Tag Archives: Retford

Treasured time with Mum in sunny Nottinghamshire

I cherish the time I spend with Mum – it’s three weeks in a small, unremarkable village in Nottinghamshire surrounded by flat fields and a few wetland nature reserves created from former sand and gravel pits. There’s not much going on which is why I love it. It’s a welcome change from my day-to-day life in Melbourne.

My focus is on Mum and settling into a gentle routine, thinking up tasty teeth-friendly meals, planning little outings and helping her with jobs around the house and garden. I noticed that being away from my desk meant I was much more fit and ‘flow-y’ plus it’s much easier looking after someone else’s place than your own. Mum thinks I am an exercise fanatic which made me laugh – of all the things I have been labelled this is not one of them!

Fanatic no, but keen to keep maintain a level of mobility and fitness, yes. I’d aim to do a good brisk walk across the fields most days, weave in some Pilates moves on the sitting room floor here and there, do my daily bone density hops (a routine I developed thanks to an article in the Times), and take every opportunity to run up and down her stairs.

I reckon going up and down the stairs is one of the reasons Mum remains as agile as she is; she can still get up and down from a chair without using her hands at nearly 95. However, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I visited in late April. She had slipped and fallen in February and, while she didn’t break any bones, she did have a nasty deep wound and narrowly avoided surgery. Since then, it’s all healed up, she’s made a complete recovery and we managed to get out and about much more than I had imagined.

We had pretty good weather (this was before the recent UK heatwave) which always helps. Keen to find some bluebells, we did short walks in two different Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust woodlands. In one, there were stands of bluebells which, even behind the deer-proof fence, dazzled with their purple blueness, and in the other, we wandered down a grassy, sun-dappled glade to a soundtrack of birdsong.  Despite her deafness, I think Mum just managed to make out the song of the chiff chaff. British birdsong is one of my happy places.  When I first moved here I brought with me a CD of British bird song, and I’d lie on my sitting room floor and let myself be transported across the miles, listening to the sounds of woodland birds at dawn.

On my walks across the fields and past the cemetery dotted with bluebells, I saw skylarks rising and falling, their distinctive trills filling the air. And I recalled my paternal grandmother telling me that the song of the yellowhammer is like “A little bit of bread and no cheese.” I’d quite often hear and see yellowhammers, thrilled to catch a glimpse of bright yellow. My brother Charlie, who came over for a night to see me, joined me on a walk and introduced me to Merlin, an App (available on six continents) which enables you to identify the songs and calls of thousands of birds. Even if you don’t see all the birds, it’s wonderful to get a sense of the diverse avian life all around you.

At Cresswell Craggs, a limestone gorge dotted with caves surrounding a lake, I saw another yellow bird. Don’t be fooled by the name, grey wagtails have a bright lemony-yellow breast – and this one was darting in and out of a cave, food in its mouth. These caves set into the cliffs were dwellings and provided shelter for nomadic humans during the last Ice Age, 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Stone tools, animal remains and Ice Age rock art have all been found here.

In glorious spring sunshine, we walked part way round the lake, and I peeked into some of the caves. Curiously, there were more yellow birds here – but these were of the plastic duck variety.  I couldn’t join the dots till a Google search informed me that the ducks are used for children’s scavenger hunts.

Mum is still very keen on her garden and gets very frustrated as her gardener is somewhat unreliable. We took matters into our own hands and went to a nursery to buy some lavender plants and an acer, all of which I planted. I am happy to hear that they are thriving and have survived the recent heat. While she’s had to give up pruning roses, just the other day she told me she was a bit stiff from doing some hoeing! I hope I can still hoe weeds at nearly 95 – mind you, it’ll probably all be done by robots by then.

On the subject of robots, at a hotel lunch with my Uncle Charles and Sarah halfway between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, we were amused that our food was transported from kitchen to table on a robot trolly – the same kind of machine with eye-like circles that was cleaning floors in Morrison’s. Thankfully humans still served us, placing our plates on the table, but it did feel a bit dystopian.

Mum has a new neighbour in the house bordering her back fence. And he kept popping up, draping himself right over Mum’s side of the fence and adjusting her climbing roses and clematis. I nicknamed him Jesus given his habit of making appearances and because he has long fairish hair and a beard. He seemed determined to cover every inch of the fence in flowers – a worthy aim – but I was tempted to tell him to get back in his box. Is it just about the plants or is he a nosey parker?

Luckily, he didn’t attend the lunch in the village hall, a fundraiser in aid of church restoration work. With four tables of eight on each side of the hall, it was well attended and well organised. There was a bar and lunch was quiche and salad followed by cheesecake.  I met people from all different walks of life and the conversation ranged from dogs and travel to retirement and conspiracy theories ––were King Charles and Trump in cahoots – just watch their body language – and covering for each other with regards to Epstein, for example?! Entertainment came via various raffles and a folksy band that made me think of that Combine Harvester song by the Wurzels – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjvffx-h2KM

Talking of the church, the bell ringers practice every Wednesday evening, and the sound is sublime. I wish I knew how to upload my – crackly – recording!

