Love in the Time of Covid
A personal essay about family, friendships and gardening.
Dear Reader,
I missed you! Almost two weeks have passed since my last post, two weeks, but that’s not to say I haven’t been working hard writing, editing, gardening.
Love in the Time of Covid is a longform piece written whenever I’ve had the opportunity. These past few weeks M, Alfie and I have been adjusting our lives in light of Alfie dog’s heart condition (more on that very soon, and thank you so much for your good wishes.) Special thanks to
who re-stacked my post about Alfie (I never ask anyone to do this, so when it happens it means heaps in all sorts of ways.) For new subscribers here’s a link to that post:
Together with several friends and members of our village community, we’ve been helping out a neighbour while he recovered from a major operation. Pete died last Saturday after going back into hospital and we’re all devastated.
There are a number of wells in the village and I’ve been planning a small community garden around one of them with a nectar café.
“When I’m up and running again,” he’d said to me, “can I give you a hand with the well?
“That’d be grand, Pete, I could use the help.”
The day before Pete died, we shared a few text messages, he sounded positive, looking forward to coming home. I was looking forward to having a giggle with him about certain ladies in the village who were practically falling over themselves to take Pete’s beloved dog, Daisy, for a walk (now there’s a story waiting to be written.)
You’ll be with us in spirit, Pete, and we’ll talk to one another about a way we can remember you when we make the garden, perhaps with a bench or tree.
Now, because the following essay is long, if you’re reading this in your email app it may be truncated (there will be a message that says “View entire message.”) Please bear in mind that for the best reading experience you can download the Substack app on your phone (it’s free!) or look at Substack on your laptop/pc. As with all my posts, this one is free to read and nothing is hidden behind a paywall.
Best wishes,
Bee.
Love in the Time of Covid.
A personal essay about family, friendships and gardening.
I’m following a journalistic prompt instigated by
Who would like to write about late diagnosed autistics and autistic strengths and autistic joy? asks Emma Goldman-Sherman
while Journalist wants to hear about people who’ve experienced midlife trauma.Meantime, to launch my new section here on Substack, About the Garden, I’d been thinking about the garden as sanctuary. I’d drafted a piece, eight hundred words on the nose, before starting again with Emma and Joy’s curiosities in mind. A much longer piece then, but hey, no gatekeepers here on Substack, as
said recently (in one of his most excellent gatherings about how to make the most of Substack.)Monday. Three o’clock in the morning.
“Hello, is that Ez’s mum? …. My name is Christopher. I’m a paramedic …. I’m with your son …. We’re on our way to the hospital…”
That was twelve days ago, I’ve a sheet of paper sellotaped into my diary.
North Cumbria Acute Hospitals. Head Injury Instructions for Adults and Children. 11 November 2019.
I remember my legs had crumpled, heart was in my throat, Christopher, waiting for M and I in the corridor. But he was off duty, had wanted to reassure us, Ez would be okay, he’d be okay, he’d have a hangover and a nasty headache. In the ambulance, Christopher had asked Ez if he’d taken anything and Ez replied: coke.
Ez had been in a fight, or fallen over and hit his head, or both, Christopher couldn’t be sure. The people Ez was with had scarpered, but someone had called the ambulance. M and I had to wait in the waiting room while a nurse sought Ez's permission before granting us access to the ward. He’s twenty-one, you see.
The train chugs out of Euston…
… I remember Ez was out cold by the time M and I reached hospital. He was in a room of his own opposite the nurses’ station. There were bleeps and lights around his bed, there was a drip. A doctor in his fifties with circles under his eyes the colour of aubergine sat on the bed and asked us some questions.
“How long has Ez been on Fluoxetine?”
“Since October, I think. I know there’s a long waiting list, but Ez’s G.P. didn’t propose he had counselling. Just prescribed the meds. It’s not your concern, I know, but…”
I look at my phone. Sixteen thousand eight-hundred and fifty-five steps in one day, my record, this week. Lunch with a literary agent in the British Museum, cocktails with friends that evening. I’d masked my way through that day with a can-do attitude when, really, I felt tired, and I was catastrophising.
