Tag: urban gulls

Please welcome Eric – he needs your help.

Admittedly this is a pretty terrible photograph, but since I lost my telephoto lens when it fell out of my camera bag and into a bog somewhere up on the Mendip Hills, I haven’t had much luck with long shots. The macro lens on my camera helps a bit, being dual purpose, but in my efforts to get a picture of my dear friend Eric the herring gull I managed to knock over a jam jar full of parsley that was perched on the window and by the time I’d cleared up the mess there wasn’t time to find the camera, change the lens and blah blah blah – so there was just the phone.

Gulls are not, by their nature, the kind of creatures you can normally feel an attachment to. If you’ve ever looked into the cold eye of a greater black backed gull, you’ll know what I mean. I think it was Adam Nicholson who most accurately described these birds as being from a different world. Theirs was the ocean and ours was the land; or at least that was the way of it until plastic rubbish bags and fast food came along at which point they moved in. Noisy, garrulous, thieving creatures as they are, their principal virtue in cities was that at least they cleared up some of our mess before the rats moved in – although in our neighbourhood the sight of the ripped open bags with their contents strewn across the streets on a Thursday morning became the kind of issue that gets councillors elected.

In years past, the council removed nests and eggs, and recently they’ve taken to using a falconer who annoys the nesting birds with a beautiful Harris hawk. Most recently the absence of tourists has led to the quietest breeding season in many years. Where there were once dozens of gulls strutting their stuff on the roofs and parapets, now there are no more than a handful and – of course Eric.

I won’t bother with the whole sorry story of my interest in gulls except to say that it started in St Ives one January morning when I realized to my shame that there were any number of seabirds out there and I hadn’t the faintest clue what any of them were. There’s a link to it here, if you’re interested. Maybe it would have been quicker, easier and far far cheaper to have categorised them all as “seagulls” and moved on to something more obviously important, but I didn’t and – as a result of my resolution that day, I am able to say with confidence that Eric is a herring gull. If he were a lesser or great black backed, a black headed or anything else in that line I’d also be reasonably certain of not making a fool of myself. I should qualify that by saying that I have give him a gender but my knowledge of gull sexing is sparse to non existent so he/she could be an Eric or an Erica. But in my long history of accidental pastoral work it was usually angry men who, spotting my dog collar, would approach me on bus stops and railway stations and harangue me as if it was my fault that their partners had seen the light and dumped them. So on that entirely circumstantial evidence, I think Eric is a male

So – gull schmull – you might think; Eric is a solitary. Something terrible has happened and he wanders disconsolately around the green every day being mobbed occasionally by jays and sidling up to young rooks who really aren’t interested.

Back in the day, Hercules would have dealt with him. Hercules was an enormous tabby cat who kind-of belonged to the whole street. He had an owner, but when she moved to Greece she left the flat, and Hercules, in the care of her son who appeared not to care whether the cat lived or died. Maybe he just got fed up with clearing up the remains of Hercules’ last hunting adventure. Hercules was streetwise, independent and fierce and could probably take down a bull terrier, god willing and a fair wind. And so he took to patrolling our street and living on handouts from just about everyone. Every doorstep had empty tins of tuna (this is an upcoming area) and someone even made him a comfortable bed on the step. Then his owner returned from Greece, by which time the cat weighed about three stone, and she posted angry signs all down the street forbidding us to feed him and so we stopped. Shortly afterwards our beloved piratical moggie disappeared forever – he probably died taking on an otter for a laugh.

At least Eric the herring gull is safe – but not in a nice way. These most sociable of creatures have excluded him for some unimaginable breach of gullish etiquette. Sans partner, sans flock, sans everything – he wanders about on the green alone and my pastoral heart goes out to him. People feed robins and blue tits, but random gulls never get a look in. I wondered for a brief conspiratorial moment if the council has set up a top secret experiment to try to stop them breeding and Eric is the first graduate – I really hope not.

In these months of lockdown I can occasionally lean out of the window when the other gulls are circling and playing; shut my eyes and imagine we’re back in St Ives on holiday. Then I open them again and it’s the same old grey world. The Brazilian woman working out with her collection of rubber bungees, the dealers hanging about on the corner, the couple who meet up secretly everyday in an earnest huddle, the smokers, the drinkers and the sturdy beggars in from town because the tourists have gone, the couple practising their strange martial arts routine, the deranged, the homeless and the affluent; the cyclists whizzing past on their way to somewhere they can be important. They’re all part of the natural history of being human. And there’s Eric. What can we do to make him happy!

Chalet chic

Something’s happening in the world of allotmenteering; something that stirs up some old and important memories of a different age we thought might have gone forever. Allotments and allotmenteers, historically speaking, are inclined to be conservative – certainly not politically, but in terms of what’s ‘right and proper’ on the ground. It’s been more of a ‘National growmore’ fertiliser and double digging’ kind of an activity. The allotments of the past were pretty monochrome on the whole. There would be rhubarb and cottage kale; potatoes, celery and cut flowers and small sheds that tended to be much of a muchness. The present rules that govern our site are sixteen pages long and cover just about everything from shed sizes to bonfires and even percentages of plots allowable for flowers. Paths are minutely described and only two years ago one of our neighbours received a rude letter from the council because he’d left a few weeds on the path.

I remember those days all too well when, being in our twenties and full of ideas of self-sufficiency and organic methods, we assumed we were regarded with dark suspicion by the other, mostly older, allotmenteers. I think it’s fair to say that some thought we were hippies who were bound to do nothing but smoke weed and make a nuisance of ourselves having orgies in the long grass. No such luck, I might say if I didn’t know that Madame will read this; anyway I’ve always been far too shy for orgies.

Two years ago you could almost walk on to an empty allotment plot after a few weeks on the (imaginary) waiting list. Not today, though. The list has grown longer and longer and a last few lucky souls slipped through the gate just before lockdown slammed it shut. The result has been a huge influx of newcomers, many of whom have never done any gardening and have joined the site in search of something more than free vegetables. The site is transformed. I’ve long thought that newcomers who are experienced gardeners bring regional or national styles with them; but the newcomers are something else. They’ve brought flair and architectural imagination with them. They recycle bits of old building material as if they were precious objects, and a pallet has acquired the sort of value that mars bars attracted when I taught in a prison.

There’s a young man on our site who has built three sheds so far and already has a waiting list – some of his efforts are in the photo gallery below as well as the one at the top. Several other things have happened; physical boundaries have become important again. The idea of ‘my space’ has become very important. Most of the new buildings provide more than secure space for tools – they’re socialising spaces as well. Shelters built big enough for four people rather than one solitary gardener with cloth cap. Our neighbours have turfed half of their plot (against the rules) put up a wire fence (against the rules) built two sheds, one of them oversize (completely against the rules) and he and she spend alternate sunny evenings drinking wine with their respective friends and warming themselves on a bonfire (reach for the smelling salts!!)

But the sense of space is balanced by far greater social media openness. The new Facebook page is buzzing with shares and questions. We talk to one another – once, that is, the younger people have got over the fact that we older ones don’t resent their presence and neither is old age contagious which some of them had been led to believe. The fact that we are supposed to have stolen their pensions is not mentioned, and just in case, we take care to not to provoke them by driving a very small mud covered Hyundai i10 with the back seat permanently down to accommodate tools and more mud. One of the advantages of being much older (there are a few disadvantages too) is that you get time to reflect ruefully on the friendships you missed fifty years ago, and on another allotment, by being standoffish and shy.

I might have concluded that this is a peculiar Bath phenomenon except for the fact that we went today to see our grandchildren and their mum and dad on their allotment in Bristol and exactly the same thing is happening there too. You don’t want to be always saying “we did that too” even if we did, because allotmenteering is a lifelong learning process and no-one likes a smartass.

But there’s something indefinable in the air. When these young people start sharing their surpluses and their first thoughts are collaboration and co-ops; and when – after an age of nuclear families and steroidal aspirations – we come back to a more tolerant, less judgemental and less prescriptive ethic, then some of the conditions for change are falling into place.

Elsewhere in the Potwell Inn

Apart from seeing, but not being able to hug our grandchildren today – still it was joyful. The three year old was bewildered by the social distancing and cried bitterly while the others were more philosophical. I’ve been reading David Goode’s wonderful book “Nature in towns and cities” – you may recall we met him watching peregrines at the weekend. The first chapter is a run around the ecology of Bath, and I read it breathlessly, ticking off things I’d seen and making lists of things I’ve missed so far. Then, as I threw open the shutters on a grey morning, I spotted a gull and a black, crowish looking bird. But what sort of gull? and what sort of crow? I’m not, never have been, a birdwatcher but it was a moment of life-changing insight not long after I retired, when I realized I had no idea what sort of gulls we were looking at on holiday at St Ives. The problem was that they were black headed gulls in their winter plumage ie. they had white heads unless you noticed the small crescent of black. Clearly birding was going to involve minute attention to detail.

