The best evening, possibly since forever

Stayed at the junior Wildlife Watch.

Normally, if the over-enthusiastic Dolores welcomes me at the doorway to the brick hut with, Are you staying? when I can see behind her only the promise of a quiz on moths and insufficient biscuits to entertain us all for two hours, then I detach myself sharpish, and find a dark place to lurk.

My personal rule is, Never lock yourself in a room with a dozen kids and not enough biscuits. I only ever stay for the outdoors meetings. Then I can do trekking about woods and quarries, because those are my things; looking up at a bird's backside, peering into bushes, and fingering gravel.

But tonight it was an indoor meeting. And I broke my rule. I stayed.

They had owls. Owls in a line pegged out between the choc'n'crisp vending machine and the display about moss.

Real owls, not fibreboard cut-outs, like the falcons brought out by the RSPB, but real, live, breathing, head-turning owls, with names like Pincer and Whisper who sit on the back of the sofa at Owl Woman's house, probably watching reruns of Kill Bill while waiting for dinners of dead and butchered mice.

Even better, these owls could be gently stroked and put on your finger and, if the inducement was right, sit on your head while you secretly prayed they wouldn't poo. I bet they were house-trained.

The best owl was this owl. Muffin, or Miffin, or Mayflower or something. I forget. I was too wrapt in covert admiration, stealing photographs of her many moody owlerisms. To me, she became the best, most beautiful owl in the whole wide world.

Look, here is Wonderful Owl. I share her with you, then you will know what puny sacrifice it was, staying two hours with a dozen kids and the over-enthusiastic Dolores in a brick hut and not enough biscuits.

She has more dramatic expressions than Nicole Kidman. Look. Pensive! Alarmed!

Quizzical.

Surprised! As in, I am surprised to hear that voles are now reduced by 50% at Moles&Voles Fine Food Outlets.

Angry. Don't make me angry.

Look at what you did. You made me psychotic. 

(My personal favourite.)

But then! She let me get up close and personal. Revealing she has more wondrous sultry smoulderyness than Kate Moss. Have a butchers at Miss Owl now. She should be on the cover of Vogue.

Yeah, there were other owls as well, hanging about, demonstrating flying techniques in the brick hut, once they could be lured up by a dead chicken, but frankly, they paled into insignificance.

And kids. I suppose I have to record that, educationally, they were there. Somewhere. Behind the owls.

Set on a course to never give up

True. The event last night did not quite go as fantasised. My ecstasy in a wood.

To explain, you non-followers of such things, it is prime nightingale tweet-tweet time here in eastern England, and I am driven by this powerful fantasy of catching this sodding bird in a full-throated sing song after dark.

The pure sound of this bird will be intense and magical, as promised.

Of course it isn't. It leaves me traumatised in the middle of nowhere at the isolated and rural Bradfield Woods close to midnight, with a terrified Squirrel hanging off my arm because we have set off the security lighting at the remote Visitor's Centre and the dogs are barking. Possibly distant, but maybe getting closer with each insistent woof.

The owl doesn't help. It is one of those sounds that is, basically, a woman screaming. Maybe she is a real live banshee, and she screeches I'm coming to get you over the tree tops, which incidentally are rustling with menace and threat. Or that is what it all now seems, and so far the evening's intense and beautiful pleasure hasn't been assisted by the fact there is a lonely parked Volvo in the car park, and it isn't ours.

Obviously, thanks to Shark's whispered suggestion as we are blindly stumbling along a track in the pitch black with one torch between us, the other car belongs to the murderer. They routinely prowl these lonely Suffolkscapes after midnight, strewing the dismembering limbs of victims in sacrifice under the coppicing. I do not suggest that aloud, but Squirrel hears it anyway.

It all fails, of course it does, because the nightingales are not that stupid they can't hear us coming from ten miles away, but I shall be back next year with another attempt, never fear about that.

However, not all is lost. I take the children in daylight to the lovely gravel pits at Lackford Lakes, where I can spend a few hours, before returning to normal life, staring at this bush.