When I’d worked in London, back in the day, had I felt as hypervigilant as I did this time around? It’s not just thoughts of Ez, this is the longest time I’ve been apart from Alfie.
Eight days later. Cockermouth, Cumbria.
In 1221, King Henry III granted a charter to hold a Saturday market and, later, a Monday market in Cockermouth. The town is a simulacrum of the town I remember from 1984. That’s when I first took the place in while on holiday visiting my folks. They’d bought a dilapidated place nearby, the cottage which M and I would end up buying years later. In 1984, Cockermouth was a proper market town, a little bit scruffy, an elegantly wasted Georgian character, wig awry.
Until the early noughties, there was a livestock market where Sainsbury’s is now. Soon after came the Farmers’ Market in various incarnations (£4 for a loaf of Jewish Rye Bread, £8 for a brace of wild woodies.) By this time, shops were being painted in pale shades with funny names. Quinoa Quail, Pinkish Tofu, Beige Blah Blah. Notwithstanding my sarky thoughts and rose-tinted nostalgia, my goodness, I am happy to be here in Cockermouth on this crisp night with the people I love. It’s nearly Christmas and M and I are in the Trout Hotel with our dear friend K, his family and friends. We’re celebrating K’s fiftieth year with dinner in the restaurant.
For a time, though, sitting here in this restaurant, I can’t push away a series of intense images. Mostly, I’m seeing bright headlights. I have to blink as if driving at night when the threat of being dazzled is real. I see red lights, yellow, blue, green; and blurry parades of shops, or something, lit up in the dark. And all this time, in my head, I’m moving. Pressing my feet into the plush of the carpet, I brake.
There’s no threat here, though. And I can be myself around these people. Here’s K’s mum raising a glass, M is talking to a couple about mountain biking. Here’s K’s daughter with the widest, most beautiful smile and there’s K looking at his daughter with all the love. I bring myself back into the room, lean into K’s special occasion. Smile, smile.
Back home, I wrap my arms around Alfie. We have a long conversation about all the good things we’ve done this year.
New Year’s Day, you saw yourself in a mirror for the first time. So funny.
I couldn’t believe how handsome I am!
You’re a wonder.
Wonderful smells this year. And my first holiday ever.
Ah, Dorset. You kept saying, “are we there yet?"
Earlier this year, there had been another phone call, from Ez’s girlfriend at the time, Etta. M and I drove to the hospital in the small hours. The junior doctor told Ez, Etta, M and I about a patient the same age as he was. “We even shared the same birthday,” he said. “In fact, the patient arrived here at A&E on his birthday. This is where he died that same night. He’d taken cocaine and steroids, Ez. He died from sudden cardiac arrest.” The doctor explained that Ez has heart enlargement, sometimes seen in athletes. Athlete’s heart. “But also associated with chronic cocaine and steroid use. Your left ventricle is dilated, and that could increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrest…” I remember how Ez had argued with us repeatedly after that. “That doctor was talking rubbish …. There’s not enough evidence…”
Diary > Monday 3 February 2020. “Gutted. Andy Gill has died…”
“No cause of death has yet been announced, but they referred to him as listening to mixes for the upcoming record, whilst planning the next tour from his hospital bed.”1
Audio and Photo Diary > Friday 7 February 2020.
“I’m in Cuan and Piper’s garden for the first time. The back of their sometime farmhouse and garden faces east over divoty fields and dry stone walls to the western fells. It’s a good time to meet the garden, raw from squall, greasy with algae. I’ve to mind I don’t slip on the pathways, an uneven patchwork of different materials.
Walking the garden: sodden grass over boulder clay and mean borders (the wildlife pond is disproportionate, too.) Mature shrubs, pruned into blocky shapes, separate the lawn from a vegetable garden. Immediately outside the house, a rough concrete area runs the length of the building and serves as a patio.
Cuan sails, Piper volunteers for the RSPB and gives her time to local societies. The garden as it is now: bitty, tired, too much work for an active couple in retirement.”
Lockdown continues through spring to summer. It’s our wedding anniversary, which always has me looking at our photo albums.
