Two weeks from now – right now – I will be sitting somewhere in the transit lounge in Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport, awaiting my connecting flight to Peru. That’s about 5,300 miles (or 8,500 kilometres) from home, which will be the furthest I have ever been from home by a long shot, beating both Kampala and a brief layover in Dallas last year – and, if things go to plan, I may well find myself even further afield before the year is out. I will also be a full five hours out of sync before I even reach my final destination, so I will need to be careful and try to acclimatise with an altered sleep schedule a few days in advance.
We are very much into the preparation phase now. I have arranged the last of my accommodations for the journey in Ollantaytambo, where I hope to end my Peruvian adventure in the peace and quiet of the Sacred Valley. I have ordered a new pair of sturdy Merrell hiking books to see me around the altiplano and beyond. I should do a preparatory pack this weekend to see if I can fit everything into my rucksack. I’m a light traveller, but the zoom lens is likely to be the largest and heaviest of the equipment I will be lugging around. The jury’s still out as to whether I should take a book with me or simply use up the last of my Audible subscription credits and download more audiobooks than I could possibly hope to finish in that time. I’m leaning toward the latter, if only because I’m not particularly good at leaving a good book behind.
I’ve been meaning to get out and about and keep practising with the lens, but my time is very limited. Last week I managed to escape for just over an hour on Friday afternoon while the sun was out, but between report-writing, lesson planning, taking my team to Oxford Schools on Saturday and being on duty almost all of Sunday, I haven’t had much luck. The Netherclay Community Wood isn’t too far from home, but it had rained a lot on Friday so I didn’t explore the woods too much, as the ground beneath my feet had become little better than a squelching quagmire. Little wonder, then, that there were so few walkers out and about.
I went looking for the water rail that I heard last week, but I didn’t see or hear it. I did disturb a kingfisher on the other side of the pond, though, and while the halcyon bird was much too fast for me, I did have more luck with a young cormorant in the momentary interlude when the winter sun deigned to show its face.
Having something incredible to look forward to always makes the Lent term – by far the hardest of all the school terms – a lot easier to bear. Last year, the knowledge that I would be spending all of three weeks in and around Spain was enough. This time, I have pushed the boat out so far that there is a very real danger that the tide will carry it away. And once it does, where will it take me? I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve caught myself exploring other destinations, other wildlife adventures, other places where I can run while I still have the light of life. This year it’s South America’s turn, but in the years to come, I would dearly like to see the rest of the world, now that the wanderlust has returned. I still harbour dreams of seeing the eerie saguaro stands of Sonora, but a number of other old ideas have started to rise to the surface, like bubbles beneath a frozen lake: KwaZulu-Natal, Kanha National Park, Svalbard and Borneo.
It may well be that in abandoning my search for Her, wherever she may be, and indulging in the thing that has always brought me the most joy, I am putting off the thing I want the most in life. It may also be that I find Her along the road. Either way, I am done waiting. The apps are drier than the Atacama these days and the conversations drier still. There is a world of light and life and joy out there and I can no longer ignore it. It is time for a change of scenery. BB x
I’m slowly starting to rebuild the life I left behind me. It’ll take a little while, but it’s starting to feel very familiar: the long walks, the eyes on swivel-stalks, the weight-training involved in swapping the zoom lens from one arm to the other. In a way, it’s like I never stopped – though it has been about fifteen years since I last did this sort of thing on the regular.
One of the first things to establish is a “patch” – that is, somewhere nearby that I can visit easily and regularly for a quick nature fix throughout the year. I’m still in the market, but I think I’ve decided upon the stretch of the River Tone that runs along Longrun Meadow and into the Netherclay Community Wood. It’s within easy walking distance and there’s plenty to see, including otters – though I dare say I’d be exceptionally lucky to find them out on a weekend wander.
The egrets around here are pretty fearless, though. The flooded banks of the Tone must be harbouring a number of small fish, because I was able to watch this one hunting for quite some time, catching a couple of tiddlers and a small eel. I wonder why great egrets are more skittish than the little and cattle egrets that have colonised so many towns and cities? Is it genetic, perhaps – or is it the memory of that obsessive slaughter for their feathers that keeps them at bay?
I added a few new locals to my “patch list” – namely, teal and buzzard – but spent most of the walk learning how best to cradle the heavy lens over a long distance. I think I’ll need a strap for the lens itself, because I don’t want to chance the weight of it putting undue strain on the camera itself.
I was looking at a tied-down weekend this week, but thanks to a couple of necessary swaps and the support of my wonderful Debating team, I worked Friday night instead and got the weekend off. Suddenly, I had a free Sunday. Coupled with the knowledge that my Railcard expired at midnight, putting a definitive end to many years of affordable train fares, I decided to put the lens through its paces in a new environment: Dawlish Warren.
I came out here at the end of October, when the sun was still shining and the beach was still packed with holidaymakers. In my memory it felt like the end of summer, but it must have been autumn, because the brants had already arrived in great numbers. They were very much in evidence today, numbering well over a hundred, and more than likely the same birds I saw back then.
Brant geese are a seafaring species of goose that spend the winter around the coasts of the British Isles, returning to their breeding grounds in the Arctic circle at the beginning of spring. Most of our geese – the dark-bellied kind – come from northern Russia and Siberia, though the odd light-bellied individual is often to be found among them, straggling over from its North American range.
In ancient times, before their migration routes were known, the people of the British Isles had no answer to explain what happened to the thousands of “burnt geese” that flocked to the coasts, saltmarshes and estuaries, only to disappear without a trace with the spring. Together with the closely-related barnacle geese – who once pulled a similar disappearing trick – they were believed to hatch from goose barnacles, which shared their colour palette. As such, being “not of flesh”, they were permitted on Christian fast-days – a practical solution in desperate times, it must be said.
It’s hard to see how anyone could have believed that old yarn about birds born from barnacles, but then again, the same people believed that swallows slept at the bottom of ponds during the winter. Sometimes we make up the most fanciful nonsense to avoid having to face the obvious reality, even when it is staring us in the face.
Out in the bay, I saw a silhouette I recognised immediately, diving and resurfacing in a small channel between the shore and a shrinking sandbank. The most common diving seabird around here is the cormorant, but in winter, there are quite a few birds that might dive beneath the surface: shags, sawbill ducks, scoters, grebes and divers. Only one of those comes close in size to the cormorant, and that particular bird holds its head level, unlike the cormorant, who swims with his bill upturned.
I didn’t need binoculars to know I had found a great northern diver – the first I’ve seen since my schooldays – and I went tearing across the beach to get a closer look.
The last time I saw one of these impressive creatures, it was far out to sea and flying east along the British Channel. I haven’t had the luxury of seeing one so close before – close enough to appreciate its terrifying red eyes, an evolutionary trait shared with grebes that filters light and helps them to see underwater.
I watched it hunting in the bay for a few minutes, before it decided to run the gauntlet of the shrinking sandbar and scour the southern shore. I counted the seconds between each dive. This one averaged out at 40 seconds, but the diver has been known to stay submerged for up to five minutes. Pretty impressive for such a small and fast-moving creature.
I made it back to Dawlish Warren’s station in plenty of time for the hourly train, but the sun was still shining and I hadn’t yet had enough, so I set out along the Warren Road to the north. The railway hugs the coastline, so the roads meanders a bit on its way north from the Warren. Eventually, after about an hour’s jaunt through the countryside, I came to the ferry town of Starcross. I decided against pushing on to the Exminster Marshes and set up shop at the station, which looks out over the estuary. I was rewarded for my patience with a family of punk-rock red-breasted mergansers, as well as a number of familiar waders probing the mudflats below: turnstones, redshanks, greenshanks and a couple of curlews.
There will always be a special place in my heart for curlews. Their mournful bubbling call was the backdrop to many a childhood adventure around Romney Marsh and the mudflats of Sandwich Bay, and followed me up into the highlands of Scotland on a couple of hiking adventures in my twenties.
Apart from that, they’re remarkably beautiful creatures, with their cryptic feathering and dark, thoughtful eyes. I’ve been very lucky with the egrets around Taunton, but I hope I can continue to observe these magnificent creatures and do justice to them with my new gizmo.
I might not get so flexible a weekend for a while now, so I’ve cashed in my chips early. But I’ll be back with more nature news in the near future, so stay tuned! BB x
Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) – River Tone. 22/2/26
On my afternoon wander along the Tone yesterday I came across an egret fishing on the concrete steps of a flow measuring station. I’m so used to the snowy white shapes of these beautiful birds in and around the rivers and fields of the English countryside that it’s sometimes hard to remember a time when these were a very rare sight indeed.
When I was not yet ten, the presence of an egret in the area was something my family or friends found newsworthy. That’s not exactly surprising. Compared to our native (and undeniably stately) grey herons, they do have an exotic look about them. Maybe it’s the silky plumes (or aigrettes) of their breeding plumage, or maybe it’s the smart yellow galoshes they seem to wear on their feet. The speed of their colonisation of the British Isles gave the Roman Empire a run for its money: by the time I was fifteen, they were already such a feature of the Kentish wetlands and saltmarshes that they had somewhat lost their star appeal, if not their lustre. They no longer triggered a rare bird alert on twitchers’ pagers up and down the country, and their names no longer appeared in bold capital letters on the “Recent Sightings” blackboards at nature reserves.
But first, some myth-busting. It’s not as though the egret is an exotic immigrant to our shores. Far from it. Various species of egrets could be found in the British Isles throughout history, before a combination of over-hunting and the insatiable demand for egret feathers wiped them out. Such was the obsession for aigrettes – which once bedecked the headwear of noble lords and ladies alike – that the little egret and its cousin, the great white egret, were driven out of much of Western Europe as well, seeking sanctuary along the sheltered shores of the Mediterranean. It wasn’t until a pioneering group of Englishwomen came together in 1889 to form the Society for the Protection of Birds (the forerunner to the cherished RSPB) that the egret’s fortunes began to change, first by petitioning powerful high-society types to eschew feathers from their wardrobe, then lobbying the government to ban them outright. It clearly caught on, because the Americans set up a similar initiative of their own over in Oregon, where the native great and snowy egrets were suffering a similar fate. Gradually, with aigrette feathers off the market, the birds began to reappear in the fields and fenlands they had once called home. It would be another hundred years before they attempted to recolonise the British Isles, but once they did, they came back in droves.
I bought a magazine once in the late 2000s that predicted the arrival of the rest of Europe’s heron and egret species in the UK as global warming made these cold islands more favourable to birds more at home in southern Europe. It wasn’t wrong. Since then, both the cattle and great white egret have secured a foothold in Britain, with all three species present in the Avalon Marshes over in the Somerset Levels. If it weren’t for the fact that I work six days out of seven – and Sunday trains and buses are awful in this part of the world – I’d be over there like a shot. Somehow, I fear the open wilds of the Avalon Marshes will have to wait until I have wheels, because after a few sums, it would actually work out cheaper for me to fly to Europe and back than to spend a night or two in Glastonbury in order to visit the Levels. Mad how that works.
Not that I’d say not to being back in Europe, of course – though I am still waiting for my temporary ban to lift, as I hit the ninety day limit last year and would very much like to go back to my grandfather’s country without having to pay a fine. I always try to keep an open mind, but sometimes, Brexit, I really do wish you hadn’t screwed up my life quite so much.
Anyway. These papers won’t mark themselves. Just thought I’d muse a little on something uplifting before getting back to the grind. BB x
Cattle Egret (Ardea ibis) – Dehesa de Abajo, Spain. 26/4/10
I’ve just come back from a wonderful five days in Scotland with some very dear friends. Apart from being a much-needed social fix, it was as good an excuse as any for a change of scenery. Unlike the rest of the UK, where it has so far managed to rain every single day since the new year began, Scotland and its particular brand of Celtic magic has contrived to turn some of that endless precipitation into flurries of snow, which still frosted the distant highlands beyond the Firth of Forth as my southbound train whisked me around the coast at Berwick. I ended up going north one day sooner than planned to tag along to a family hike in the Lomond Hills around Falkland, for which I was woefully overdressed. We popped in to Andy and Babette’s church first, so I had my Sunday best on, which wasn’t exactly the right fare for carrying a pushchair through ankle-deep mud and melted snow. Still – there’s got to be a first time for everything, right?
God – but Edinburgh is such a beautiful city. I don’t say that all that often about cities, but Edinburgh is special. If Spain doesn’t work out – and I am still holding out that it will – Edinburgh wouldn’t be a bad fallback. What a place to raise a child!
With my Peruvian adventure now just over a month away, I have started to get serious in my preparations. I have booked my first accommodation option in Cuzco, using the only dates of which I can be sure, and started to map out the various bus routes I will be taking. I have nineteen days, which isn’t nearly enough to see all that Peru has to offer, but I’ll give it a damned good try.
As I can’t be sure if I’ll return to Peru anytime soon, it occurred to me a few weeks ago that now might be the right time to invest in an upgrade to my trusty 75-300mm telephoto lens. The reliable little Nikkor lens has done a fine job for the last ten years – almost to the day – but in a country teeming with sights I have never seen before, a little more reach would be a very handy thing to have.
When I was starting out as a wildlife photographer, I used a second-hand Nikon D70 and 75-300mm lens and so I grew very accustomed to shooting with that focal length, but when I was around fourteen, my mother bought me a Sigma 150-500mm. I don’t want to think about how much it must have cost her back then (when we weren’t exactly in clover after our ruinous attempt to move to Spain), but it was one hell of an investment. Once I got the hang of the behemoth and its various quirks (notably its optimal range of 400mm, as it tended to blur beyond that range), it became nothing short of my right arm.
Goodness knows I had enough practice. Weekly sorties became routine. My homework diaries from Year 10 and 11 have a clearer record of my weekend plans than they do of any homework I might have been set. My usual haunts were scattered across East Kent: Stodmarsh, Sandwich Bay, Margate and my local patch at the Undercliff where the White Cliffs of Dover began; and sometimes further afield, to the lonely wetlands of Dungeness and the Elmley Marshes. I still find it ironic that I didn’t really get bit by the birdwatching bug until my last week living in Spain, by which point it was almost too late to appreciate what I had out there. Still, Kent was a wonderful place to learn that trade, and I even made something of a name for myself as the Young Kent Birder for the Kent Ornithological Society. That was also my first foray into blogging, as it happens – this particular endeavour is merely the successor to a record-keeping exercise that I have been working on since I was fourteen years old.
The Sigma lens came with me on many adventures, but it was absolutely invaluable when I went to work in Uganda during the first three months of my gap year. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done without it. I certainly wouldn’t have had nearly as much luck with the fish eagles, crowned cranes, tree-climbing lions and mountain gorillas as I did with the Sigma lens at my side.
Sadly, we leave some of our most cherished things behind when we grow up. When I became a man, I put away childish things, and for some reason, the Sigma lens – and the birdwatching world it had opened to me – was one of those “childish things” I put away when I left for university. Maybe I was only trying to fit in. Maybe all the time I would have spent out and about in nature was reassigned to making time for friends and rehearsals. One way or another, I sort of let go of something that had been a fundamental part of my childhood – and, if I’m being honest, my soul. I regret that, I guess.
The naturalist in me never went away. I distinctly recall keeping a quiet list of the birds I saw in a notebook while traveling around Morocco with some friends from my Arabic course. I remember also taking an unfettered delight in the sight of a sparrowhawk when it struck down a pigeon in my garden and proceeded to disembowel it in front of the kitchen window. And there was always an enormous grin on my face if and when I encountered the pair of goosanders that lived on the River Wear en route to a seminar in the morning. I think I even altered my route most days to try to see them.
After a few months in Spain during my year abroad, I used some of my Erasmus grant to buy myself a new camera. The new model – the D3200 that I have used ever since – was a budget model and thus did not come with an in-built focus motor. When I remembered the faithful Sigma and tried it out with my new kit, I realised that its days as a wildlife zoom lens were over. Let’s just say that tracking a 15cm kingfisher flying at 40kmph across the surface of a rushing river is hard enough with an autofocus-ready lens, and damned near impossible when you’re trying to catch it manually. Several years of neglect had also left it in a rusty state. While still perfectly functional, web-like fungus had grown across its inner rings, doubtless the result of its final foray in the cloud forests of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
Since then, I have done a decent job with my 75-300mm, but the glory days of wielding a mighty telephoto like a flanged mace felt like a distant memory. Until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and ordered a proper upgrade: introducing the Nikon 200-500mm AF-S. It’s not exactly the latest model – the lens went on the market in 2015, shortly before I bought the D3200 – but it is a huge step forward in terms of what I can do with my wildlife photography. I’m not really at the stage in my career where I feel I can justify splashing out on one of those titanic cannon-esque superzooms that the other Kentish birdwatchers used to lug around, but I am at the stage in my life when I want something to live for. Lady Luck is proving hard to find, so until she turns up, I’ve decided to step back in time and blow the dust off a hobby that used to have me grinning from ear to ear from week to week.
Some people find their joy in the gym or in park run. But for me, the answer is and has always been nature. Now that I am fully-armed once again – for the first time in nearly fourteen years – it’s time to get back out there and enjoy a hobby again.
Long-tailed Tit (Aegithalos caudatus), River Tone.
I still don’t have wheels of my own, so my forays will be limited until such a time as I get my hands on a driver’s license, but for now, I intend to explore my immediate area. There’s plenty to see in the corner of Somerset where I live, and the local bus and train network is pretty handy. With the forecast looking none too promising (the rain continues), I thought I’d start with a wander up and down the River Tone, so that I could dash home in case the heavens opened. Fortunately, the worst I got was a gentle mist for the first five minutes, after which I had a very dry (if muddy) two hours’ walk.
The Nikon 200-500mm is about the same length as the old Sigma, but it is both chunkier and heavier, so I found myself using the tripod grip as a handle. It also requires two spins of the barrel to extend to its full focal length (back in the day, I could wind out the Sigma to its precise maximum of 400mm in a single move), but in a major improvement on the Sigma, it loses none of its visual acuity at its full extension, so in a very real sense, I am working with a longer telephoto than I have ever operated before. I had plenty of opportunities to put it through its paces this morning with the roving flocks of passerines that were feeding along the river, and it did not disappoint, tracking the nimble movements of treecreepers, siskins, goldcrests and long-tailed tits as they hopped about between the leafless branches.
I’m a firm believer that it takes more than just an expensive camera or lens to make a decent wildlife photographer. What it really requires is a solid understanding of your subject and their fickle nature. Fortunately, I have spent most of my thirty-two years on this planet observing the world around me, so while I still can’t keep pace with the rest of my generation in many respects, I do know what I’m doing in the field of wildlife photography. I’m no professional, nor would I ever consider making this hobby into a side-hustle, but it does bring me immense joy.
Eurasian Siskin (Spinus spinus), River Tone.
It’s so good to be back. My arm is complete again. Let’s make this a year to remember! BB x
I can’t remember the last time I flew Ryanair. It’s definitely pre-Covid, but it might be even as far back as 2017, which isn’t that far off a decade ago. If memory serves, that last flight under the sign of Brian Boru’s harp was so dreadfully delayed out of Toulouse that my flatmate had to pick me up well after midnight from Sevilla Santa Justa airport – back when Sevilla was a conduit rather than a destination, nearly a lifetime ago.
But, at £15 for a flight to Madrid, I could hardly say no. It isn’t often that I can escape to Spain for less than it costs me to get to the airport. My grandfather’s country has become something of an elixir of late, and one upon which I have become heavily reliant… So here I am, once again, hightailing it out of the country less than twenty-four hours after the end of term, in search of peace, joy and healing – and three blissfully Teams-free weeks.
The train up from Taunton was absolutely packed with revellers, cackling and guffawing and generally reeking of booze, weed or the cheap, sickly stink of vape smoke. A new party seemed to jump on board at every station en route to Bristol, before the 13.18 stopped in its tracks at Weston-super-Mare and, at a signal from the station manager, disgorged the contents of its swollen stomach onto a smaller Great Western train on the opposite platform.
I tried to zone out with a copy of Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind which I had swiped off my bookshelf before I left – a hasty decision, admittedly, as I don’t tend to return the books I take on holiday, so it needed to be fiction. I got about a hundred pages in before losing interest in the plot when I realised it was marching backwards in time. I’m not the easiest to please when it comes to fiction, but I do tend to blanch pretty quickly at any kind of narrative structure that deviates from a logical chronology.
Here’s hoping my fallback, S.J. Deas’ The Royalist, is a little easier to read. Failing that, I’ve downloaded the audiobook for Dune – and there’s always Madrid’s Casa del Libro.
It’s going to be a rather full flight. There’s a large and boisterous throng now gathered here at Gate 23, most of them under the age of twenty. Either Bristol’s entire population of Spaniards are riding this flight home, or several school trips are coming back for Christmas (though I can’t see any teachers). Either way, it’s a good thing I’ve packed light, as I don’t imagine there’s going to be much room on the plane.
They may be noisy, but their language is a lot sweeter on the ear than the F-bomb-littered slurring speech of the revellers on the train. The older I get, the more I feel the sands of time slipping through my fingers. Destiny is calling me back to Spain – I must not turn my head from her. I cannot. BB x
The theme of the Commemoration Service and Prize-giving Ceremony today was Come and see. To that end, the school Chaplain chose John 1:35-51 – the one where Jesus calls together his first disciples. I think the message was intended to convey the importance of getting involved, because that’s something that our kids here really do more than anywhere else I’ve ever worked. But for me, it had a second layer. My disciples, as it were, had assembled for the first time, and delivered one of the best performances I’ve seen in thirteen years.
I have a funk band again. And I couldn’t be prouder of them.
There’s a very real danger of this entry sounding selfish. I admit it freely – it would be foolish of me to claim that my efforts with the school funk band have been entirely selfless. After all, I have wanted a funk band for thirteen years.
Ever since I left my funk band behind at the end of my schooldays, I have had a band-shaped void in my heart. Durham’s Northern Lights, African Singing and Drumming Society and the Gospel Choir were decent placeholders, as were the various choirs and house music ensembles that I’ve cobbled together over the years, but they’ve only ever been pale imitations of what I once had. The fear of cultural appropriation that came in the wake of the BLM movement put all my attempts on ice after 2020, and with the way the workload was piling up as I took on more responsibilities at work, I’d pretty much given up hope of ever giving back the magic… until a year ago, when I sent off a few job applications in a bid for some interview experience.
As soon as I heard that one of the schools I’d applied to had a functioning funk band, the die was cast. I had found what I was looking for. I would consider nowhere else.
I have always loved music. Perhaps the Spanish blood in my heart beats with its own tempo, or maybe it’s because I had two music teachers for parents. Either way, I’ve been making music since the moment I could bash a keyboard with my infant fists. School was a gauntlet of choirs, orchestras and musicals, but it wasn’t until I got involved with the Soul and Funk Band at the school over the road that I ever truly loved performing. My bandleader, a living legend by the name of Mr D, was in a very similar fix to the one I’m in now: he’d been in a band himself, found himself in teaching, and channeled his love for the music right at us, giving us one of the best experiences of my entire school career – and my life, come to think of it. If I have become a carbon copy of that man, it is not at all unintentional. When I was wrangling with teenage relationship troubles and other trivial affairs, he directed me to the microphone and gave me something to take my mind off all of the noise. I got my chance when one of the girls didn’t show up for her solo, and I took over one of the James Brown numbers. James was right: it felt good – so good. It turned me from a shy and reclusive wallflower into a confident vocalist, and eventually, the band’s frontman.
My first teaching post in Uganda set me on the path to being a teacher, heading up Public Speaking and Debating here has turned me into an orator, and Spain made me whole like nothing else could, but it was Mr D and the Soul & Funk Band that really made me the man I am today.
So yes – I have recklessly pursued my lost band for thirteen years, and now that I’ve found one, I have done everything I can to turn an already gifted bunch of musicians into a powerhouse – like we were, when we were young, but even better. But it is not just a selfish nostalgic streak on my part. It is my way of giving back what I was given, all those years ago. And maybe, just maybe, along the way, I can do for some of these kids what Mr D did for me, and set them on the path to the happiest days of their lives. BB x
I’m sitting in the rest area at Bristol Parkway Station, watching the blinking lights of cars cruise around below me in circles like so many coloured beetles in the darkness. If I’d made my original train, I’d be at my mum’s place by now. But there was an incident on the 20.35 from Bristol that the authorities had to deal with, so a twenty minute delay has turned into an hour’s setback as I missed my changeover. I’d chalk it up to some Friday night jollities from some of my ruddy-faced countrymen in the next carriage. The only highlight was the very comical collective groan from the other passengers when the announcement came through. Can I still use the term passengers? It’s been recently outlawed by National Rail, who apparently fear it sounds “too formal” – what has the world come to?
So, I’m stuck here for another half hour. I’ve wolfed down a meal deal and am now watching the world go by with my Spotify on shuffle. The holidays are here at last, so I guess it’s time to blow the dust off the blog and flex my rusty writing arm with a little exercise. I’ll use the first five songs on shuffle as a jump-off point and see where we go from there.
Stronger – Kanye West
Ah, the latter days of 2007. After largely eschewing popular music, my brother and I were simultaneously introduced to modernity with Now That’s What I Call Music! 65 around Christmas 2006, our first away from home during our short-lived attempt to up sticks and move to Spain. Maybe it was because it was a link back to the world we’d left behind, but I leapt upon the novelty, and it’s fairly safe to say that my awakening as an explorer started with that CD. I used to get almost all of my music from those Now! compilations. Thank goodness Spotify came along and broadened my horizons!
It was a good time for music, anyway. Rihanna was still pumping out hit after hit (Don’t Stop the Music had just hit the scene), Ed Sheeran was unheard of, and Kanye was famous for his beats and his bars, and not his antisemitism or his (now ex) wife’s rather large bottom. Those were happier times.
Bailando – Enrique Iglesias
Wind the clock forward around ten years. Durham’s Music Society released the theme for the summer concert (Around the World) and the Northern Lights – then in the early days of our ascendancy – hit the books to find a suitable number to fit the bill. I wasn’t anywhere near as talented as some of my peers (at least four of whom have gone on to moonlight as professional musicians since) so this was my one chance to take the reins with a song where I might be able to do something the others couldn’t – that is, singing in another language.
By that point, aged 22 and fresh from the year abroad, I was spoilt for choice. But let’s face it, it would have been a tall order to get an English a cappella group to sing the Arabic smash hit M3allem, and all the sevillanas I had committed to memory were much too demanding, even for those who could speak a little Spanish. Luckily, Enrique Iglesias was famous enough to provide a bridge between the two languages, and after some negotiation with my musical director, I managed to get Bailando onto the set. I put my heart and soul into my Grapevine arrangement, but I honestly had a lot more fun performing Bailando with the gang, not least of all on account of the choreography.
Mammati – Willie Mohlala
Somewhere at my dad’s place is a little red memory stick containing a number of MP3 files: mostly obscure Ugandan pop and folk music, with a few Dolly Parton numbers sprinkled in for a little variety. That playlist was the soundtrack to the various marathon road trips of my time in Uganda, since the full playlist was never enough to span the enormous distances we used to travel. Shazam still struggles to identify the greater part of that playlist, and since Willie Mohlala was one of the only artists labelled on the tracklist, he was one of the few to travel with me out of Africa. Him and Dolly, of course, though quite how she wound up in central Africa beats me.
AM to PM – Christina Milian
Given my guilty pleasure for early noughties R&B, I’m surprised it took me until the summer of 2024 to discover this banger. I have vivid memories of boogying to this one in a club in town with a girl I’d met on Hinge, the first of several attempts to move on from my American heartbreak. It didn’t come to anything. None of my dates have since. But I did pick up this little number, so I did manage to take something away from the experience. I’ve been using the same excuse to justify traveling more than four thousand miles to discover AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, but since that electric anthem has catapulted itself into my top ten, I’ll allow the hyperbole.
Get Me Home – Foxy Brown ft. Blackstreet
I did a Spotify audit the other day and found I’d amassed about 97 playlists. More than half of them (52, to be precise) are ones I made myself. One of them is definitely a ‘mood’ collection, staffed by Missy Elliott, Blue Six and the legendary Foxy Brown. It’s not one that gets an awful lot of airtime, but it is seriously groovy.
I Go to the Rock – Whitney Houston (with the Georgia Mass Choir)
The London Community Gospel Choir did a school visit to the girls’ school over the road when I was around fifteen. This was back before they were a big deal – and back when there was such a thing as the subject specialist initiative in schools that provided money for that sort of thing. I Go to the Rock was the song they taught us that day.
Like so many of the greats in the music industry of old, gospel was where I truly learned to love singing. It was a true release from years of staid hymnals – which I look back on fondly, but not with the same awesome power that gospel provided. It felt like singing from the deepest reaches of my soul. It’s probably no great leap to say that I wouldn’t have launched myself at the funk band if I hadn’t had that crucial awakening through gospel.
It’s a shame that global politics prevented me from sharing that pivotal joy for so many years. I will always carry that scar, I suppose. At least these days I am in a more tolerant establishment that understands the importance of offering diversity through music. I dread to think where the other road leads. I don’t doubt the talents of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, but if that’s what people like me will be limited to in years to come, my music tastes will be so much the poorer for it.
For the Love of Money – The O’Jays
Well, would you look at that. When I started writing this post, I was shivering in the upstairs waiting area at Bristol Parkway. I’m now inching closer to the rammed check-in desk at Gatwick Airport. Turns out most everyone on this flight has the same problem: directed to the check-in desk to collect their boarding pass, due to the sheer number of people on board. I could have dodged this by buying priority, maybe. But with prices up everywhere (the Alhambra visit is costing me nearly £100!) I decided to dodge the £8 priority add-on this time. That’s on me!
Money is the root of all evil – do funny things to some people. Spain is in the throes of an anti-tourist rebellion, centred on Barcelona, Mallorca and the Canary Islands. And not without reason: the tourist trade has been allowed to run rampant in some parts of the country, to the point where it has utterly destabilised life for the locals, forcing a dependence upon tourist money that only comes but a few times a year. Unlike Santa Claus, however, it doesn’t seem to be spreading much joy. Some protesters vented their frustration last year by hosing down tourists at cafés along Las Ramblas with water pistols.
I’m hoping to investigate this blight a little during my adventures over the next three weeks. I appreciate the irony of doing so as a tourist, but I’d like to think that by avoiding resorts and foreign hotels, I’m doing my part to contribute to the local economy in parts of the country that aren’t necessarily overrun. Speaking Spanish helps.
Well, ten minutes until take-off. My arm feels exercised. See you on the other side! BB x
I had my probation meeting today. No, don’t worry, it’s nothing to worry about – just the first part of the “settling in” process of the new job. It’s always good to get constructive feedback on your teaching, and even better to get positive feedback from kids, colleagues and parents alike. Emails remain the bane of my existence, my beast to be slain, and I dare to say that, had I gone into the teaching profession a hundred years ago, before the days of instant communication, I might even have been an exemplary teacher.
Most of all, however, I can’t help but find it delightfully ironic that my main piece of constructive criticism was that I still have a tendency to “say yes to everything”. Saying yes was something of a New Year’s resolution, and it’s been a bloody good one, to be honest. So far “saying yes” has given me: a new job, a short-lived but precious romance with an American beauty, a string of adventures from Paris and Prague to Poland, the chance to teach French again after several years’ oblivion, the title of Head of Debating & Public Speaking and, finally, a well-intentioned caution.
In fact, probably the only thing I’ve said no to this term was tonight’s post-carols drinks with the staff, and that was only because I’d have missed my train if I’d delayed even a minute longer.
I guess that’s just as well. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more exhausted after a Christmas term. It’s been pretty full-on, even by my standards.
I’m off to Poland tomorrow. Polish is absolutely not one of the languages I claim as part of my arsenal, so communication is going to be a bit ropey – but, hey, that’s nothing new to me. It has nothing in common at all with any of the languages I speak, so learning has been slow… on top of everything else I’ve had on this term. Sometimes I have to take a step back and think about all the plates I’m spinning at work:
Teaching French and Spanish to Years 7-13 (spanning two different exam boards for GCSE as well as A Level and the IB)
Heading up the Debating & Public Speaking events and competitions
Living on-site as a boarding house deputy and working two overnight shifts a week
Volunteering with a local school
Tenoring in the Chapel Choir and staffing any and all music trips
Attending as many home fixtures as I can to support the boys
No small wonder I’ve had no time for a relationship or driving lessons this term…! The stress of the latter might just have broken me, if I’d managed to fit my lessons in anywhere at all into my crammed schedule – which is highly unlikely. I think the only reason I managed last year was because I was six years into the job and had taught most of the kids for years, so I could walk straight from my driving lesson into teaching Year 10 GCSE Spanish without batting an eyelid.
Most rational teachers would be practically collapsing into bed tonight after a term like this one. Instead, I’m lugging two rucksacks across the country to catch an early morning flight to Warsaw, so that I can spend the first four days of the Christmas holidays in some bleak corner of Eastern Europe searching for wolves (or traces of wolves). I blame all that time spent reading The Tiger this summer. I’d be tracking Siberian tigers if I could, but I’ve traveled across the world once already this year in search of a dream, so I’m settling for an adventure a little closer to home this time.
At least it’s meant I have something to say in return when my students tell me about their Christmas plans in India, Florida and/or the Maldives. “Wolf tracking” seems to fall under the banner of decidedly unusual responses to the question “any plans for the holidays?”.
Thunderstruck is playing in the one functioning ear of my earphones. The train is fifteen minutes late but racing to make up for lost time. I’ve fired off the usual end-of-term fusillade of messages to friends and family, bursting upon the surface of my WhatsApp in two-minute intervals like an underwater volcanic vent. Old habits die hard. Thunderstruck was the great gift of my American adventure, and it’s been a real mood-lifter ever since. Unsurprisingly, it’s my most played song on Spotify this year.
I think I’ll listen to it a couple times more as the train nears its destination. I could use a boost. BB x
The October half term holiday came to a rather unorthodox end this evening with a last minute trip into town to catch a talk by celebrated English nature-writer, John Lewis-Stempel, on his latest release: England: A Natural History. It isn’t every day you get to meet people who you have grown up reading, and as this is a year for saying yes to things, why not? I came away with a signed copy and a really interesting chat with the author about the importance of names – not just the scientific names of the animals and plants around us, mind, but the old English names that are disappearing even faster than some of the creatures themselves: you might have heard of a peewit or yaffle, or possibly even a dumbledore, but would you know a bumbarrel or cuddy bear* if they were sitting in a tree in your garden? (Answers at the end!)
I’m feeling much recharged after ten days’ leave. These boarding school terms really do knock the stuffing out of you, though as I like to say, I’m happiest when I’m up to my eyeballs – it leaves less time for dwelling on things. I left it a little late for any far-flung adventures this year, but I did make it to Dartmoor a few nights back, taking advantage of the last few days of the public bus service that crosses the moors before they shut down over the winter.
Why Dartmoor? Possibly because it’s arguably easier to get to by public transport than Exmoor, which is a lot closer, but mainly because I had an insatiable itch to see the legendary Wistman’s Wood, a tiny sliver of temperate rainforest nestled deep in the heart of the national park. It popped up in a number of ghost stories I read a while back and again in Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain. The desire to see that last fragment of the Great Wood that once covered this island ended up pressing against the inside of my skull like Wistman’s own stunted trees.
I was holding out for mist and fog, but I had neither. The weather was actually remarkably pleasant for fickle Dartmoor, so instead of mirk and mystery I was treated to soft clouds and sunlight through the ancient branches; the kind of warm glow that Tolkien bestowed for a moment upon Fangorn Forest, an ancient wood of his own design. Did he pass through here, I wonder? His faithful illustrator Alan Lee certainly must have done at some point.
Just as it sits in a valley in the innermost chamber of Dartmoor’s heart, so too is Wistman’s Wood at the heart of much of Dartmoor’s folklore. It is said to be haunted by the spirit of a terrier who can still be heard scampering through the boulders, while by night it is prowled by the far more sinister wisht hounds, a local variant of the hell-hound myth that can be found across the British Isles, from the gytrash and Barghest to the Beast of Bodmin. The wisht hounds were believed to be kennelled in Wistman’s Wood by Old Crockern himself, the ancient pagan spirit of the moor whose foreboding tor rides the crest of the hills a short distance to the west of the woods.
