The cruellest month

 

Greetings!   It is said April is the cruellest month. It is not. It is January, the interminable opening month that comes around each year distributing gloom to every corner of the countryside. Sure, there are a few snowdrops as proof of life in that there earth but they are like Royal icing on a cold, soggy cake. Let us appraise a typical January day.    Sunrise is late; at 8am we are still as enlightened as moles. A few songbirds make a feeble effort at the dawn chorus but if Simon Cowell was on the judging panel it would be three noes from us. On the water the mallards fight each other because, like disaffected youths inhabiting the lunar wasteland of some post-industrial town, they can in the absence of anything else to do.   The moorhens, scared witless by I know not what, run screeching hither and thither for no apparent purpose. The trees drip, drip, drip cold greeting on all and anything beneath their spindly canopies. I would bring you tales of arrow light streaks from kingfishers or the foraging of cute voles to lift your spirits to engender hope of better times ahead but they are all entirely absent.        January dawn at Nether Wallop Mill

 

Forget about Dry January this should be Grey January, the universal colour of the sky. If it is not raining, it is grey. If it is not blowing a gale, it is grey. If it is not grey then it is almost certainly night. Occasionally the sun will appear for which we are pathetically grateful commenting to colleagues, friends and family as if it marked the Second Coming. Any outside activity is done in the belief that, as D:Ream sung, Things Can Only Get Better. Or that the very fact of being outside is Doing You Good. And it is not the cold that eventually drives you indoors but the damp that seeps to your core regardless of microfibre layers.   As we say goodbye to January, has there been anything good about the month? I will say in its defence it is a great month for spectacular sunrises and sunsets. It is also, to completely mangle Churchill, if not the end of winter then at least the beginning of the end of winter with 67 minutes more daylight than when we started the New Year.   PS Some facts random to make my point: ·     The Anglo-Saxons called January “Wulfmonath” as it was the month hungry wolves came scavenging at people’s doors ·     More couples separate or divorce in January than in any other month. ·     Daytime temperatures in January make it the coldest month of the year in the UK. ·     "Blue Monday" falls at the beginning of the third week of January and, according to scientists, it has been found to be the most depressing day of the year.

 

 

A bright intervention on a gloomy day   Soon after writing the above I went outside from The Mill in the gathering gloom of dusk for a final hatch inspection; it had pretty well been raining all day. In my cunningly chosen moment at a break in the rain I came across a cheerful little creature perched atop a gate post loudly warbling to an unseen companion who replied in similar kind.   Robins are the first and last birds to sing each day, so his (or her as the plumage gives little away in that respect)) timing was impeccable. Robins are, apparently, fiercely territorial and have been known to fight to the death to defend their patch. Maybe this was a new arrival as this gateway was an uncommon robin perch?

 

For the most part robins are faithful homebirds, preferring to live and die within a couple of miles of their place of birth. But not all. Some of the population hate the British winter as much as I hate a British January, migrating to Spain and Portugal until warmer weather draws them home. Or some, in search of food and fleeing snow and ice traverse the North Sea from Scandinavia.  For a while the robin kept me company, watching me as I went about my business the singing a happy antidote to January blues. But soon it was too dark to sing and too dark to work so we both called it a day.     Nether Gone   The mystery sign stealer is back. After a furlough of some years whoever had a penchant for our village sign is back, nicking it sometime last week.  It is all very odd because Nether Wallop hardly ranks up there in the UK village name stakes like Brown Willy, Brokenwind, Shitterton or Penistone. Or so I thought until I did some Googling to come across You Tubers who have ranked Nether Wallop as the UK’s fifth funniest village name.     Gone but not forgotten ......   The pair who are, to be truthful, quite engaging, are correct in the origins of the Wallop suffix though there are just two villages, Over and Nether, with Middle a relatively recent creation when the airfield, surrounding barracks and military housing came into being around WW1. In fact, until very recently in some Cold War throwback Middle Wallop never appeared on any maps or road signs to confound invaders.       How wet was 2024 for you?   How wet was 2024 for you? Pretty well regardless of where you lived the answer has to be wet to very wet. It takes a lot to significantly move an average but that was the story across England.   The driest region was the north-east at 114% long term average (LTA) rainfall with the wettest the south-east at 131%. Translated into rain gauge measurement that represents annual rainfall for the south-east of 42 inches instead of an average 32 inches. In case you were wondering the LTA is the years 1961-1990, though quite why it is such a trailing statistic I do not know.   What does that mean in practical terms for rivers? Well, if it was coming on the back of a dry year such as 2022 it would be catch up as the aquifers recharge a bit like topping up a water bottle. But, coming as it does on the back of a wet 2023, your water bottle is spilling over the table and drenching the floor in turn. Everywhere I go the meadows are flooded, streams bursting banks and winter bournes pummelling though. Three years ago I wondered whether the source of the River Kennet in Berkshire would ever flow again; last week it looked like a proper river.   I never like to say ‘if it does not rain between now and the start of the season we will still be fine” because that feels like offering a hostage of fortune to the Gods. So, I will not say it, but you know what I mean ……