I’m loved up, too, at the sight of all the colour and froth in our front garden, Rick’s garden. Here’s a cloud-pruned box, here’s a helter-skelter topiary, and here’s a mop-head hydrangea our neighbour tells us must be fifty years old. But mostly, this small space bounded by a curved fieldstone wall, is a perennial and wildflower meadow in miniature. Columbines, Foxgloves, Oxeye Daisies, Red Campion, Welsh poppies…
Ez met Lennie in the spring. Their romance blossomed online and, later, they met for the first time in our garden. I could see the both of them out there talking nonstop, aughing. They laughed all afternoon. To hear Ez laughing like that felt blissful.
Diary > Wednesday 2 September 2020.
“Loving a stream-of-consciousness song on 6Music, Kyoto, Phoebe Bridgers. She’s singing about being on tour with her band in Japan, references to an alcoholic, back home? Her dad?
Took a photo of the radio display to remind me to download the song. Looked at the photo just now, a woman in a black mask on the pavement. For a moment I’d forgotten about Covid.”
Now that we can meet in groups of six, M and I are on our way to meet Ez, Lennie, and Lennie’s mum for lunch at Lingholm.
Dorset. M, Alfie and I have pitched our tent in a meadow surrounded by ancient woodland.
We’re in Dorset to see M’s family, his mother, an octogenarian who lives independently, his sisters and their families. There has been a lengthy enquiry because M’s older brother has died, but the time or cause of his death can’t be determined. There’s no pathology. All we know is that he must’ve died in August. Because of lockdown, and because he lived alone, nobody had missed this kind and clever man, who liked to fix bicycles and motorbikes, who collected timepieces, and paraphernalia from army and navy stores. His landlord found him lying on the floor of his flat. He was sixty two.
Friday morning 10 September. At first light, I’d the sputtering, waking dream hallucinations you sometimes get between sleep and full consciousness.
A young girl in tomato red pyjamas tugs the zip’s pull, making sure the tent is closed, in case the snake returns.
It’s because we’re camping I’ve had this dream. This is the memory which triggered the dream:
We were in France. Mum had asked me to empty the teapot in the field behind the tent. I didn’t see the snake until it whipped the ground. Leaning back, as if to strike, it put its tail in its mouth and wheeled away.
“Like a bicycle wheel, and as fast as you like,” I’d said to my grandfather after that holiday, knowing he alone would keep my secret. I must’ve been nearly eight years old because Grandpa died the following year, and the winter after that, my parents separated and put our house on the market.2
“Whiplash snakes …. Move by you like a press train,” said Romany gypsy Freda Black. That was in 2012. I was on the web listening to Freda describing her experiences of snakes that “moved in cartwheels” to her friend, folk singer and folk song interpreter, Sam Lee.
On Soundcloud: Story about Cartwheel Snake - Freda Black
I’d first heard Sam, with cellist Francesca Ter-Berg, perform at a social enterprise unconference3 in London. Soon after, Sam’s debut album Ground of its Own got nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. By this time, I’d got into the stories behind the age-old songs he collected, and invited Sam and his band to play in Cumbria. Freda’s story made my heart hammer, triggering memories of what my maternal grandmother, May, had told me one summer.
That summer, I’d gone to Sussex to stay with May and her husband Horatio for the duration of the school holidays. Long divorced from my grandfather, and on her third or fourth marriage, my grandmother, with her two-headed fox furs and heavy gold jewellery, frightened and fascinated me in equal measure.
“What do you enjoy doing?” she said, while pouring coffee. “Do you take cream?”
“I’m not allowed coffee. I enjoy reading and gardening.”
I spent a lot of time in Grandma and Horatio’s wild garden, making a den, garlands, headdresses, lavender bags, rosewater. There was a boarded-up house next door with roses growing through the trees, and an air raid shelter. Horatio told me the house had been empty for years. I could explore, if I liked.
Horatio was interesting to talk to. He told me that technology was moving fast. “One day,” he said, “when you pick up a telephone, there’ll be a direct line to Saint Peter.”
“Come and see what I’m up to,” said Horatio, one afternoon. Stepping into his shed, I examined Horatio’s collection of preserved bumblebees, beetles, speckled crickets, dragonflies, mayflies. He’d made scaled-up and motorised cars, buses and motorbikes with sidecars for the insects, and talked me through the process.
Enchanted by this curious entomological sideshow, I told Grandma and Horatio I’d once seen a snake put its tail in its mouth and wheel away. I suppose I was too young to grasp that my grandmother had a reputation in our family as a fabulist and a spieler with a story for every occasion. But I remember what she said next, looking into my eyes while leaning into the table.
“Only gypsies see cartwheel snakes.”
At that moment, Grandma’s dress disappeared into the chintz wallpaper and soft furnishings. What remained, as if hovering over the table, was her powdered face, her dark eyes, white hair. Bright coloured lipstick gathered in the cracks of her lips. I remember how her breath forever smelt of coffee and chocolate mints.
“Only gypsies,” she said again, as if this would mean something to me. “Close your mouth, you look like a goldfish.”
I’ve stepped from under canvas into the day, wriggled my feet in the grass. At this early hour, I can taste the heft of the air and pay close attention. Woodland all around crackles like static, a buzzard mews overhead. There’s distant traffic hum from the trunk road that runs all the way from Guildford to Bere Regis. We’re about six miles from the sea as the crow flies, pitched at the eastern boundary of a long meadow, a grassy terrace underlaid with plateau gravel. As ever, I’m compelled to imagine the landscape across epochs of time.
This is a back-to-basics campsite. There are no electric hookups, or caravans, or motorhomes. Our host, David, transports camping gear up a steep wooded incline to the meadow in his pickup. All other vehicles remain in a small car park. The narrow road below winds through centuries old linear settlements. Across the road, in the valley beyond the ancient hedgerows, and the brick and flint cottages with thatched roofs, a river meanders through copses of trees, oozy meads and pasture.
Given the woodland, and the sensitive approach in which David cares for this place, it must be a habitat for hundreds of lifeforms. There are glow-worms, meadow grasshoppers, the only species of grasshopper that can’t fly because of their stunted wings, rare bats, deer. Yesterday, come dusk, we saw a buzzard and red kite sharing airspace while migrant and brown hawker dragonflies searched for prey just metres away from our pitch.
I’m picturing a prehistoric dragonfly with a wingspan of a buzzard or raven. I’ve experienced intense thoughts and vivid imagery about geological time and primaeval creatures for as long as I can remember. It’s a kind of grounding and a solace, I suppose. It blows my mind to think that just fifty miles from here the bedrock is Early Jurassic, formed around 140 million years earlier than the ground beneath my feet.
Peeping inside our tent, I can see M is asleep. Alfie is eager to join me. All the same, he doesn’t object when I draw the zip and head towards the woodland, to one of the old bumper-pull horse trailers converted into a composting loo. Along the way, flattened lime green shapes on the meadow bear testament to the hither and dither of a holiday season now drawing to a close. Last night, it was dark by nine thirty. We’d lit a fire by then, and enjoyed seeing everyone else’s dotted around. A few family-sized inflatable tents shone electric blue, green, red. Another bell tent like ours; a canvas tipi and three permanent yurts at the western end of the meadow were lit up by solar festoons. Everywhere, shiny tech, faux industrial and vintage-inspired. Like a festival, we’d agreed, drinking in the mellow tunes from our neighbour’s wireless speaker.
We’ve had some friendly conversations with other guests in this meadow, and in the orchard below with its bow-topped caravans and shepherd’s huts. I’ve cooed over a hand painted cocktail bar a couple from London brought along, and we’ve compared notes on portable, wood-fired pizza ovens. Unfamiliar as we are with the bells and whistles of glamping, after years of the most basic camping, some of our one-on-one talk revolves around examining our privilege. I think we’re learning to be less self-conscious, comfortable with what we enjoy. I make my way back to our tent, past spent braziers and fire bowls, past bunting and prayer flags. A woman in bright red trousers and a plum-purple top is doing the sun salutation.
A botanical artist, gardener, and author lives on the fringe of this campsite. L’s small garden wraps around her cottage. I wouldn’t dare to explore without an invitation, though cannot help but peek when passing. I see a bold, theatrical, artist’s garden; also a concentration of everything I’ve felt about gardens since way back that I didn’t have the words for then.
