Spirits of the Forest

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Winter is on the retreat. It began on Tuesday, when I heard a dunnock singing from the top of one of the trees by the church. A tiny foot soldier, the herald of the advance guard that has set up camp at the edge of the Weald, singing his heart out in defiance of the lingering cold. The dawn chorus grows in strength by the day. It woke me before my alarm did yesterday. There are still a few redwings about, but it’s been a long time now since I heard the cackle of a fieldfare, and the evenings are getting lighter. Spring is still a little way off, but it is finally on its way.

I’ve been a lot more mobile these last few months. No, it’s not because I finally have a set of wheels – I don’t, and that is still very much a work in progress – but all the same, it has meant I have spent even more time in the Weald than ever before. While my head and my heart have been busy elsewhere, my eyes and ears have not taken a day off. The shifting seasons and the changes they bring have always been a major source of happiness for me, and there have been so many things to see on my weekly commutes that I’ve been pretty spoilt for choice.

More than a couple of times, I’ve looked over my shoulder to see a roe buck staring back at me. I almost walked right past a couple on my way into town yesterday, and they stood their ground even when I stopped to stare right back. They’re easy to miss at this time of year, blending seamlessly into the starving ferns and leaf-litter, and I might well have missed them more than I’ve seen them. The only obvious sign you get is when they dash off into the woods, their tails flashing white like a signal behind them. When the snow came down in December, they were only too easy to spot. I very nearly missed my train into London because I stopped to let a small herd cross the path into the woods beyond, watching them until they disappeared into the gloom. It wouldn’t be the first time.

During a cold snap like the one we had before Christmas, it isn’t uncommon to see foxes out and about during the day, since the going gets tough for pretty much everything that lives in the forest. Last weekend I saw one curled up asleep in the open beside the Gatwick stream, one eye open and trained on me as I wandered by. Not too many weeks before, I had a close encounter with a younger tod on the edge of town, which was either so accustomed to people passing by or too hungry to care that I was sitting only a few metres away. Plenty of folk passed by without so much as a sideways glance, which is understandable, I suppose – foxes aren’t universally popular for a number of reasons – but the country boy in me can’t help but stop, and look, and listen. Whether or not they’re virus vectors or poultry pilferers, foxes are undeniably beautiful creatures when you get the chance to have a good look at them.

Then there’s all the voices of the Weald. Snatches of conversations in languages at once familiar and unfamiliar. The croak of the ravens that nest somewhere in the forest. The harsh cry of a hulking grey heron as it soars above the trees. The thin rattling wheeze of a wren, and the answering snare drum of a woodpecker. It’s all I can do to keep my head facing forward on my way to and from lessons at work, lest I make my love for these things painfully obvious. In a very real sense, I’ve been playing the same game since I was a schoolboy. That makes it twice as fun, I guess.

Boy, but it feels good to be writing again. I’m out of practice. I’ll report back when I have something to report. BB x

All Change

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Autumn has come early this year. Following in the wake of the fierce heat of the hottest summer on record in the British Isles, many of the trees have started to shed their leaves almost two weeks earlier than usual. Two weeks does seem to be the number: the forest is thick with the musty air of fungus, and the colony of house martins that nest in the school have already started to muster on the roof as though they mean to depart any day now, though they are usually with us well into September. We’re in for a long winter when it comes.

The zenith of the summer stargazing season is behind us now. It’s one of the things I most look forward to about the summer, living where I do: despite the eternal glow from London to the north, the stars and the planets are surprisingly clear. Some of the summer nights this year were so hot it was possible to go out stargazing well after midnight without catching a chill, and I refamiliarised myself with the constellations: the twinkling ‘W’ of Cassiopeia; the Northern Cross; the winding enormity of Draco; and arrayed along the horizon, the bright lights of three planets: Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. It was so bright at the peak of the heatwave that I didn’t even need a torch to find my way around, thanks to the unfriendly glare of the hunter’s moon. While I couldn’t catch the planets with my camera, the Moon was easy enough.

There’s a buzzard that lives in the forest which sometimes quarters the school grounds. A few days ago I saw her from the kitchen while I was having breakfast one morning, and on a childish whim I set out with my camera in hand. I used to be rather good at stalking for a good shot, but I’m a good number of years out of practice. I did manage to get close enough to see the hawk’s eyes with my own, which was the standard I always used to hold myself to back when I was a schoolboy, before it took off over the woods.