The other twitchers are most helpful. Although don't think of me as a twitcher, not at all. I will only say that one day I shall suspend this blog, come and live in Suffolk all summer, and bring binoculars, which I shall claim I only hold to spy on the neighbours.

Call it ointment on the soul

We have been too busy. So this, I have to do. Grimes Graves, Norfolk. One of my most treasured places. Like heaven on earth!

Yes, it is an odd reaction, considering local folklore tells this is where the devil dances.

 

I make for one of the abandoned pits, lay down over the sheep shit, stare up at the sky, and listen to the skylarks. I watch them rise, soar, and fall, performance artists of the air, like they're bursting with helium before they plummet as rocks, and making me wish that I had feathers and might, for once, join in.

Farne Islands

Obligatory. My mini twitchers have high-maintenance puffin needs.

I find it absorbing, looking at the different photographs taken by the different members of the family. Evidence: the children's camera. I can guarantee, 800 pictures of puffins, shags and the other ones.



This year, seals, too!


Clearly, my construct and search for memory of these events is very different from everyone else's. They snap away with puffinspuffinspuffins and I am all Keep still I want to remember your shoes.


And rock. Yes, I like to photograph the lovely Farne rocks, too.



Then I take a few more hundred pictures of the children in bird-watching and bird-photographing poses.




Bizarrely, I am still in love with them. Even though some moments I would like to throw them out of a top floor window of a castle or push them off a boat into the North Sea, then laugh at the splash.


But I think I should acquire a better camera. I'm still using my old phone one and it is barely surviving. The battery drops out in awkward places.


I also discover I have photographed the extending telephoto lens of the man standing next to me. I have no idea why. At this point in life, wishful thinking, probably.

Cheated by nightingale

Time is running out if I am to be seduced by nightingale. I've been hunting one for a week, and know that by June, the fickle creatures will escape my clutches, and depart our English summer. Then that will be that; my desires wasted for another year.

I don't know when they'll go. I bet it will involve a moment of unstoppable, wing-waving impulse. Drunk on night-time song, they'll suddenly jump up and fly away, as quick as they can, gone from Suffolk and Norfolk to where else I can't catch them.

But who knows where they go? Inconstant, flighty, unreliable, I bet those faithless little creatures will take themselves just where they please, with each passing fancy, somewhere south, or east, up with the wind, down with the clouds.

Maybe the cheating little rogues fly away to consort with skylarks. Maybe they serenade the suburbs of evening Nice. Maybe they pass hot nights in the scrublands of southern Spain. Lured by the kissing lips of the blue Mediterranean sea on the rugged shores of Africa, they'll no doubt be off again, skimming round the coast and landing, holiday mood, in Guinea-Bissau, to cavort in tree tops, and fool around in the fingertips of the bushes that tickle the edges of the mangrove swamps.

That's a long way from England, you faithless rascals. The thought might send me mad, all over again, that I have to wait another year to track you down.

Once, they found one. They put technological investigators close on its trail and followed the cheating creature to its other feathered nest.

Well, you should be here, you flighty piece. With me, in Bradfield Woods. So determined am I, to imagine that you're here, I think you are, for one good half hour.

We all stop on the path, hold our breaths and listen. We exchange glances. We hear a song that doesn't have any endings, and no beginnings either. The notes start knock-knock-knock, but tumble up and down in snatched phrases. The phrases are all bound by silences. I can't detect a repeat, a common trill, or a routine rise and fall. No one can predict what's coming next, or whether you'll fall high, or low. It's like you're trialling the overture, without ever completing the opera.


So, tempter and miscreant, I'm telling myself that I caught the sound of you, but you failed me on the symphony. You still have a lot to live up to.

But be warned. You should never wrong a woman. If you do, know that I shall find pleasure when you're gone with the next warm wind. I shall hug myself and tell myself that really, after all, you were nothing special. A summer promise, never delivered, that's all.

Then I shall tell everyone what I know. That if I really did catch a sight of you, I would find you nothing more than what you are. Nothing of a looker, that's for sure, you plain, brown, elusive little bird.

Nightingale hunt

Blame Michael McCarthy. He started it. I read that and thought, I want ecstasy in a wood.