 

A swollen Wallop Brook

 

 

Quiz   Back to the normal random collection of questions inspired by the events that took place on this date in history or topics in the Newsletter.   Answers are at the bottom of this Newsletter.   1)   Who wrote: “Above all, there are villages [in Britian] almost without number whose names are just endearingly inane………… Nether Wallop, and the practically unbeatable Thornton-le-Beans. (Bury me there!).”   2)   What was postponed on this day in 1944 until June?   3)   How many heads did Janus, the god on beginnings hence January, have?

 

Have a good weekend.  Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

1)   Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island 2)   Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings 3)   Two to allow him to look both forward and back

Starmer stymies Truss beaver legacy

 

Greetings!   I do not know about you but the direction of the Starmer administration in regard to the countryside confuses me, more akin to the Dominic Cummings dig at his former boss Boris Johnson who he described as “a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.   First, we had their extension of Inheritance Tax to farms, then the rescue plan of many years in the making for the chalkstreams championed by my friend Charles Rangeley-Wilson, was unceremoniously dumped and now, out of the blue, despite endorsement by the Department for Rural Affairs, 10 Downing Street have stepped in to kybosh the mass release of beavers.   Why? Well, at this moment with the official announcement still to come, we can only guess but the speculation is of a visceral reaction to a policy championed by previous Conservative administrations. If you recall Liz Truss’s leadership campaign manager cited the reintroduction of beavers as the candidate’s greatest achievement whilst Environment Secretary and Boris Johnson, who said he would give his father a beaver but never did, advocated “Build Back Beaver!”.

 

Read my Spectator article on the beaver menace. Spectator subscribers click here. PDF version click here.

 

In case you are equally confused in respect of beaver status as I am about Starmer, there already being an estimated 2-3,000 of these tree-eating rodents in mainland Britain, let me explain the difference between what we have and what is/was proposed.  Beavers were first smuggled from the continental Europe by eco-fanatics over two decades ago who, having failed to make the case for legal releases, illegally set them free first in Scotland and then in Devon. Whether this disparate group of people ever had a plan as such I do not know but if it was for the beavers to put down roots, breed a ‘native’ population, win the hearts and minds of the British public and then bring officialdom along for the ride, then their plan succeeded. It culminated in 2020 with a farcical study of the River Otter beaver population by Exeter University requiring the answer yes to decide whether the ‘wild’ population should remain and further licences for enclosed populations be granted.   There is, frankly, a load of tosh talked about beavers saving the planet. I know I am often unkind to Natural England, the Environment Agency and other members of ecological officialdom but I think even they would have worked out years ago that if building a few random dams was the answer to all that ails the British countryside and rivers they might just have worked it out. But no, apparently we have to leave it to some very dim and slow moving mustelids.   So, at this point we have the ‘wild’ beaver river population and another population, who make up the bulk of those few thousand, who live in maintained enclosures under licence. The final stage in the evolution of the British beaver was the licenced release of beavers into the wild advocated by that super quango Natural England, egged on by all the usual suspects such at the National Trust, Mammal Society and numerous Wildlife Trusts. Frankly, we all know the licensing of wild releases was just cover for a beaver release free-for-all and the ultimate victory for the eco-fanatics, so quite why this Labour administration has quashed it is hard to work out but nonetheless gratifying.   Watch out for Starmer Beaver Harmer placards at a protest near you soon.