Words can’t describe how good it feels to be back at work. Usually, the two days of staff training can feel like a gut punch from the backstage crew as the curtain is yanked back – a kind of ‘playtime’s over, now get out there and earn a crust’. But this year, after eight weeks of on-and-off isolation, it could hardly be more welcome. I’ve been chomping at the bit to get back in the classroom since the end of July at least, and finally, it’s come around again. Only the bank holiday stands between the last few hours of the summer and blissful occupation.

I popped up to London yesterday and bought myself a new suit and shoes in a hollow attempt to pave the road to success this year, but also to treat myself after the success of my first ever GCSE cohort to sit exams came out shining. But will they detract from the beard? I find that doubtful.

Sir has been known to radically change his appearance before. I shaved my head once two years back and braved the raised eyebrows of my kids for months as it took its sweet time growing back. I’ve not cultivated a beard (or a ’tache, for that matter) since my time in Jordan, now seven years ago, and despite my initial apprehensions, I have to admit it’s starting to grow on me – faster than it’s growing in, anyway. I’ve accepted the fact that it’s going to leave me looking more like one of Leif Ericsson’s men than one of Hernán Cortés’ conquistadores – I am three-quarters English, after all, and what Spanish blood I have is more than a little rubio. Still, change is good. One can get too comfortable.

I tidied the flat a bit this morning. Took some clothes to a recycling centre. Did one last shopping trip before the portcullis comes down on Tuesday and ordered a grooming kit to keep this new project under control. The writing bug bit earlier this week, as it always does just before work begins. I guess I need to be busy to be productive.

As the clock runs down, I’m enjoying a warm mug of Cola Cao (courtesy of Garcia’s on Portobello Road) and leafing through one of the oldest books in my collection: a 138-year old copy of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet & Tales of the Alhambra. The writing is wonderfully poetic, and it even smells historical. One of my students is writing a project on the Alhambra, having fallen under the same spell that I did at his age – the same magic that ensnared Irving and countless other devotees long before us. It would do me a world of good to clue up on that old obsession once again.

It’s going to be a very busy year, but I’ll write as often as I can – it’s been really therapeutic, getting back into the writing game after a long hiatus. Until the next time, dear readers! BB x

Leveret

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The heavens opened last night. The water butts, which were pretty much exhausted yesterday, were filled right up to the brim and overflowing as the rain continued long into the morning. Then the winds blew in hot from the southwest, then the skies clouded over and a chill set in. Looks like we’re back to formula with a regular English summer once again.

I read a couple of articles in The Critic today. Oxford University in a bind over a Benedictine college. Simmering anger against the rising tide of wokery. In the news, US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan against the wishes of the Chinese government, Beyonce changed the lyrics to her latest hit single after outcry against an offensive word and Big Brother announced its return. I could have added that the latter information was revealed at the end of this year’s season of Love Island, but the ambiguity is very much intentional on my part.

I quit the house for a bit, grabbing a worn Barbour coat and a pair of binoculars. Figures if I’m on the wrong side of history, I might as well look the part. Watching the swallows yesterday made me nostalgic for the long, quiet days of my childhood when I would set out into the countryside with my camera in search of nature. It was a bit warm for the Barbour, despite the clouds, but it’s a damn sight better for blending into the khaki hues of the English countryside than anything else in my wardrobe.

Lincolnshire seems to have quite a sizeable population of hares. You don’t see so many of these impressive creatures in the south-east. Being larger and more skittish than the rabbit, they don’t cope so well with how crowded it is down there. Neither the rabbit nor the hare are native to these islands. Both were brought over here by the Romans – for sport and for eating, if not for some early scientific whim. Our only native species is the mountain hare, and you’ll have to travel to the wildest parts of Great Britain and Ireland in order to find them. Ultimately, that’s neither here nor there: two thousand years have come and gone since the Romans were here, and the hares that race across the fields are by now as English as the oaks that have grown in our soil since time immemorial.

The hares I saw in the fields behind the house were only youngsters – leverets. They hadn’t developed the long and powerful back legs and enormous eyes that make adult hares so striking. They also weren’t as fleet-footed as adults, who will usually disappear in a black-and-tan dash into the middle distance long before you can get close. They let me approach further than I expected before deciding the Goldilocks line had been breached, and off they went. I followed, slowly, at a distance, and caught up with them by the sand martin colony. One hung back to watch me for a few moments before slipping through the fence and bounding after its sibling. After that, I climbed the fern-bound rise and scanned the forest for a while, listening to the wind in the trees and the buzzards calling. It feels good to be back in nature again.

