Spring Fever.

Spring has really sprung. All the blossom is out and the colours are growing vivid and the birds are performing frankly unspeakable acts, sometimes on the wing. I wake in the night to hear the oystercatchers singing like drunken sailors out on a spree. The swifts are here although I have still not seen my swallows. We have a new visitor in the field, in addition to the pied wagtails and the swifts and our two robins and the usual dark complement of jackdaws. He is a proud and vocal chaffinch, and is very interested in the horses. At times, he almost seems to be singing his song to them.

I am so ignorant of birds that I had to look the chaffinch up. It is known, rather distressingly, as the Common Chaffinch, on account of being the second most common breeding bird in Britain. I pucker up at this, furious on my fellow’s behalf. There is nothing common about him. His plumage is as rich and exotic as that of a Chinese emperor. He has a little blue cap and a breast the colour of old roses and singing white flashes on his black wings. He is splendid and remarkable in every way. Common, indeed.

Time is such an odd thing. As I grow older, it races past me in a hurling blur. I quite often get the days of the week wrong, and for most of this month have been captioning my photographs as April rather than May. And yet it seems years since it was spring. The Scottish winter goes on much longer than the English one, and there is no bosky transition period. We do not have the nodding cow parsley in the lanes and the tumbling hedgerows and the sense of burgeoning that comes to England. Scottish nature is much more austere and reticent. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, until it seems that the world will remain brown and bleak forever, and then, almost overnight – spring. It is as if some capricious giant has waved a wand and everything comes out – there are tiny leaves in stinging green and gaudy blossom in vulgar pink and unapologetic dandelions raising their yellow heads. Even the hills change colour, as if they have cast off their sensible winter clothing and gone to Paris for the new modes.

It is very, very exciting.

Horses, famously, go a bit wild on the spring grass, get spring fever, have spring twinkles in their toes. Perhaps humans have that too. My mind is working at eighty miles an hour. I can’t sleep because I am writing three books in my head at once. I have a new idea which I can’t possibly start, because I’m still editing two manuscripts, but this story won’t leave me alone, and I imagine convoluted dialogue in my head as I walk down to tend to the mare.

I do steady groundwork with her, to get the spring out of her. Someone needs to do some groundwork with me.

 

Today’s pictures:

I cannot capture my own chaffinch as he moves too fast, but I found this lovely picture on Wikimedia, available for public use, taken by a gentleman called Michael Maggs:

You see how not common.

Sunday in pictures

Fairly serious author’s warning: if you have no interest in watching horses graze, I would look away now.

The really tragic thing is that I could watch them eat grass for hours. The riveting minuet of herd behaviour is endlessly interesting to me. But at the moment, there is just the sheer joy of seeing them with their heads down to the new growth, after months and months of snow and ice. It is beyond anything.

Autumn the Filly takes the opportunity to have a little roll:

Mr Stanley, sunbathing:

And bird-watching:

And generally inhaling the spring air:

There are some actual FLOWERS in my garden:

Stan has a nice rest whilst I tackle the ground elder:

Hill, from a different angle than usual, over the dry stone wall and through the trees:

A fleeting glimpse of spring

There are intimations of spring. This morning, I found the very first snowdrops. There were just two tiny clumps, on the rough ground, their buds still tightly furled. But there they were, brave harbingers of life to come. I was so excited that I exclaimed out loud.

The birds are suddenly singing their heads off. The woodpeckers are sending out their rhythmic rattle from the woods. The robins and tits are pairing off, and chasing each other around in a frankly blatant manner.

Even Beryl the Bird, the hen pheasant who visits the horses most mornings, pitched up today with a boyfriend. He is a big cock pheasant of several seasons, and the Horse Talker and I have now got it into our heads that Beryl has run off with a dirty old man. She’s clearly after his money. We are quite shocked. We did not think she was such a wanton.

There was even sunshine today, and the mercury climbed to a dizzying four degrees. We took all the rugs off, to let the equines stretch and bask in the sudden warmth. (We are talking in relatives here. It’s still glove and hat weather, but after so many days of windchill and zero degrees, it feels like the South of France.)

Stanley the Dog catches the new spirit in the air, and plays wild games with his ball. He has a very funny habit of burying balls all over the place. He carefully takes one, makes a little hole, puts the ball in it, and replaces the earth with his nose. Then he has the crazy fun of going about digging them all up again. Once discovered, the ball is thrown in the air, caught, chased, and practically juggled on the end of his nose. He is a one-dog circus act of his very own.