As a family we sometimes worry about Mum still driving given her age, but it was me that nearly reversed into a pensioner in the Morrison’s carpark – whoops. Luckily I was going slowly, and he rapped on the back window but still…We did a fair few shops in Morrison’s to tie in with my menu planning. How I loved cooking on the Aga – roasting veg, making soups and stewing fruit in the bottom oven, doing things in advance and keeping them warm. I roasted a chicken when my niece, husband and their two little girls came over for Sunday lunch – and the Aga did us proud.

On our last Saturday, Mum and I had a girls’ trip to Retford. With a history stretching back to the Domesday Survey of 1086, Retford is a historic market town. Sadly, today the high street is full of bargain shops, charity shops, vape shops and the like. But there’s still an attractive Georgian market square and one or two shops worth exploring.  I had my eye on the clothes in Wisteria, a small home, garden and gift shop. They obligingly got a chair for Mum so she could sit down while I paraded in and out of the changing room. A few things got the thumbs up from Mum, and she bought them for me – an early birthday present. We rounded off with lunch in the Glass Lounge, a light-filled café with a rustic vibe. A delightful day – you’re never too old to go shopping with your Mum!

Scarecrows, Sprockers and State Visits

Have you ever thought about the history of scarecrows? I hadn’t but the 12th annual Ranskill and Torworth Scarecrow Festival – a village fundraiser close to where my mother lives in Nottinghamshire – prompted me to do some research. The Egyptians were the first to make wooden scarecrows in the likeness of deities to deter the birds from eating grain. In medieval Britain children would walk through the fields throwing stones at birds raiding the crops but when the Black Plague decimated the population in 1348, there weren’t enough people to work in the fields so they made scarecrows out of straw with turnips or gourds for heads.

I always think of that song in Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat (still one of my favourite musicals of all time) Stone the Crows, the one that comes after Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream:

Well, stone the crows
This Joseph is a clever kid
Who’d have thought that 14 cows
Could mean the things
He said, they did

And who remembers Worzel Gummidge, the TV series from the 70s and 80s, based on the books by Barbara Euphan Todd with John Pertwee aka Dr Who as Worzel, the scarecrow? I’ve just read that the BBC is filming a new adaption to be screened later in the year. There’s something very lovable about a scarecrow who comes to life and befriends children, getting up to tricks and mischief.

I didn’t count the scarecrows lining the roads around the two villages but there must have been a good fifty or more covering topics ranging from humour to history, cartoon characters, fiction, fantasy and fairy tale. Mum and I hopped on Wilfreda Beehive, a 1965 London Routemaster Bus, to view the exhibits in style.

Some of my favourites included three Spitting Image-style politicians: Theresa May, Jean Claude Juncker and Jeremy Corbyn, a policeman holding a hairdryer as a speed detector and a robed figure sitting on a chair entitled Mindfulness. Positioned atop trees and hedges along the route were knights on horseback, astronauts and children’s favourites such as Peppa Pig. A lot of fun.

But there was more: amid the stalls selling hand-crafted bags and natural skincare products there was a dog show and competition with categories including Gundogs, Working Dogs and Hounds, Pedigree, Pastoral and Toy, Good Looking Boy/Girl and Most Appealing Eyes. Drawn to the spaniels, I met several Bertie lookalikes. They were, in fact, sprockers – a mix of cocker and spring spaniel. Bertie is the result (one of ten) of an accidental mating between a field spaniel and a cocker spaniel. What does make him? A focker, a flocker? The mind boggles. That same day I accompanied Mum to St Peter’s Church in nearby Clayworth, home to theTraquair Murals by renowned Scottish Arts and Crafts artist Anna Traquair (1852-1936). I reckon Mum goes more for the social connection than any deep-rooted faith. The somewhat happy clappy vicar – it was Pentecost Sunday (reminding me of our/Australia’s Pentecostal PM, Scott Morrison) – challenged us to reflect whether we were ready for God’s Kingdom on earth. The lady in the front pew assented with a vigorous YES and clapped her hands in the penultimate hymn. Mum, meanwhile, whispered all too loudly, that the service was going on way too long and she hoped there wouldn’t be yet another hymn. There was. I enjoyed a bit of time out to reflect, count my blessings (excuse the pun) and admire the fabulous murals.

Not to be defeated by the rain, we also visited Retford’s local museum housed in a handsome Georgian mansion. A mix of various private collections – china, glass etc – and displays of bygone eras, I enjoyed the Second World War Kitchen, the cabinet full of lotions, potions and medicines such as Dr MacLean’s Stomach Powder and the Victorian schoolroom. Although once a thriving market town (granted its first charter by Henry III in 1246) and then a coal-producing centre connected by a network of canals, it’s gone rather downhill and is now full of shops such as Primark and Poundstretcher.