When I get back home, I really must get back in the habit of spending more time in nature again. I’ve neglected this side of me for too long. At the end of the day, I love to try my hand at various things, but under all those layers is a naturalist. Life is a mosaic – you never lose who you were, or the people you’ve been at various stages of your life. You will always carry them with you in one shape or another. The largest shard in my mosaic is an earthy brown, like the soil; greenish-grey, like oak leaves; and bluish-white, like the sky. I need to go back to nature. I need to go back to being me again. BB x

They Bring the Summer

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The year is turning. Can you feel it? The light in the morning has shifted ever so slightly, but it’s noticeable. We’re past the peak, and before long the red-gold winds of autumn will be upon us. Thanks to the fierce heat we had in July, some of the trees are already wearing their russet cloaks. I shouldn’t be surprised if we’re in for a long, dry winter this year. Perhaps that’s the way of things to come, perhaps not. Time will tell.

The family of swallows that nests in the barn near the house have had a very successful year. I counted eleven of them on the wires this morning: two parents with full streamers and nine noisy youngsters whose tails have yet to grow out in full. I had to count twice because of a sand martin who seems to prefer hanging out with swallows than his own kin, who have a colony in a field half a mile down the road. There comes a time every year, usually in September, when the swallows and martins suddenly gather en masse in a noisy spectacle before setting off for the south. We’re not quite there yet, no matter how abnormal this summer’s weather has been, but it sure felt like a nod to that day this morning.

Swallows, swifts and martins – collectively known as hirundines, which might have something to do with the Latin word harundo, meaning the forked shaft of an arrow – really are some of nature’s miracles. The tiny flashes of blue and white that dance over the fields with such cheerful abandon in summer travelled around 9,700km from their wintering grounds in South Africa to get here, and in the space of a few short months they have to make the same journey all over again in reverse, this time with their young in tow. Most estimates have them traveling about 320km every day. That’s a bloody long way to go when you’re only a few months old!

This morning the family looked like they were getting some practice in for the long journey ahead. Mum and dad would sit with the youngsters on the wires for a while, chattering amongst each other while the kids preened endlessly, before suddenly taking off and wheeling about the garden with their offspring racing after them. They might have been hunting, of course, but some of the young ones were far more interested in playing keep-up with a pigeon feather, catching it and keeping it from touching the ground, the way children sometimes do with a balloon. It was really quite endearing to see.

In the past, where our swallows went each winter had us stumped. There were some truly bizarre theories floating around. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps, some thought they hibernated underground. Some thought that they slept at the bottom of deep lakes and ponds, since they spent a great deal of their time hawking over the water during the summer months. One 17th century theory, courtesy of Englishman Charles Morton, claimed the Moon as the swallows’ winter destination as the only logical explanation for their total disappearance. It sounds absurd, but it’s not so outlandish a theory when you try to imagine explaining that these tiny creatures travel further twice a year than most humans will in a lifetime. It even makes the underground hibernation theory seem plausible!

It’s an incredibly hazardous journey, and not every one of our brave swallows will make it there and back. There are all manner of dangers they have to face: sea crossings, storms, high winds, predation by hobbies (consummate swallow-catchers), not to mention human interference – some will be caught for food, and the Maltese in particular are infamous for their practice of trapping migrating birds by liming fences. And then, of course, there’s the mighty Sahara Desert. Michael Morpurgo wrote a fantastic children’s book about that journey – Dear Olly – which you should read if you want an idea.

So why travel all that way? Competition might well have something to do with it. After all, Africa has plenty of swallows of its own (without all these European swallows “comin’ over ‘ere and takin’ our jobs” etc.) and fans of Monty Python will be well aware of the fact that African swallows are non-migratory. On my travels around Uganda during the rainy season (November) back in 2012, I saw plenty of familiar-looking swallows hawking over the White Nile, but most of the birds I clocked were local species that don’t travel far from home. Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether maybe just one of the brave little birds flitting by had crossed my path sometime before, either in Spain or the south of England. How’s that for a flight of fancy! <groan>

Greater striped swallow, Ishasha Lodge (Queen Elizabeth National Park) Uganda, 18th November 2012

Swallows are remarkable creatures to watch. While we still have a few weeks left of summer, try to find a few minutes to enjoy the little winged miracles. I’m sure they do wonders for one’s mental health, but to use less clinical terms, they sure can lift one’s spirits. Today, for the first time, I saw two of the youngsters doing something I’ve never seen swallows do before: sunbathing. Plenty of birds do this kind of thing to regulate body temperature, but it’s the first time I’ve seen swallows in the act. It was just two of them who kept leaning over in the sunlight – the others were far more interested in preening, though the sand martin looked as though he wanted to get in on the action!