It has been a long, hard winter. It’s not over yet. More snow is forecast for the weekend. But just today, as the sun shines, and the air is gentle, and the frost goes out of the earth, my heart lifts with the thought of spring.

 

Today’s pictures:

SNOWDROPS:

The naughty Blue Tits, flirting their heads off:

The limes:

The old oaks and beeches:

One of the very few sadnesses about living so far north is that it is almost impossible to keep rosemary alive. It gets done by the ruthless winds, and turns brown overnight, as if someone has gone at it with a flame-thrower. This is the very first one that I have kept going for more than one season. I don’t count chickens yet, but I live in hope:

One of the things we do with the herd is give them a morning haynet. It means the hay lasts longer than if you just put it on the ground, and it keeps the horses occupied, because they have to pull the stuff through the small holes. We are very lucky to have a magnificent farmer who gets us the best stuff, and the girls absolutely love it. It’s one of their favourite parts of the day:

Autumn the Filly:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare, with her goofy hay-heaven face on:

And looking a little more demure:

Stanley the Dog, going ball crazy:

Two views of the hill today:

One of the Dear Readers asked if there was a structure on top of the hill. There is indeed. You can see it more clearly on some days than others. It is a perfect cairn, a built pyramid rather than an ad hoc mound, and it was put up by a widow as a memorial to her husband and son. I do not know who they were or how they died, but it’s very touching.

A dream of spring.

What a tremendous blog existed in my head this morning, as I cleaned my teeth. The brushing of the teeth, I have found, is a most excellent aid to thought. I often write blogs or articles or even entire chapters of books in my head in those meditative minutes. I cannot tell you the coruscating nature of the material. I sometimes blush at my own brilliance.

Then I go out into real life and it all dissipates like water on glass. Either I forget entirely, and only a blank space is left behind. Or I do remember, sit down in flushed triumph to write the immortal words, only to find that what was so dazzling in my frontal cortex is prosaic and dowdy on the page. The gap between thought and fingers is one of the enduring mysteries of the writing life.

I frown and chew my lip and chase the errant thoughts round my head. What was that marvellous ontological observation that was going to keep you rapt? Absolutely no idea. I screw up my face in frustration. I so wanted to give you something good today, after you so kindly put up with my yesterday’s wail.

There is a silence. I can hear the dog breathing, and the distant cooing of pigeons. I sit up, surprised. The pigeons are back? That is the sound of spring, yet it is only January the 8^th. Oddly, I have been thinking about spring quite a lot in the last week. The afternoons are drawing out; we are no longer in the pitch dark at half past three. Tiny shoots of new grass, of a most vivid and unlikely green, are starting to appear in the horses’ paddock. I stare at the verdant clumps for minutes at a time, quite enchanted, as if someone had presented me with a bunch of flowers.

We have a long way to go yet. We have February to get through, which up here can be the cruellest month, leaving April for dead, whatever TS might have to say about it. But it’s like a line I heard in a film once, I can’t remember which one. It went something like:

‘Is there love?’

‘No, but there is the dream of love.’

Here, in the north-east of Scotland, there is the dream of spring.

That’s not what I set out to write today at all. It was not what I contemplated in my morning hour. But as I write that sentence I sigh and smile. Yes, I think: a dream of spring. That’s not such a dusty thing for a cloudy Scottish Tuesday. That will do.

 

Today’s pictures:

After I wrote this, I went down to the horses, where Autumn the Filly was receiving her weekly desensitising training from The Brilliant Woman. It’s always fascinating to watch, and a happy little crowd gathered. I groomed my mare, and the thick, amber northern sun came out, the one that astonished me so when I first came from the south. It is an ancient light, like the light I imagine of old Italy. It, too, had the promise of balmier days in it, and the horses mooched and relaxed as they felt its tender warmth on their backs.

Then I got back to the garden, which is rather windblown and neglected and assailed with old leaves, and suddenly, I saw hopeful green everywhere. I must not get ahead of myself, but it felt like a bit of a sign:

Autumn the Filly, very pleased with herself after her good work:

Myfanwy, posing:

This is Red’s IS THAT MY TEA face:

She gets quite duchessy and over-excited when her food arrives, so I am teaching her to settle and wait for it. There will be no pushiness at feeding time, not in my herd. This is her faintly resigned, if you say so face:

STANLEY THE DOG HAS A STICK:

It goes into capitals because it occasions high excitement. He likes hurling the thing in the air and then pouncing on it:

And then looks a little put-upon as I stop the game and make him sit and stay:

What a martinet I am.

The blue hill: