Lincolnshire

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

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

That Smell

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Mum and Dad are away on holiday so I’ve gone up north to look after the house while they’re away. Living as far out as they do, I had to catch the bus this time, as the nearest train station is easily a few hours away on foot (with feet being the only reliable form of transport since neither my brother or I can drive).

Arriving in Lincolnshire sometimes feels like stepping back in time. It’s doubly noticeable coming up from Croydon, watching the diversity metronome swing violently to one side. When you live and work in such a cosmopolitan environment, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are still great parts of this island that are – to take Wilfred Owen out of context – forever England. I think we all need reminding of that from time to time. A lot of us Southerners fall into the trap of thinking the rest of the country thinks like us. I still believe that’s how Brexit caught so many of us off-guard. We weren’t looking or listening hard enough to the folks north of the M25.

It’s been a while since I caught a Stagecoach bus. I used to ride them all the time when I was a teenager; but then, both my parents had full-time jobs, and Kent is pretty self-contained. So it was a trip down memory lane – sort of.

The guy sitting next to me falls asleep in seconds. He’s smartly dressed but his body odour is quite overpowering. Between his sweaty cologne and the leather-clad goth girl puffing sickeningly sweet clouds of vape smoke overhead in the seat in front, I’m reminded my sense of smell isn’t as awful as I always say it is.

Three lads sit with their feet up across one extra seat each at the back of the bus. There must be an unwritten rule that stakes out the rear of any vehicle as the sole dominion of teenage boys, because I’ve never seen any other setup on my travels. One of them is pissed about how there’s nothing to do where he lives, and how he knows nobody, and how not being able to drive doesn’t help. He could be voicing my own concerns, if I were really that bothered about settling for my own company. His mates tell him to come along on a night out, and if he doesn’t have friends out there, “fuckin’ make friends, mate”. A wingman’s life was never easier.

A man gets on at the prison gates just outside the city in matching grey trackies and a baseball hat that’s too small for his head. His eyes are large, dark and staring – it takes me too long to realise it’s his dilated pupils that give him that intense look. A blunt tucked behind his ear smoulders ever so slightly. Now the smell of wet grass (or fox, as I always assumed) mingles with the BO and the indiscernible fruit-something of the vape clouds. He cracks open a lager and the bus driver stops by a bin and tells him his booze needs to go in that bin, mate. You what, he says. That bin. Can’t drink on here. Roll-Up Man gets up – alright, jes gimme a minute – wanders over to the door and necks the entire can. A lady near the front applauds. He ain’t wastin’ that can! Roll-Up Man returns with hands up in mock surrender, or it could be triumph. It’s hard to tell.

Lord Vaper continues to drag on her death stick. Given that she’s the third passenger on the bus to ignore the no smoking sign, I wonder whether anyone can read, or whether they just don’t care.

The Marvel run continues tonight with Doctor Strange. Watched Civil War for the first time last night and actually really enjoyed it. Yeah, I know, I missed the hype of watching them as they came out, but the MCU truly belongs to the generation just after mine, I think. I grew up with Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and that remains the gold standard as far as superhero movies go. Perhaps I’ll have changed my tune by the time I get to Endgame. Somehow I doubt it. Like the Joker, I guess I just can’t let go of Batsy. BB x

P.S. I wanted to give the title of this post the full nod to Sonallah Ibrahim’s seminal 1966 novella, That Smell and Notes from Prison, but some references are just far too pretentious to shoehorn in – especially when it’s about a bus ride out of Lincoln City.