One swallow does not a summer make, but their departure certainly puts an end to it! If you’ve enjoyed reading my homage to our chatty little neighbours, you might find the links below worth a browse, too. Until the next time! BB x
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/great-migration-mystery
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/swallow/migration/

Spotified

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’ve just finished re-assembling my entire music collection on Spotify. It’s taken me the best part of three days, since I amassed a pretty sizeable library in the years before Spotify had pretty much everything. Time was when iTunes was where one kept all one’s digital music, ready for transport onto this or that hand-me-down iPod Shuffle, bought from a friend for £20 or so. Those early models could only store so much music, and you had to decide which 240 songs would make it. Those were trying times.

My parents grew up with mixtapes and CDs, but I belong to the generation where music went digital. If a song came out that you liked, you bought the CD, burned it onto iTunes or some other software and uploaded it directly to your device (alternatively, you could take the cheaper route and just find any one of the YouTube to MP3 converters that were occasionally dodging the censors). My first walkman – a bizarre pen-drive device that might just as easily be taken for a vape pod today – had a small collection of music, mostly hand-me-downs from my parents: Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits, Spiceworld, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This was back in 2008, and Spotify was still a few years away from hitting the big time, so most of us turned to YouTube for our music. YouTube, ever-growing, seemed to have almost everything, and I’m not afraid to admit it was a major conduit for musical discovery in those early years (and still is!).

Carving up my library into playlists has made one thing glaringly obvious: my taste in music has changed little over the years. The range of artists has certainly exploded, but the genres are almost exactly as they were in the first playlists I drew up in iTunes years ago – that is, a motley collection of Folk, Klezmer and Gypsy music, with a similar number of Classical musicians (my parents were both music teachers); a broad range of World music and edited highlights from the major Pop hits (largely selected for nostalgia purposes); and in the top spots, a virtual eternity of Soundtracks, and – constituting the greatest majority by far – Soul, Funk & Disco. The last ten years have seen Afrobeat, Hip-Hop and Flamenco occupy an increasingly large section of the library, while Rock remains miserably underrepresented (it’s quite simply a genre I’ve never really been that drawn to). What Spotify doesn’t have is the absolute mine of videogame soundtracks that I’ve also collated over the years, but perhaps that’s for the best…!

Yes, I’m a heathen because amongst the thousands of songs in my collection I haven’t got a single song by The Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, or even Bob Dylan (I feel I ought to apologise to somebody for this). But I do have every single track James Brown ever laid down (even the bad ones), a fair grasp of obscure Balkan folksongs and a burgeoning playlist of sevillanas that I am trying to learn off by heart. And thanks to Spotify’s constant suggestions, which get smarter as the playlists grow and grow, the fact that almost all of my favourite artists died a long time ago is no barrier to discovery: every week I find something new.

The music we listen to has a profound impact on who we are. Equally, I’m sure who we choose to be has an impact on the music we choose to listen to, but I’m more inclined to believe in the transformative power of music. With very few exceptions, my taste in music veers towards the upbeat. Fast-paced, feel-good numbers dominate. I wasn’t counting, but if I were to go back and have a look, I probably couldn’t find more than one or two dozen slow or sad songs amongst the thousands. Those that are there are there for a reason: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On holds the line as one of my favourite albums of all time, and Whispering Winds from Don Bluth’s The Land before Time is just there to make me cry on occasion. The reason for the lack of slow music is quite simple: I’ve always turned to music as a cure to my doldrums. I’m not one for wallowing in my sadness. If you want to conquer misery, loneliness or fear, there’s no use getting stuck in a rut. You have to face your demons head-on. I’d much rather shake off my blues with something that puts a smile on my face immediately. That’s why my most-used playlist is called Smile! (feel free to vomit)

Personal music curation is an unending process in the digital age, but Spotify is one of the few technological advancements to which I’m not afraid to be a committed disciple. A virtual library where you can find almost all the music ever produced, anytime, anywhere? Yes please! BB x

P.S. I’m a fervent believer that music should always be shared, so if your tastes align with mine, or you’re simply curious to explore, please feel free to browse the following playlists I’ve put together:

Cairo to Cape Town: A collection of African music, from Moroccan Gnawa to Highlife and Afrobeat

Liquid Red: A collection of the finest Soul & Funk music from James, Aretha, Marvin and more

Puro arte: A small but potent collection of Spanish folk music

Photo by Castorly Stock on Pexels.com

Greenheart

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’ll be frank. Summer is my least favourite season. Summer is, in the vocabulary of my students, “dead”. Most of the birdsong is over for the year, the whole nation is out and about and the holidays stretch on for what feels like forever (especially when you work in a private school). There’s a dry stasis in the air that you don’t get in the changeling months of spring and autumn and you’re too cold to notice in winter. This summer, as is tradition, I’m spending my time between watching documentaries and watching the clock. There’s not all that much else to do when you find yourself in the countryside far away from everyone you know.