After listening, over and over to Freda Black’s words in 2012, I sifted through the archives for references to cartwheel snakes, cataloguing everything found so far. “The Hoop Snake,” writes a journalist for Gleanings in the Carmarthen Journal, January 1892, “is marvellous enough to have come out of a fairy story, but he lives on the earth …. By and by midsummer dries up the marshes and the woodland pools; the hill streams run low or fail altogether. Sportsmen or foresters begin to say apprehensively: Better be careful, time for hoop snakes to come whirling out of the water crazy mad.”4
“In this midsummer madness the creature curves itself till the horned tail rests just on the back of its head, and whirls out along country roads or open woodland …. the name hoop snake or cartwheel snake comes from its locomotion on these midsummer forages.”
I’ve been tracing the lives of the people who lived there, building a picture.
Mature trees bound the north, east and west of the meadow. At the western boundary, there’s a network of woodland walks under great cathedrals of beech, Monterey pine, oak. The woodland floor is spongy with leaf mould, crunchy with mast, rutted with roots. A dense understory of cherry laurel alongside the pathways reminds me that the campsite was once part of a country house estate. The house survives, it’s offices now. I’ve been tracing the lives of the people who lived there, building a picture. Alfie and I venture on a longer walk, under a girthy oak: a majestic waymarker to the steep, tree-rutted path down to the road and river beyond.
I’m singing a mishmash version of On Yonder Hill. Unlike me, Sam Lee performs a beautiful, reverent interpretation of the song, but I’ve enjoyed rooting out others. George Hanna (who learnt it from his father Joe,) Kara O’Brien, Jenna Walker with David Cambridge. It’s an old song. In 1820, the illustrator, painter, and writer William Henry Pyne, writing as Ephraim Hardcastle, references the lyrics in the Literary Gazette.5
“It is possible,” writes Steve Roud in his book Folk Song in England, “that [Pyne] was remembering genuine incidents of childhood, which would still be 1770s onwards, and if these really were his mother’s songs (she died in 1819) it could be taken as an indication that they were in circulation before that time.”6
Dusk. I’ve been in the woodland with Alfie collecting pine cones for our fire, a primitive act that makes me feel insanely happy. M has gone to collect logs.
There’s a long tradition of Wicca, here in this woodland. Natural magic.
Is there an incantation that will ensure you a long, healthy life, Alfie, no matter what the vets have said?
See how I’m all nose to the ground and excited wee-wees? I’m all about the here and now. You can learn a lot from a dog like me.
Diary > Tuesday December 8 2020.
“Went to the beach again and remembered Katie’s Ruby dog.”
You look wistful, Alfie. You okay?
She was a sweet and gentle girl.
She was.
Can we come here every day?
Sadly no.
I really like it here.
I know.
Photo Diary > Friday January 8 and Wednesday 13 January 2021
.
“Covid isn’t a thing,” he says. “You just believe everything the media tells you to believe.”
March 6. A news item pops up on my phone. It’s about a digital billboard commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing. The billboard image is a head and shoulders shot of a nurse wearing PPE and these words:
“Look them in the eyes and tell them they’re only worth an extra £3.50 a week.”7
I show the image to Ez (because, I think, he still thinks Covid is a conspiracy.) “Covid isn’t a thing,” he says. “You just believe everything the media tells you to believe.”
Wednesday 17 March 2021. At last. M, our friend George, Ez and I begin work in Cuan and Piper’s garden. I am designer, project manager and labourer. This is a first for Ez and I, working together in a garden.
Back at the cottage, Lennie has moved in with us. She’s in the final year of university, but Covid means she attends all lectures via Zoom. Covid has thwarted Lennie’s twenty-first birthday plans, too. We have a party in the cottage, the four of us. We make a homemade photo booth, gift Lennie an instant camera and make a playlist of songs by her favourite artist, Kylie Minogue.
The work in Cuan and Piper’s garden is dirty, dangerous and rewarding. We break up the concrete patio and paths with a demolition hammer, using a grub and a pickaxe to remove a layer of tightly packed dense cobblestones underneath. And then another layer. Ez wheels the cobblestones up a scaffolding plank onto M’s van, and the broken up concrete and cobbles are repurposed by the farmer next door, he’s building a new road on his farm.