 

 

When Tony went fishing .......   My piece on Jimmy Carter created quite a postbag. Firstly, the landlord of The Mill Arms Terry Lewis where the President took lunch during his day on the Test related his conversation with Carter which nicely summaries the predicament of being too famous.   “Smashing bloke who loved his fishing, he (Carter) was thrilled that the Test was so natural and challenging. He spoke of being invited to the Colorado River by wealthy supporters but on arrival they would have stocked the river with hundreds of fish to ensure that the President had a 'good day', quite defeating the appeal.”

 

Terry Lewis with Jimmy Cater at The Mill Arms   I was also pointed in the direction of that great book You Should Have Been Here Last Thursday by River Itchen keeper Ron Holloway who hosted Jimmy and Rosalind Carter the following day, Mrs Carter comfortably out fishing her husband from which Ron concluded she was the better dry fly fisher of the two, though he chose to keep such thoughts to himself.   Finally, on the subject of fly fishing British Prime Minsters it seems Tony Blair was gifted an exquisite handmade Edward Barder cane fly rod (RRP £3,300) when invited to fish in the US. Of when, where and with whom Blair fished I have no information, but if anyone knows ……     Fit for a PM - an Edward Barder outfit     Memories of The Wind in the Willows   The only book my father ever read me, though do not think we ever got to the end, was The Wind in the Willows. Still to this day I recall the very room and the very chair in which we sat each evening as the tale of Ratty, Toad, Badger and all the other denizens of Wild Woods unfolded. I was probably too young to fully appreciate the plot but vividly remember the colour plates in the book, that guided the story, flicking through the pages long after my father had completed the daily read. So, it was with a certain amount of nostalgia that I saw Kenneth Grahame’s last home in Pangbourne, Berkshire is up for sale.   As is well known, the setting for Grahame’s tale was the River Thames and his childhood home at Cookham Dean nearby which is 5 miles northwest of Windsor. He wrote the book, his only novel, based on bedtime stories he had told his son Alastair when three years old (about the age I was when read it) though Grahame wrote the book a few years later having moved away from the Thames, closer to Oxford on his retirement from the Bank of England.

 

Kenneth Grahame

 

Church Cottage is a pretty house, on the edge of Pangbourne village on the corner of Riverview Road, just a few yards from the River Pang, a chalkstream tributary of the River Thames, which it joins a quarter of a mile to the north. Towards the end of his life, though he died only aged 71, Grahame seemed to lose his memory transferring the location of The Wind in the Willows to either the Thames close to Pangbourne or the Pang itself. Two years prior to his death in 1932 but already immobile he invited artist Ernest Shepard, due to illustrate a new edition of the book, to Church Cottage, Shepard relating the conversation,   “He told me of the river nearby, of the meadows where Mole broke ground that spring morning, of the banks where Rat had his house, of the pools where Otter hid, and of Wild Wood way up on the hill above the river… He would like, he said, to go with me to show me the river bank that he knew so well, ‘but now I cannot walk so far and you must find your way alone’.”   Church Cottage is on sale with Singleton & Daughter at £1.65m.

 

 

 

Appropriate to his book Grahame's Church Cottage contains what was the village jail with Toad, plus keys, immortalised in the pathway.

 

 

Quiz   Back to the normal random collection of questions inspired by the events that took place on this date in history or topics in the Newsletter.   Answers are at the bottom of this Newsletter.   1)    What did Captain Cook cross on this day in 1773?   2)    If you were a dissectologist what would you have a passion for?   3)    What was the name of the prison in which Toad was jailed?

 

Have a good weekend.  Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

1)   He becomes the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle 2)   Solving jigsaw puzzles 3)   Town Prison