There are, however, massive perks to being here. A few days visiting my parents in Lincolnshire usually throws up a chance to explore somewhere new, and though today’s ramble was more of a wander “round the back” than an adventure per se, it was a beautiful reminder that there are some things that make an English summer worth seeing.

Up on the wolds near Donington, I heard a quail. It’s been years since I heard one in this country, but once heard, you never forget. That iconic wet-my-lips call carries for miles, especially under a hot midday sun when the only other sound is the wind. It reminded me of the green riverbanks of the Dehesa del Banco, where the call of quails was just one instrument in a wetland symphony: percussive reed warblers, the accelerando snare of the corn bunting, the indescribable beauty of the bee-eater’s woodwind and zitting cisticolas going zzzzit zzzzit zzzzit overhead. It sure felt nice to be taken back there from the sunlit uplands of Lincolnshire.

The skies here are immense. The land seems to go on forever in all directions. You get a real sense of eternity in this vast corner of England. Little wonder, then, that so many Lincolnshire folk hoist the red and green county flag over cars, windows and doors. And yet, as is so often the case in England (and why I really didn’t take too well to life in Jordan), you’re never too far from a dark forest, which – admittedly – are especially peaceful places in the quiet summer months.

I tried to explain to my companions in Amman again and again the importance to me of green spaces. I think at the time I said I needed more trees, and was quite rightly told there were plenty of trees in Amman’s parks. But there’s something very special to an Englishman about the quality of light that can be found filtering through the trees in an English wood. Something about the infinite shades of green, alder branching over ash, ivy climbing up oak, a ceaseless communication from leaf to leaf, tree to tree. Little wooden fences put up by one of the country folk using fallen branches. The sound of the wind in the leaves: the way it chatters and whispers through the oak trees, and sings without syllables in the firs. Stop and listen the next time you’re near one and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s a magical feeling, standing in the dappled shade of an English forest in summer, and the loss of it in Amman broke my heart, I think. It was, perhaps, the time in my life when I stopped hating on my English heritage and came to appreciate the land where I was born – which, I think, is a stage we must all go through at some point in our lives. Not making peace with the establishment, exactly; rather, making peace with one’s roots. Learning to love the land that made you who you are.

Ten years ago today, I was spending my final childhood summer gigging with my funk band in an attempt to distract from results day. Two months later found me teaching for the very first time in a private school in East Africa. It’s been a colourful decade since then. I feel like I’ve lived around the world in my twenties: Durham, Jordan, Morocco, Sussex, Dorset, Lincolnshire and various corners of Spain. I’ve also found a real fondness for Edinburgh, reawakened my love for France and started a love affair with Italy. And while all those LinkedIn “so grateful for” posts make me want to throw up into my hands, I have to admit I’m incredibly lucky to have had such a colourful decade. I wonder where the next ten years will take me?

I hope She is out there somewhere. I never lose faith in that. And faith, as always, keeps one believing in a better tomorrow. For now, there is the English countryside and the sounds of summer. I can live with that. BB x

Home Again

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I’m back home in England. It’s a lot noisier than it was in Bayeux, but then, the summer school kids are still here. It’s a Friday night, which means an end-of-week party, curated by the team leaders. That’s what we always used to do. You can tell because the music pumping out of the hall is almost entirely hits from the 2010’s. Twenty-somethings revelling in university nostalgia at a party ostensibly for children. Every once in a while a track comes on that they all seem to know: Freed from Desire, Mme Pavoshko, the Macarena. I’m almost nostalgic for Sur ma route, ever the anthem of my summer school days. Almost.

