It’s been a sad roller coaster of a week with all the highs cancelled by some awful lows. Last weekend we were in the Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons, staying with friends. I’d been in conversation with the doctor about my AF medication and she had contacted the consultant cardiologist for advice. Out of the blue I received a text message from her with a suggestion of a new drug whose side effects were even more severe (and dangerous) than the previous lot. The message said that this was the “drug of last resort” – well thanks! I’ve always wondered if doctors make you ill, but this felt like the threat of some serious iatrogenic harm. The Wednesday high was a field trip to Woodchester Mansion; a lovely but enigmatic unfinished building set in a magnificent Cotswold valley. I was leading (or supposed to be), but the group instantly split into birders, entomologists, trippers and botanists who all wanted to go their separate ways – notwithstanding my hard work on risk assessment maps and species lists – and so we threw in our lot with with the botanists and thrashed our way up and down 600 feet of steep Cotswold valley. The upside was a personal guided tour/tutorial where we found half a dozen rarities that we’d never have noticed in a hundred years and I discovered a whole pile of ideas about plant recording.
Friday was never going to be a fun day because we were going to an anaesthetist friend’s funeral. He died in the appalling way that only Motor Neurone Disease can offer. The church was full of consultants who radiated the kind of smooth skinned self confidence that my old friend never displayed; the vicar barked at us like a performing seal and I felt the meaning of life and death draining away between the medieval floor tiles. The consolation of old village friends just about kept me going but there were no tears accessible to me in the etiolated atmosphere. It seemed as if his widow and children had their grief airbrushed out as the torrent of worldly achievements, words and music shuttered the darkness away. As we left down the lane I found relief at last in a woundwort plant and crushed its leaves, releasing its powerfully unpleasant smell. Real; real! On Saturday an email announced the death of another college friend; news came of Michael Mosley’s disappearance and the brutal slaughter of hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza. Even the thought of an imminent election brought no hope . “Homini lupus est” – man is a wolf to man. Then from the sublime to the gorblimey I managed to lose my hearing aids and I was plunged into an underwater world of deafness.
By Monday Madame had helped me find the hearing aids in the communal dumpster in the basement and I cooked a curry. Those two clauses were not in any sense connected. We decided a trip to Whitefield would cheer us both up, and so we drove over to Dyrham Park and found three species of orchid within a riot of unimproved meadow plants. Pyramidal, Purple Spotted and Bee orchids – all of them very small this year. The field will soon be cut for hay, but today it was thrillingly lovely. Among the pictures, the Buff Tailed bumble bee is feeding on Rough Hawkweed; a flowering head of Crested Dog’s Tail grass; the field white and gold like the Milky Way, with Oxeye Daisies and the same Rough Hawkweed; and the three orchids