There were no malevolent spirits during my brief stay, of course – at least, none that I could see from my perch atop a boulder on the fringes of the forest (visitors are no longer allowed to enter the wood proper, so as to protect the longevity of this sacred and truly unique ecosystem). But that is not to say the place was lifeless: quite the contrary, in fact. There was no wind, but the trees were alive with rustling leaves that turned out to be the beating of tiny wings. In the space of a single minute I clocked three species of tit (blue, great and coal), blackbirds, redwings, wrens, robins, tiny treecreepers and the truly pint-sized goldcrest, our smallest native bird. I haven’t seen a forest so alive in a long time. Even the air itself felt different, a fact that would have been obvious to all but the senseless by the thick, mossy lichen growing on every surface, a perfect natural yardstick for a healthy forest.
I spent the next five hours or so wandering in a wide arc around the surrounding moorland, following a rather makeshift path swiped from the internet the night before. I haven’t hiked around Dartmoor since I was at primary school, so I’d forgotten that, up on the moors, river crossings are often not bridges but rows of stepping stones. Which are a delightful challenge in balmy summer weather, no doubt, but something of a roadblock after the first heavy rains of autumn. I made the tactical decision to not tempt fate and so I took off boots, rolled my trousers up to my knees and waded across.
I hardly need to point out that Dartmoor’s rivers are devilishly chilly – and surprisingly deep. I was just shy of the other bank when the water came almost up to my waist. Thank goodness I’d brought a spare pair of trousers, or I’d have had a very wet hike back to the inn!
Luckily, as I crested the hills due south of Two Bridges, the sun came out to guide me home. It seemed to turn the grass to gold, in a wave that washed down the hillside until I was stranded in an ocean of golden blades. I straggled up to the Crock of Gold, a small stone-strewn vantage point where, as if on cue, a shining rainbow daubed itself across the grey sky to the north. No leprechauns on this occasion, but I got my gold one way or another.
Well, I’d better put down my proverbial pen and get some sleep. Back to work tomorrow, and another busy term awaits! BB x
*Bravo for holding out for the answers! A peewit is of course a lapwing, a yaffle is a green woodpecker and a dumbledore is a bumblebee, while cuddy bear and bumbarrel are old English names for the wren and long-tailed tit respectively! Go figure!
This morning I found myself in Taunton’s market square, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a branch of the Stand Up To Racism movement, some of whom had come from as far afield as Bristol to head off the rumoured far-right protest that had been brewing here.
It was morbid curiosity that drew me into town, I suppose. My driving instructor inadvertently tipped me off about the planned protest, and the journalist in me wanted to see events unfold for myself rather than trust in the news, which is so very hard to do these days. I had no idea that the rally I would find would be the counter-protest, nor had I planned to join in, but curiosity turned into a burning sense that the right thing to do, the right place to be, was there with the peace rally.
My great-grandparents, Mateo and Mercedes, had little love for the fascist regime under Franco. My bisabuela went to the grave convinced that the state had murdered her husband on the operating table, as his Marxist beliefs were well-known. So in a way, it felt like carrying on their work, standing up to fascism, even in a small way, some seventy years after Mateo’s demise.
Trade unionists. Socialists. Artists. Refugees. Doctors, policewomen, teachers. English, German, Indian, Cameroonian, Brazilian. Shouts of Whose streets? Our streets! Representatives from other movements jumped aboard: Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine joined the fray. Some of the speakers pulled the rally in different directions: frustration against the super-rich coorporations, against Sunak, Patel and Braverman, against the police (who, credit where credit is due, had sent a small detachment to protect the rally today, so that last speaker’s targeting was poorly judged). I couldn’t help but be reminded of Orwell’s experience in Catalunya during the Civil War, however, with so many factions within the Republican camp and our own. If the opposition did come to meet us in force, theirs would be a militia to our band of mercenaries.
The minutes turned to hours, and the opposing force that were supposed to be marching on Market Square failed to materialise. A police officer let us know that the mustering point in Hamilton Park was still empty at one o’clock, when they were supposed to have gathered in force, and a cheer went up from the crowd. An elderly Indian man embraced everyone around him, gleefully repeating “We did it! We scared them off!”.
Scared is probably the wrong word. You can’t quell that kind of resentment that easily. They also weren’t entirely invisible this morning: an armoured car sporting four Union Jacks and a large gun mounted on the roof did make three threatening laps of the square towards the start of the rally, its driver staring at us with hostile, wordless eyes, before the police chased him off. I should be grateful that’s the closest we got to any kind of danger.
I confess I don’t exercise my civil right to protest nearly as much as I should. Going to a protest in London always felt dangerous, and just getting there and back was easier said than done, what with Thameslink and Southern Rail experiencing eternal delays. So it’s nice to be able to do my part here in Taunton, while I still have time and energy to spare.
It’s now after 4pm. The Avon and Somerset police issued a statement half an hour ago that the planned protest never did take place. They also counted us – at its peak, there were sixty of us in the square, beating back the prejudice and the hate with words alone. It’s a small victory, but if such a thing can be repeated nationwide, we will have made these islands a friendlier place for those who come here to seek their destiny.
To paraphrase one of the speakers today, immigrants are the backbone of our NHS, but they prop up the country in so many other ways. They give us new perspectives, open up our small worlds to larger spheres. If we can open our hearts and our minds, we can learn so much from them. The United Kingdom is not just a name, it’s an ideal: a kingdom of people from all walks of life, working together. We are so much the richer for it.
Life doesn’t always take us in the direction we want, but it does have a very good habit of setting us back on the right path in the end. Or, in another writer’s words:
The infinite will of God is always mysterious, mercifully granting us what we need more often than what we want.
The Book of Barnabas 