Blimey, but it’s a long ferry ride from Caen, though. As I caught the overnight ferry on my way out on Monday, I slept through most of the journey, but this time I watched the whole thing from the seats. At first you’re riding parallel to the sloping French coast to the east, and the seabirds follow you out: pairs of scoters, heavyset black-backed gulls, solitary gannets and the odd fulmar. Then it’s nothing but sea in all directions. England, on the horizon, hides behind a wall of cloud and mist, and the sea seems to fade into the sky. There’s always at least one or two shopping containers in the distance, the lettering on their hulls so vast you can read it from miles away. In a trick of the light, an Evergreen tanker seems to float in the void between the sea and the sky.

More than once, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers crossing the Channel. The Allies riding into the jaws of death on the beaches of Normandy; and the Normans themselves, some nine hundred years prior, setting out to rewrite the history of a nation. The Conquered liberating the land of the Conqueror. There’s a poetic symmetry to that. Perhaps that’s why Normandy felt so special. It really is a history fanatic’s paradise and I couldn’t recommend the place more highly.

I really enjoyed being back in France. Toulouse was OK and Bordeaux pleasant enough, but there’s a magic in the north I’d never noticed before. It was also a pleasant reminder that I can handle myself just as capably in French as I can in Spanish, and I needed that. I should get to know that beautiful country some more over the years. Normandy was especially beautiful and I may well be back someday.

But for now, my legs could use a rest. And I could do with the sun making a return, since my feet, having been in sandals for four days, look like something you might find in a Bernard Matthew’s packet in the frozen food aisle in Tesco’s. BB x

Omaha Beach: Battlefield Forever?

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It’s easy to ask yourself why you’re bunkered down in a hostel when you’re at the point on your life where you can afford a little comfort here and there. But I stand by my decision: hostels are a fantastic way to meet people from all walks of life. And that’s what travel is all about, right?

I got talking to Gavin from Utah last night – the first American from a state that isn’t Cali or Texas that I’ve met in a long time (those two states pump out travelers like there’s no tomorrow). To have an American perspective here in Normandy was more than I could have asked for, and Ana from Austria provided a Germanic point of view – so I really scored a hat trick here!

Over dinner last night the three of us decided to check out the landing beaches today. Gavin had already booked himself onto an organised tour, but I’m nothing if not stubborn when it comes to planning my own affairs, so Ana and I improvised our own plan of attack, starting at Pointe du Hoc.

Most of Omaha Beach – one of the main landing zones for US troops during the D-Day landings – has reverted to its pre-war status as a pleasure beach, so it’s important to visit a site like Pointe du Hoc to really get a feel for how things were. The promontory is strewn with craters caused by Allied shells, some so deep you can stand in the centre of them and still be more than a head below ground. It’s hard to take it all in at once: the scarred, lunar landscape overgrown with tall grass and summer flowers, with pipits and wagtails and warblers singing their hearts out. In a cavity in one of the old gun mounts, a blackbird stood washing itself, and away to the east the mournful cries of a large colony of kittiwakes. I wonder how much of this vanished when the clouds of earth came down here, all those years ago.

The bunkers are eerie. No other word for it. They’re cavernous on the inside, with a lot more rooms than you think at first. Some of them have marks in the rear wall that can only be from stray bullets fired directly through the opening. You try not to imagine how they got there. And then there’s the coils of barbed wire that ring the cliff edge, rusted from years of exposure to the salted wind. You can’t help but take your hat off to the US Rangers for not only coming ashore under heavy fire but scaling a vertical cliff-face before launching their assault.

From Pointe du Hoc we found a track along the cliffs to take us back to Omaha Beach. It’s completely invisible on Google Maps, but reason told me there would surely be such a path, and as luck would have it, there is: a relatively new cycle track that starts at the Pointe du Hoc car park and follows the coast all the way to the beach at Vierville-sur-Mer.

It’s clearly a popular route with the locals, and there were plenty of cyclists out and about, from hobbyist Dutchmen clad in Lycra to families of sporty-looking Germans – and, of course, your classic stately monsieur paying no heed to aerodynamics in his beige jacket and jeans. We passed him at least twice (did he lap us? I think he lapped us…).

Omaha Beach was pretty busy when we got there some two hours after leaving Pointe du Hoc. Paddle boarders, bathers and dogs plied the shallows between the beach and the sandbar. Children built sandcastles and dug bunkers of their own, while parents leafed through this or that summer book. If you squinted down the coast you could almost imagine the many thousands of troops who landed on this beach nearly eighty years ago, but I get the feeling that memory is fading further and further into the distance. The tour guides bussing up and down the coast road in WW2-era jeeps look more whimsical than reverential, like taking a ride in a sedan chair. Gavin said he thought it a shame that it hadn’t been preserved more like the battlefield that it was. I’m not so sure. I think the regeneration of a battlefield is part of the healing process. This is, also, France, and having borne the brunt of the fighting in not one but two world wars in the last century – not to mention their occupation by the Nazi regime – they may well want to move on.