There's only one problem. We don't live within the nightingale line. I can't leave the kids asleep at midnight to pop to the local wood and be enraptured: just me, Mr Nightingale, and Hosanna Glory Be. No, if I want to be spirited away by Mr Nightingale, I have to travel to his patch, and take the kids with me.

Shark is dead keen, egging on this latest enthusiasm, but Tiger stands fast. She says No. Definitely No. She won't do midnight in a wood.

I look to the balance of power, Squirrel. I mention casually, in an off-hand manner, that when things swing my way I usually celebrate with a delicious bar of Green and Blacks.

Unfortunately, things are not swinging my way. Squirrel says, after some thought, and a few menacing glances from Tiger, that she's not doing a mummy-guided tour in a dark wood. For good measure she adds, not after last time.

Nonsense! She thinks it will involve getting lost, crashing into things, falling into a ditch, and being pissed on by badgers. It was not like that at Ashridge, was it? Except we did get lost, yes, I panicked a bit in the dark and fell in a ditch. Apart from that, it was fine.

Well, Squirrel wins. She says it's a guided tour with someone who knows what they're doing and where they're going. And daylight, not midnight, otherwise No Deal.

Which is why we're here. Getting up at dawn to go nightingale hunting at Minsmere with a proper guide. There are a few curdling curses from Tiger on leaving her warm, cosy bed, but I have become inured to those, and the death threats.

Here we all are then, this happy band of dawn-time nightingale thrill seekers led by our guide Anya and trailed by a slightly sulky Tiger.


And off we go. We look at a lot of bush tops and listen to a lot of birds.


But no nightingale. But then! Anya says, one lives here. Here!


This is very frustrating. But Hark! HARK. I may be entering RAPTURE.

Anya says, Don't confuse them with warblers. That is a warbler, Grit. You can hear a nightingale has a rounder sound. Then Anya says, Oh dear. Mr Nightingale's not singing this morning. How unusual. Never mind. You can hear them anytime. Just pop back. After dark is usually a good time.

I might turn ugly.

I have driven 150 miles, got up early, have engaged in a grudge match with Tiger, and am facing frustration of religious orgiastic passion in a wood thanks to a cheating little bastard of a piss-boring brown bird. I am considering invoicing Michael McCarthy for anguish to the soul.

Of course I have to console myself. No one else will sodding well do it. I tell myself, early rising might not have led to miracle, but on the other hand, I learn just how much I can achieve in a day by falling out of bed at 5am.

To wit, a run round Leiston Abbey, three hours in the Long Shop Museum, a late afternoon walk through breezy Dunwich Heath as a last gasp for the little sods, then back to a caravan in a field for a takeaway curry.








I bet Michael McCarthy never achieves so much.

Parent who doesn't give a toss bunks off with kids

I'm told the upper primary SATs start this week. If you are a school-choosing parent in England and Wales, you will know what that means.

The school has been badgering you for months to do the supplementary teaching-at-home every spare minute of the day. And don't forget to put on the overnight audio CD for sleep learning. It can make the crucial difference to your child's grade performance!

What schools don't say, but is writ between every line and implicit in every breath, is the judgement that if you don't comply with the SATs exams, you must be a parent who doesn't care. And what can be worse than that! Off to exile you go, social leper.

Mothers are particularly programmed to feel this pain, pressured to give in to guilt, kicked that little bit harder to enforce the at-home spelling bee, and encouraged to supervise each other at the school gate with sneaky reference to how much better Tinkertop is performing now play is rationed to one quarter-hour every Friday, but only after homework.

Yet the school probably never explains the real intent. How the grades gathered by the kids can feed into the amount of money they have next year, and this is the real economic imperative underlying exams performance.

Suggesting it is hard cash, and not Tinkertop's ability with sums that is actually driving your pain with the SATs is the sort of socially unforgivable brutal honesty which has got me where I am today. Unemployable in school and totally committed to actual learning.

Well, no news there, then.

Better to say that I take the kids to the RSPB Fowlmere nature reserve. While the cuckoo calls, we follow the inviting, wandering trail about the reed beds, over the board walks, through the wetlands and woodlands, while all the time enjoying the early May sunshine.