There’ve been some afternoon naps – I’ve bagged what was Dad’s reclining chair and plugged in a little hot pad in an attempt to create a sun lounger experience. I’ve done lots of cooking and, to Mum’s delight, tried recipes that I have collected over the years with only one culinary flop so far. And all this against the backdrop of the ongoing Brexit debacle: no deal, a revised deal, a postponed deadline, proroguing Parliament, a General Election, scrapping Brexit or remaining. It’s chaos. And the way the Conservative party leader selection process is going, it looks like the UK and the US will each will be ruled by blond blusterers with bad haircuts. I met a lady on the train to London who was on the Conservative Executive Committee under Thatcher and was injured in the Brighton Hotel bombing in 1984. She knows Boris and insists that the buffoonery is all an act and that he is a shrewd player. Let’s hope she’s right!

Trump, of course, basked in the attention, pomp and ceremony surrounding his State Visit to the UK (labelling anti-Trump protests as fake news) to mark the extraordinarily emotional 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings. Britain being Britain, he was highly criticised for his sartorial faux-pas with the vest of his white-tie outfit way too long under the jacket. Then there was the errant h in his spelling of the Prince of Whales and his vicious verbal attack on the Mayor of London. By contrast, the Queen so dignified and chipper and doing her bit for that so-called special relationship between the two countries.

 

Back in Blighty

Well, I made it over here in one piece. The flight was LONG as it always is but I stuck to my plan of seeing it as a mini holiday. The food was pretty mediocre but I watched three films, a light Spanish comedy, Ocho Apellidos Vascos, Words and Pictures, a rather hard work film with Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I loved. I also continued to read Slipstream, Elizabeth Jane Howards’s autobiography. Howard, who died recently, was an author married to the naturalist Peter Scott and then, latterly, after multiple affairs with married men, to Kingsley Amis. The book is full of encounters with literary figures, artists, playwrights and the like – from Charlie Chaplin, Laurie Lee, John Betjeman, Laurens Van der Post, members of the royal family and other glitterati. The rest of the time I slept and dozed and longed to lie down. I’m normally very organised but had run around all day like a mad thing only taking Bertie to the dog sitter a few hours before I was due to leave so I was still watering my lemon tree and washing up when the taxi came. No wonder I felt a bit tense and stiff by the time I got on the plane!

I’m now back in Nottinghamshire, the county we’ve all heard of thanks to the forest-dwelling tax evader, Robin, he of the Hoodie, with my parents. I did spend some of my childhood years in Nottinghamshire, but I don’t feel any particular allegiance to it or that it’s what the Spanish call ‘mi tierra’, which, literally translated, means my homeland or my country, but on a deeper level conveys a sense of soul connection with a place.

I flew into Manchester airport, where Eddie from Mum’s village met me, along with his dear little dog Scruffy who was rescued from a Spanish village. We travelled over the Pennines (following at one point the Tour de France route) passing through wild expanses of moorland cloaked in bracken and heather, now turning brown and gold as autumn moves into winter. It was unseasonably mild and sunny and the trees look magnificent in shades of russet, copper and gold. We passed through tiny villages with names such as Tintwhistle and Stone and past fields bordered by hedgerows and dry stone walls. I’d forgotten about hedges but now I’ve seen and remembered them, I realise how much I’ve missed them! Hedges are havens for wildlife – according to the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds, Hedges may support up to 80% of British woodland birds, 50% of British mammals and 30% of butterflies.

A good native hedgerow is made up of a mix of plants such as Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Crab apple, Guelder rose, Dog rose, Wild privet, Honey suckle, Hazel, Field maple and Holly. As a child I used to look for birds’ nests in the hedges and watch the parents flying in and out until the babies flew. Even in my mother’s garden we get a great selection of birds; this morning we saw goldfinches, blue tits, robins and green finches all darting around on her bird feeders. Although Australia has a rich diversity of birds, I only seem to get mynas, an introduced species, wattle birds (they can be very noisy too) and pigeons in my Melbourne suburban garden.

Much as I love Australia, the life I have created there and all my wonderful friends, I really miss the British countryside. It’s definitely mi tierra, my spiritual home. There’s something about the soft, green, gently rolling landscape that gets under my skin; it reminds me of family walks on Sunday afternoons, picnics by rivers, bike rides along country lanes, village fetes with tombolas and teas and long summer evenings when it’s light till ten o’clock.

I read an article a few years back about Sidney Nolan who moved to England in 1955 and then to the borders of Wales where he settled in 1983. He painted Australian landscapes from afar, but also travelled widely outside Europe to Africa, China and Antarctica, returning regularly to Australia to connect with the quality of light and the shape of the trees. When people talk of homesickness, perhaps what they are really getting at is a yearning for the topography of their native country. Every time I return to English I feel like doing a Pope John Paul II and kissing the ground.

I have very intermittent internet access and so am writing this from the library in Retford near where my mother lives. It’s a small market town, worlds apart from Melbourne in every way, but I’m rather fond of it. There are no shops to speak of – not even a Marks and Spencers – but there is a great little market on Thursdays and Saturdays. On Saturday I bought a wonderful 1950s style cloche hat with a flower on the front ready for Krakow and Zurich, and a red leather collar for Bertie. The hat cost just £10 and the collar £3.50; everything seems much cheaper here. My brother tells me that the cost of living is indeed higher in Australia but so are wages. Not mine, I fear! Next time I come over I’m going to bring an empty suitcase and load up with goodies.