In any event, I wasn’t averse to a swim in the bloody waters of Omaha, if only to say I’d done it. After a two-hour hike in the sun along the cliffs, it was definitely the right thing to do. The heatwave might be over, but it’s still hot enough to dry off in a matter of minutes, so I had no concerns about swimming out to the sandbar and beyond for a bit. I’m not the best swimmer, but God, I’ve missed being in the water. It’s a pain living so near the coast and yet so far.

I didn’t think about the history as I stepped into the water. The infamous opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan didn’t flash across my eyes. I just waded in up to my waist and kicked off into the murk. As the poppies that grow on the fields of the Somme have become a symbol of remembrance, I think it’s only fair that the spirits of Omaha are also allowed to depart in peace. Their heroic struggle will never be forgotten, but the land beneath our feet is not ours to sculpt, no matter how hard we try. It was here before us and will be here long after we’re gone. To see Omaha and to stand where they stood is enough, I think. And that’s my two cents on the matter. BB x

The Weatherman Cometh

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It starts with an ominous grey sky to the west. The patchwork of fluffy summer clouds that have been insulating the leftover heat from three scorching days suddenly drops into a void the colour of slate, matching the roof of Bayeux’s cathedral almost exactly. A man in a beret watches the skies; a French family whose children seem to tan faster down the years savour their two-scoop ice creams; a boy and his mother walk their five beagles.

The first raindrop falls on the back of my neck like a kiss. Cool, swift, sweet. I’m sitting on a bollard, sketching. I wait for another. It lands on my arm. Almost instantly a third lands on my sketchbook, narrowly missing the moustachioed gentleman I’ve been sketching. I snap the book shut and watch the tourists scattering as the rain comes down: the French dignified beneath their umbrellas, the Dutch unflinching behind their cameras, the Americans in a mad dash. I think about taking a slow walk back to the hostel to savour the blessed rain after so many days of sun. I’m no further than a few feet around the corner of the cathedral when the heavens open.

I concede defeat to the tempest and join a small but growing crowd seeking shelter in the ancient stone doorway of Odo’s cathedral. The beagle-fanciers are here, along with a cross-section of Bayeux’s tourists. The rain comes down in sheets, hammering the cobblestones like a snare drum, and then a sudden flash and a rolling crash from the bass drum up in the sky. “On est bien dessous, hein?” remarks a Frenchwoman with short-cropped hair and round glasses. A boy with long eyelashes runs in and out of the rain in his yellow anorak, singing the chorus of the Wellerman shanty over and over.

A solitary American standing nearby stares at his phone in disbelief and growls. It sounds like he’s frustrated at a video game, but as he starts to verbalise his frustration it’s obvious he’s checking a weather app. “You’re kidding me, I’ve got to wait half an hour? God, you’ve got to be kidding me. Come on!”. He growls again. And again, louder this time. Some of the other tourists back away. “Hrrrrrnnnn!” The grunts and growls sound uncannily like a bull, giving fair warning before a charge. “END! NOW!!!” A couple of startled jumps from the crowd. By the looks on their faces, they’re weighing up whether to tell him it’s futile to attempt to command the skies, or whether it’s more futile still to reason with a man so blatantly trying to do just that. As a result, nobody intervenes, and Yankee Canute continues to defy the elements, bellowing at the clouds with increasing fury. “Hmmmmmhnnn, CAHM AAAAHN. When’s it gonna EHYAAND? GAAHD, I don’t have TAAM for this SHIIYET”.

The growling and grumbling is briefly cancelled out by another clash of thunder. “Hurry up, END, NOW! Cahm aaahhn, pleeez, end now! Why does it have to do this during the day, it should do this at night!” – (a fair point here, it was unbearably hot last night) – “Gahd, I don’t have time for this shit!”.

I slip inside the cathedral to escape the verbal artillery for just a moment. Bayeux’s cathedral survived intact the last time it came under fire from an American battery, so I figure it’s a safe bet. The muted thunder beyond the stone walls sounds strangely beautiful, and the grey skies filter through the stained glass in hopeful technicolour. The aisles are packed with a colourful array of tourists waiting out the storm; a phoney faithful glued to their phones, waiting to proceed on their pilgrimage to the crêperies outside – a combination of American flags and English spoken here signs were drawing in the crowds earlier. Staring down at the sightseers, a gargoyle pulls his mouth into a sneer, tongue out, deriding a thousand years of peasants, pilgrims and pensioners.