So when David writes in his book that there are flocks of lesser black back gulls and herring gulls I was obliged to get the binoculars out and have a closer look. Until this morning I’d never given it much thought, but now I know for sure that I can identify lesser and greater black backed gulls, black headed gulls and herring gulls pretty much on sight. So too, the black crowish bird I paid minute attention to as well, is – a young rook at which point I realized that using binoculars to survey the green could, at times, be misconstrued.

In the plant department I had my eye properly ‘in’ and spotted *nipplewort and pellitory of the wall barely twenty feet from the flat! Slowly, and as a result of the lockdown, I’m seeing the wealth of wildlife we’re sitting in the middle of. I still miss our walks in North Wales and Cornwall bitterly but I’m learning more plants every day, right here. Then to crown the day a perfectly ordinary Comma butterfly resting on the inside of the fruit cage. Is someone trying to tell me something?

  • * Pride comes before a fall! No it wasn’t nipplewort it was wall lettuce – should have looked more carefully. Also forgot to mention the greater celandine on the other side of the path. That’s three sites I’ve found in Bath – again it’s not rare but fun to find.

Piano Story

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It’s a sad day because my piano for – I guess – about twenty years is about to be collected and driven up to Birmingham for our son. I bought it because I began (almost accidentally) trying to run a church music group where everyone else was a better musician than I was. I was a moderate but very rusty acoustic guitarist and a half reasonable singer but apart from guitar notation I couldn’t read music. My critics, and there were many of them, voted mostly with their feet when I tried to introduce new music to the church, but enough of them remained to fight a guerilla war with me and the musicians and ensure that there was a constant supply of scorn and hostility on offer. The only alternative was to get better at what we were doing and so initially I got some proper guitar lessons and when I was on top of that instrument I bought the piano and found a teacher.  Actually I had two teachers – the first, Bryn, was a lovely man who would reminisce about his days playing the piano at strip clubs and how his dad was a star at the local pub but only ever played on the black notes because he reckoned it was impossible to play a dud chord whatever notes you hit. Hmm ….

My second teacher, David, was a brilliant musician, composer and choir director who would rap my knuckles with a ruler when I made daft mistakes. I never became a real pianist but I learned to read enough music to resolve most of the disputes that arose in the band.  I took a couple of courses in music theory at the university too, and as the music group grew I taught myself to conduct and, ‘though I say it myself, we were pretty good for a bunch of amateurs and we had a lot of fun too.

Sad to say, since I retired and we moved here to Bath, I haven’t sung at all and the music has slipped away. Our flat is in a cast concrete box and so sound travels very easily. Piano practice is repetitive, noisy and downright antisocial so the lid has remained closed and the music is in my head. Bach has been a great consolation. Meanwhile my tiny study has become a pit and so after a clear out of books I knew I wasn’t going to read (I’ve more than replaced them with new books) the piano is the next thing to go and today when the removers leave I’m going to turn the desk around so I can look out of the window at last, and I’ll be able to get to the shelves that I’ve had to crawl under the desk to reach.

So a bittersweet moment to contemplate, but with months of incarceration to face, it makes sense. Yesterday we heard a commotion outside on the green, and about fifty gulls (lesser black backed) were circling around in a highly agitated state. Then we caught sight of a man down on the green who was flying a falcon – a Harris Hawk I’m pretty sure. The gulls surrounded it and harried it from a distance but the hawk was having none of it, nonchalantly perching in the trees for a breather and then setting off to menace them once more.  I guess this is a new council attempt to discourage these visitors who make the most tremendous racket during the breeding season, and tear open rubbish bags, spreading their maggotty contents across the streets. It was wonderful to watch the hawk working.

Outside the streets are uncannily quiet and the supermarkets are struggling to cope.  Our son’s partner was almost elbowed to the floor in Waitrose yesterday as the middle classes fought over the toilet paper.  Later she witnessed a fierce argument at the checkout when one customer was not allowed to buy two four roll packs  when the customer behind was allowed to buy sixteen in a pack.  This morning I got a rebuke from Facebook for posting a completely innocuous photo of a joker in a hazmat suit because it ‘breached their community standards’ – I’d copied it from an online newspaper so I guess they’re a little behind the curve in their attempts to stifle discussion. These are strange times – I hope we’ll be able to get up to the allotment later today, I’m going stir crazy already.