill recipe books if you look on Amazon. Arthur Boyt calls himself a conservationist, but I bet his fans don’t swerve, slam on their brakes or suffer from sweating palms if they see a bunny walking the verge like a tightrope.

I don’t understand people who name animals, build up a relationship with them, then eat them, either. People like Hugh Fernley- Whittingstall, whose mantra seems to be ‘if it moves, eat it’, or Gordon Ramsey, who killed and cooked his piggies Trinny and Susannah.

My ethics have always been odd. I’m not a vegetarian: I am happy to gut a fish or remove the breasts from a still warm (shot) pheasant. But I don’t do venison, veal, or foie gras; rabbit has been off the menu since I read Watership Down as a child, and I suffer terrible pangs of conscience if I eat lamb, even though it tastes divine. Kill It, Cook It, Eat It? I don’t think so.