Outside, the rest of the gargoyles are doing their job, spewing rainwater from their mouths onto the streets below. For the first time they look complete, as though the gaping mouths were merely voids waiting to be turned into channels. A father points them out to his daughter, one hand gesturing, the other on her ear as our frustrated Yankee Canute swears blue murder at the sky.

The streets of Bayeux shine under the whitening sky. Umbrellas and ponchos have been magicked out of the air (and some straight out of souvenir shops). The Wednesday market is being dismantled. The fishmonger reclaims the last two skate wings and a Norman bookseller voices a quiet complaint to the heavens as he stacks his pulped collection of second-hand books: “aujourd’hui, précisement?”.

The storm has passed and the sun has returned with a milder temperament, his midsummer fury sated at last. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off. Find a park, do some reading, and clue up on the bus times for tomorrow’s expedition to the coast. A bientot! BB x

William the Conqueror’s Invincible Thigh

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I woke up on a boat this morning. That happened. Originally I was inclined to arrive later today and save on the expense of booking a cabin on the overnight ferry, but how often do you get to sleep on a boat? I’m glad I did – the long faces on most of the other foot passengers spoke volumes of a long, sleepless night on deck. I just caught the sunrise as I went up on deck, by which point we had almost arrived. No dolphins or whales on this journey – maybe next time!

Attention, mes amis! The ferry serves Caen, but it docks in at Ouistreham, a small village some 17km north of Caen. The shuttle bus into Caen was a little deceptive, since despite saying CAEN in block capitals it only went as far as passport control. The real bus stop for Caen (Ouistreham Port) is a few minutes’ walk into Ouistreham from the port. Easy enough to find but worth knowing. The price is (at the time of writing) 1.80€ for a one-way trip. It’s also completely incompatible with the early ferry, arriving some twenty minutes after it departs, so I guess I’ll have to shell out for a taxi on Friday.

Check-in at my hostel in Bayeux wasn’t open until 4 in the afternoon, so with that early start I had quite a few hours to kill – on what was gearing up to be the hottest day, not just of the year, but in living memory. It was already pushing thirty by 10 o’clock. I took refuge in the shadow of Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, where William the Conqueror was laid to rest a little under nine hundred years ago. I thought I’d picked a good spot, and I pretty much had the shade to myself for the best part of an hour until a window cleaner turned up in a monstrous contraption spitting and whirring and grinding and clunking. It took him and his two companions all of five minutes to calibrate the machine into the right spot so he could start cleaning, by which point all the office workers within had long since pulled down the blinds. Why a ladder couldn’t get the job done beats me.

William wasn’t in the Abbaye itself. The 5€ entry fee through the Hotel de Ville revealed a beautiful cloister and an interesting exhibition on the Allied liberation of Caen (after nearly levelling the place first), but no William. A mini-map within showed he was in the adjacent cathedral (go figure), which is free to enter.

But, as it turns out, he wasn’t there either. Well – not all of him. During the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s, the abbey was sacked and William’s bones were exhumed and scattered. Only his thigh bone remains, and that in itself a miracle: less than two hundred years after his tomb was restored, it was sacked again by the unscrupulous revolutionaries. Napoleon’s generation certainly didn’t seem to hold heritage in high regard: you may have heard of Bonaparte’s foiled attempt to blow up the Pyramids, but he also ordered the demolition of various ancient wonders in Spain, including the Alhambra. Even the mighty CID’s tomb was ransacked by Napoleon’s men, and though more of his bones ultimately came home than poor William, some of them traveled a very long way. One apparently ended up in Russia, where it must have been carried as a trophy of war by a soldier with an eye for relics…!

William’s tombstone reads ‘here lies the Invincible William the Conqueror’. Somewhere under that slab is an invincible thigh bone. It’s definitely more invincible than my thighs, which are feeling very vincible in this heat… if that’s even a word.

Outside, it’s sweltering. It felt like walking into a wall of heat. By the time I reached Bayeux around midday I didn’t have the energy to anything beyond finding a shaded spot and collapsing. Fortunately Bayeux was spared the inferno enveloping most of Europe, and a nearby nature reserve afforded both shade, a cooling river and a bird-hide to lay down in relative comfort. I must have passed out several times, I think.

*Alternative* sleeping arrangements

Thank God the worst of it is over. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It couldn’t be more welcome. BB x