Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
As you can see, I’m really missing my occasional trips to London. Just before lockdown we’d been planning a Thames-side walk from Bushey Park to Greenwich Park, meeting up with friends at various stages, including Alistair, who celebrated his birthday at the weekend, hence this card.
My latest homemade birthday card is for my great nephew Zach. It celebrates the home movies that my brother, sister and I made in the days of Standard 8 cine. As you can see, Bill took the action roles, often at risk to life and limb, with my sister guest starring as the ‘Hostile Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and, no doubt hoping to break out of being typecast, a World Security agent scanning the skies for invaders from outer space.
Our friends were regularly in the cast, launching flying machines and hatching dastardly plots for world domination. Mostly we filmed in our garden; the rhubarb patch made a suitably lush jungle but for a more dramatic setting we headed for the local quarry.
But we did consider health and safety. I remember us discussing the possibility that our flying machine might overshoot and end up crashing down onto the railway line. In the event it plummeted vertically downwards when we launched it from the top of Horbury Quarry although I stood well back when filming, just in case.
It would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday this week, on the 9th, so I’ve dug out this four-second snippet, filmed in very shaky Standard 8 cine from our black-and-white television, when John and Yoko were appearing on a chat show, probably The Eamonn Andrews Show in the spring of 1969.
I was surprised when my friend Hilary told me that in the early 1960s she’d been at the Saturday morning ABC Minors’ matinee at the ABC Regal cinema in Wakefield when The Beatles made an appearance. About twenty years ago I met a woman who had worked at the Regal at the time and who remembered telling off John when, after the performance, he offered her young daughter a cigarette.
My painter friend Jill told me that one of her tutors at art college (this would have been Manchester, 1969-1972) had previously been a tutor at Liverpool and had caught the young Lennon urinating down the lift shaft.
Finally, as a teenager, my brother’s daughter Hannah learnt the drums from at musician who’d been on the northern circuit in the early 1960s. His group had appeared on the same bill as The Beatles (possibly in Doncaster?), so after the show he’d approached John to say how much he liked their music.
“I especially like Yesterday“, he enthused.
“One of McCartney’s.” said John, and turned away.
Almost a decade before The Beatles performed at the Regal, Laurel & Hardy made a brief appearance, again at a children’s matinee. My friend Richard Knowles was taken by his uncle and remembers two elderly men coming onto the stage and waving at everyone, although at the time he didn’t know who they were.
We were lucky with the weather at Bridlington on Tuesday and even luckier that the gulls featured in this video didn’t spot us eating fish & chips.
Another character from the Do You Say . . . ? ‘poem’ and all that I really know about ‘de Z cow’ is that she’s been known to ‘utter’ the occasional ‘grouse’. Could it be that she’s rather proud of her ancestry? If she really is ‘de Zeeland’ that’s not so far from Freisland, so she could be a pedigree Holstein Friesian.
More likely ‘DeZee’ is a randomly generated name-tag number and she probably usually gets called ‘Daisy’. I have a feeling that she won’t like that.
We’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death of a member of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, Karen Nicklin, who also – as in my cartoon – volunteered at the RSPB St Aidan’s reserve.
“As a really keen walker and hiker, Karen spent time planning and undertaking walks that combined nature and the landscape and I remember well the talk she gave recently at our members’ evening when she wowed us with views of the spectacular scenery and wild flowers from a recent trek in the Austrian Alps.”
John Gardner, President, Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, wakefieldnaturalists.org
It’s just three weeks ago that we last saw her on that pre-‘Rule of Six’ Naturalists’ field trip to St Aidan’s. As she served me a socially-distanced shade-grown coffee (shade-grown saves trees) afterwards, I asked her what the news was from the Loch Garten ospreys. She replied that, because of Covid, she’d missed out on volunteering there for the first time since 2004. She told me that she hadn’t even managed to add an osprey on her year list. She was obviously missing them, and we’ll miss her.
At the request of my sister, a character from the poem in yesterday’s post. As you might remember, Castro Rabbit appears in the final verse and, as far as I can understand it, he operates in ‘the meadow deep in the world squirrels’, so he’s got to be a bit of a tough cookie, surrounded by all those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rodents.
I’m convinced that he has some connection with a scam involving ‘rattlebox-free shoes’, which gets a cryptic mention in verse 3.
Verse 1 sounds like the kind of hard-baked pulp-fiction dialogue he’d use, with more than a hint of a threat in it:
“Yeah, I know, but that is on the list,
Castro Rabbit, ‘Do you say . . .’, verse 1.
down there in the bulkhead . . .
and it’s not that ‘cauliflower’.”
But I think the line that he’s delivering here is: “Roger I’ll flax.”
A ‘flax’ must be the Squirrel Meadow equivalent of a fax, and as we’re veering towards Toon characters, Roger must be Roger Rabbit.
I’m looking forward to learning more about de Zee Cow, the one known for uttering the occasional grouse in verse 3.
Do you say that I was on the list yeah I know but that is on the list down there in the bulkhead and it’s not that cauliflower pictures in attic Tony how pineapple go Dale scar lucerne cauliflower Englishtown crop Janets Foss motor Cal from friends seaside. de Z cow utter grouse strands geranium juniper Rattlebox free shoes at garden hellebore Roger I’ll flax Jesse cauliflower and bread lobster the meadow deep in the world squirrels Watership Down fox Castro rabbit Chapel
Nope, we couldn’t make sense of it either. It was our first attempt at dictating a note on an iPhone as we made a stock check of drawings and paintings in the attic.
Bilberry Wood was planted in the mid-Victorian period, at about the same time as Nethergill was built as a lodge.
Heather, also known as ling, Calluna vulgaris, grows in the drier parts of the wood, including on tussocks raised about the boggy areas and, here, from a crevice on a fallen pine trunk. Heather is an indicator of dry acid soils. The abundant heather and bilberry here are a sign that the wood has been only lightly or moderately grazed.
Lightly-grazed pinewood with tall heather is classified as National Vegetation Classification community W18.
On our last visit to the Dales, I walked around Bilberry Wood in Langstrothdale, using my Olympus Tough TG-4 to take short movie shots of every plant and fungus that I found. So how am I going to put those 42 random shots together to make a coherent two-minute film?
The Freeform Project Panel in Adobe Premier Pro is proving useful: I can drag and drop thumbnails of the clips around the screen, so I’m arranging them in groups, such as habitats, flowers and mosses. Once I’ve got them in a suitable order they can go straight on to the Editing window and I can add titles and a commentary.
I’ve already scrolled through each clip and selected the best few seconds of each one, by adding an ‘In’ and an ‘Out’ point to each clip, so there shouldn’t be any redundant or out-of-focus footage in my first rough cut of the movie.