Well, it’s been a fairly hellish winter and an effort of will to keep going but – finally – the Celandines are out; Imbolc festival has come and gone, along with wassailing – without many people noticing – and extensive counselling sessions have taken place to repair the emotional damage of the Christmas season when high expectations collide at speed with human nature. Time, then, for mending the nets which in my case has occupied many hours on the computer, preparing (and repairing) my little homebrewed wildflower database. I only thought yesterday how difficult it is to turn random and uncatalogued – let alone identified – photographs …….. to turn them and their associated EXIF information into proper data. Data that I can sort, filter, number and export to whom it may concern. It’s like a random collection of holiday snaps being transformed by the power of AI into a magnificent library. But we’re not there yet! AI isn’t half as clever as it pretends, and every single decision has to be interrogated and challenged, so my desk still groans under the weight of all those field guides and there are many sheets of scribbled-on paper surrounding me. I’ve made major and exciting discoveries about taking photos of plants but I can only wish that I’d known all this years ago. Today I’ve been “doing” violets; last week it was Fleabanes and I’m not even thinking about Dandelions; ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!‘
Throw all that into the mix with our long battle with the landlord concerning black mould in our concrete mock-Georgian block; two visits from surveyors hoping to prove that nothing can be done unless we open all the windows in the freezing weather and take it in turns to breathe (obviously it’s all our own fault) and by the end of the week Madame had built a temporary electric bender over the sofa and refused to engage for forty eight hours.
We managed to work in a couple of lectures, mind you. At the first talk the expert on Harvest Mice had obviously started hibernating in the cold and failed to turn up so the ever prepared secretary (who’s also the Vice County Botanical recorder) sorted through her bag and dug up a fascinating lecture previously delivered to the Somerset Rare Plants Group and which inspired me to even greater curatorial heights because we’d actually found about 20% of the plants already.
The second talk was given by the friend of a friend; an artist and teacher who’d worked with our oldest friend and also with some of the young people I’d worked with as well back in the day, not to mention his workshops at WOMAD. Our oldest friend Tony Eastman was given a wonderful welcome and tribute was paid to his still undervalued work. He deserved no less! Tony followed a similar course to me. My Dad wanted me to be an engineer and Tony was sent to the shipyard in Plymouth to do an apprenticeship. He applied to go to Art School as soon as he finished the apprenticeship, and I landed up working for a while in engineering before I swerved off towards real life. With Tony and Glen coming for tea before the lecture I baked some scones and bought clotted cream to go with home made bramble jelly – after all he’s a Devonian – and we gorged on home-made scones and jam before catching the bus down to the Art School. During the scoff he made the intriguing remark that in his childhood they used to eat the scones and clotted cream with black treacle and call it “Thunder and Lightning”. I could hardly wait to try it and so our youngest – who’s a chef – came and tasted them with me the following day. They were fabulous – if life threateningly sweet and fat!
By today the nets felt just a bit mended.
