Heartlands

This was a curious return to the world of people. A work trip to Salisbury Plain. I travelled there in darkness and stayed in the cheapest and most literally sterile of all possible hotels. The hotel had Stonehenge in its name and white van druids peered wistfully into the locked and bolted Greggs praying for relief. I drove home  in the late afternoon. The summer still lies in the sky, not quite defeated. Its white clouds are torn and the sky is dark and bruised. The fluffy white crumbles of cloud against that stormy dark echoed the billowing lines of trees across the rolling hills of this most English heartland. Each tree starting to turn, green blood draining to a wash of hazel browns and butter yellows. 

A short review of home automation

We have been tinkering with home automation. Just dipping a toe. Our spare room is separated from the house by a couple of rooms and a set of stairs. A cosy hidaway but also badly thought out in terms of power and light switches. Going to bed, for a guest, is like one of those fiendish interview puzzles. You have to go turn on a light, go to the next one, turn that on, go back turn the other one off, rinse and repeat. So we decided to improve the Night Orchard experience so that if anyone ever visits us again, they will have some hi-tech support. Our conclusion is that the tech is not quite ready yet. Last week I was allegedy exposed to someone with the virus, so I spent a night in the spare room. This morning I managed to get something as complex as 'play scheherazade on the spare room speakers' to work perfectly, but the system responded to 'desk' with a soliloquy on death. I found the experience strangely profound under the circumstances. It seems that our automated future may be more poetic than expected, but perhaps our digital slaves are not going to be as dispassionate as we think.

A Strange and Bitter Harvest

Listening to cover versions, which has become a habit of late. I was reminded of this by James Taylor as covered by Kate Rusby.

"Dark and silent, late last night, I think I might have heard the highway call"

This is a strange and bitter harvest. My life was split between the Night Planted Orchard and trips to faraway places. Now, each week, we speak to more people in those places. We have become familiar with the sound of their children, their pets. Their partners appear from time to time trying not to be seen in the video. Their studys and their gardens are becoming familiar. We are more engaged yet further apart than ever. They are humanised, but less tangible. It is a strange time.

I find myself looking at ways to help people remotely. Through all of that it seems that the World is receeding from me. Those trips to the US seem to be long, long ago. In the pre-amble to a meeting this morning I found myself comparing wistful notes with a New Zealander on Christchurch and Dunedin. Finland last week. Oz tomorrow. Oregon yesterday where we talked of smoke-haze from the all-consuming fires there. I wonder if I will ever fly again. Perhaps that is as it should be. That it is as it should be. In my heart I know that this is an opportunity to end those hard, crazy, trips to ecological ruin. But that heart is selfish and I know that would be a desperately sad outcome. My heart is therefore broken. I cannot put my love of travel aside. I know that I should, but I just can't. The idea makes me so sad I can barely speak of it, like an alcoholic facing an open bottle. Just one more. Just one more. Maybe the Vermont trip? Please? I'll stop tomorrow. I'll plant trees. Lots of trees. Please?

I realise with mounting horror that after all that, it's me. I am Babylon.

Wheelbarrow Meals

A September evening. We're having a few days of late warmth but behind it the heat is seeping out of the year day by day. This morning a mist lay in the fen like smoke from the doused embers of the summer. The light over the soft mist was low and brilliant. This is the first of my three beautiful things: honey and soft ochre dripping over the world. 

Later in the morning I saw that the harvested fields made lines across the landscape like a musical manuscript. The residual haze softened the colours. Sere gold dominates. On the horizon the trees are softened still further until they are like dissolving watercolour lines against a blue wash sky. The picture beside this post was taken in the nineties, from a bus on the way to work. For me it captures the very essence of early autumn in the Fens. Endless fields. Lonely trees. Black Earth. Colours that fill the huge sky.

I live for the light of autumn and September is my favourite month. Each evening we've loaded our battered red wheelbarrow with our evening meal and trailed it down to the orchard with the Old Hunter in tow. We pass under the tree where the bees were squatting in the little owl box. They were rescued by a kind beekeper a week ago. This is my second beautiful thing, the bees are safe now, but the old orchard feels empty without them, like the house does if the Old Hunter is not there.

The sunset is chipped into jewelled facets by the hedge and shards of red-orange are scattered on the grass.  There is a vivid lull, under the trees, with wrens hopping about and foxes barking. A lull between the constant effort of the summer, and pruning and cutting tasks of early winter. A few late beetroot are racing the summers-end. There are still beans on the plants. A self-set sunflower nods like a yellow card from those old Batman TV shows: POW! POLLEN! We've taken to smoking food in an old pan with chipped fruit tree prunings. The air is full of the smell of smoke, smouldering fig wood and slow-cooking sausages. As it grows dark the Old Hunter is torn between the bangers and the creeping, rustling beasts in the woods. He puthers back and forth, nose alternately low to the hedge and high to the cooking pan. Pruning offcuts crackle in the chiminea. An insense burner tries and fails to repel biting insects. A bat flits. A woodpecker swoops. We enjoy the failing light and the deep silence. We feel the creeping cold huddle together, all three of us, not quite ready to batten down the hatches for a brutal winter. This is my third beautiful thing for today: defiance. We are not quite ready to retreat from our beautiful, sleepy old orchard. We'll wait a little longer because I fear that this strange and deadly year is not done yet. 

A Taste of Victory

It's an apple. It's not a special variety or a conserved local breed. It's a Gala apple, a staple of gargantuan commercial orchards all over the world and quite recently the number one cultivar in the US by volume. I like to think the tree was grown from an apple from the supermarket, a child's special project. (Yes I know. Shush. It wouldn't have bred true. Shush, inner geek.)

But this was the most delicious apple that I've ever eaten. It was warm from the tree, which is to say warm from the sun of course. It was gorgeous and unblemished.

And there's the rub - unblemished. Well actually the rub was on my t-shirt before I ate it. But this poor tree was at Death's door when we started work in the Night Planted Orchard. The apples were sad and half-formed things. The branches of the tree were literally dripping with disease. Then I did a course with the totally brilliant East of England Apples and Orchards Project (applesandorchards.org.uk). In the first year I cut the tree back as far as I dared. I let two branches grow above the worst of the corruption. The next year I cut more back and grew out two more branches. Then I removed one of the bigger rotten core branches. The next year I took out the massive, dying central stem and fully expected the tree to die. Two years later and it had a strong central cup of thick stems. The apples were still disappointing, but by now the main problem was bitter pit. I'd planned to treat that this year, but by now the tree is roaring. It's healthy as an ox, if that's a proper metaphor, and the ground around the tree has recovered its balance because the bitter pit has gone. Every time I look at it, I feel a glow.

As if in celebration, the Gala's neighbour, a solid old Bramley has, quite literally, showered us with huge, luscious fruit this year and all the apple trees in the orchard have fruited, even though it's supposed to be an off year for some of them. So I picked one of this year's crop from my healed tree and after capturing its portrait for posterity, I wolfed it down. It tasted of victory. A small victory, but one I'll treasure.