You’ve no idea how lovely it is to feel well again; to wake up in the morning full of ideas; relishing each day and going out on our walks once more; a bit further each time. I still don’t know with any certainty what was wrong with me but in the end – and by default because they’d looked at every other possibility – I think it all boiled down to iron deficiency anaemia caused by polyps in my colon which were removed by a lovely team at the RUH and then, after a troubled start on iron tablets which initially made me sicker than ever, they were changed for another type and apart from the bother of waking myself up to take them at 5.00am, I feel better than I’ve felt for around 18 months. Hooray for the NHS and the Royal United Hospital ….. and for our GP who started the ball rolling on what must have been a hunch.
So last year didn’t go too well on the travel front – rescued twice by the AA and ignominiously towed home on a trailer; the engine blew up once, cambelt, water pump, clutch and alternator needed replacing and two trips were cancelled before they even began. But that was then and this is now and the van, Madame and me are ready for (amost) anything but especially for a trip to the Lizard which was just ravaged by storm Goretti and lost both water, electricity and internet for a couple of days. We’re staying in a rented clifftop cottage and the photos at the top were all taken through the half-door; the one on the bottom left taken early on the morning of our last departure. Every time we leave it feels like a small bereavement – there’s a bit of my soul living there permanently.
Having spent several years on the neighbourhood plants – Lizard is a botanical hotspot – I’ve just finished fixing up a moth trap. It’s very early in the year and we don’t expect more than a handful of visitors, but in many ways a slow start is the best way for beginners like us. The more projects we embark on, the more the planning resembles a military campaign – laptops, mobile wiFi router and aerial, books, maps, food; cameras, lenses, tripods, kitchen sink. You get the picture. I’ve even bought a new, clonking great monograph on hedgerows to keep me happy if it rains non-stop, and that’s happened on several previous trips.
Taking photographs is only a fraction of the battle, though. Identifying the plant in question is three quarters of the fun. For instance the little darling below was – so far as I was concerned – a white form of death cap that we found on the edge of a wood in Cumbria a few years ago. It’s been labelled and sitting in the photos folder for years until yesterday when I was reading a brilliant monograph on fungi in the New Naturalist series – when I discovered that it also looked very like another fungus known as Destroying Angel which really is white. In the intervening years I’ve learned how to access the massive power of databases and so I checked on the largest I could find and discovered that neither of the fungi is even recorded close to the place we found it, but that even so my initial identification was more likely to be correct. There is a test to distinguish them but of course the subject of the photo is long gone and so it will always remain an unanswerable question.
That’s the thing about nature, it seems far more malleable than we would wish. It would be fairer to say that short of a full DNA profile almost all our identifications are provisional. Like weather forecasts ID’s are correct on the basis of percentages. 100% certainty is rarer than we’d like. Of course that merely means that we should be more modest about our certainties. A couple of days ago we were on a plant hunt and I overheard someone airily identifying a Feverfew with a lot more conviction than I would dare to offer. In fact, the more I learn about fungi the less likely I am ever to forage for them. Both the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel are regularly and fatally confused with edible fungi. No thanks, then, I’ll have the fish fingers!
So, the packing lists are all made and the kit is all checked over, charged up and wrapped. You would think we were off up the Amazon but you need to remember that as a list addict, planning is almost as much fun as getting there. It doesn’t always work of course, we once drove up to Pembrokeshire for a camping holiday only to discover I’d left all the tent poles behind. On another occasion I forgot the air mattresses, and after a trip to the local supermarket we bought a couple of air beds that were so thick and luxurious our noses were almost touching the flysheet.
But at this moment I can hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of waking up to the sound of the sea and walking between fields and hedgerows which – being much further south – are just beginning to wake up. Bring it on! – we say.