M and I salvage old, thick flagstones from a local reclamation yard. We’re told they’ve been salvaged from a nearby church and we find an OS benchmark inscribed in one of them. Benchmarks were a “means of marking a height above sea level …. They can be found cut into houses, churches, bridges and many other structures.”8
Meanwhile, I can’t source any wildflower turf, there’s a waiting list: gardening in the time of Covid is a series of compromises.
May 2021. There are rows, recriminations and tears upstairs at our cottage, but I am outside, with our friend George, making our boring back yard into a courtyard garden. I want the garden to be fun, a wee bit theatrical, a refuge, tropical-looking, even. And I am outside the next afternoon when Lennie’s mum arrives to pick up Lennie and her suitcases and bin bags. We hug and cry and say our goodbyes and after Lennie and her mum have left I get back to making our garden.
Ez isn’t here. He doesn’t want to come home and be in his room without Lennie. It is better he isn’t here, he says.
The courtyard is bounded by: our cottage; a stone wall (where blackbirds like to nest in the climbing hydrangea;) a two-storey workshop (sometime in the 1920s this was a horse stable, a shed for a cart and, later, a joiner’s workshop;) and high gates.
All of the paving, most of the furniture and most of the planters in the courtyard garden came from other people’s gardens, would have ended up at the refuse tip; but M salvages almost everything, finds a new home for this and that, eventually. The wooden planks, which our friend Moray made into stable doors for the workshop, were left over from a fencing project.
Photo Diary > Tuesday 7 December 2021.
Sunday 12 December 2021.
Where does Ez’s anger come from, and his rigid views? When did they arise? And why does alcohol make some people aggressive and mean?
Ez told me that M said he’d “drawn the short straw” when we got married, that M “couldn’t wait for me to leave.”
“You contribute nothing to this family,” said Ez.
I really felt for M, standing there, bewildered. I know he knows that I know what Ez said isn’t true.
There is a special time of day, no better time of day, for me, where I can tramp before my vagaries, own them. Or, where I can push them aside. Walking with Alfie. This morning, our lives are nothing beyond ourselves and the hedgerow. As Alfie said, when we were in the Dorset woodland, you can learn a lot from a dog.
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Andy Gill, influential guitarist with Gang of Four, dies aged 64 by Ben Beaumont-Thomas Music editor. From The Guardian Saturday 01 February 2020. Online at: <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/andy-gill-influential-guitarist-with-gang-of-four-dies-aged-64>; date accessed Sunday 18 February 2024
In 2020 there were reports that Covid-19 may have reached the UK earlier than thought. “The trajectory of Gill’s illness, which took medics looking after him in January by surprise, is now familiar – sudden deterioration, low oxygen levels and organ failure. He had fallen sick after his band returned from a trip to China in late November. A short time later, his 26-year-old tour manager was taken to hospital in Leeds with a severe respiratory infection.” From The Guardian 01 June 2020 by Frances Perraudin and Matthew Weaver. Online at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/01/spate-of-possible-uk-coronavirus-cases-from-2019-come-to-light>; date accessed Sunday 25 February 2024.
I inherited the newspaper clipping along with other paperwork from my mother’s effects and transcribed it into my diary Ad Verbum:
“Considerably improved fully gas C. H. four bedroomed family house in quiet road close local shops. Spacious accomm. incl. entr. hall, two good recept. rms. (gas fires incl.) Huge fit. b’fast kit. Playroom with store and w.c. off. Four good bedrms. (one with h’basin, three with b-in robes.) Bathrm. with w.c. Integral bk. garage. Large rear gdn. and 2nd garage from private drive giving boat / caravan parking. Except. opportunity at realistic price. £11,450.”
“During Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011, UnLtd hosted the SHINE Unconference at Hub Westminster. The event was all about joining the conversation and seizing opportunities to learn from each other.” Online at <https://www.unltd.org.uk/>; date accessed Monday 26 February 2024
The Hoop Snake. Carmarthen Journal Friday January 1 1892 Online at <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/>; date accessed Sunday 13 October 2019
“The source of Jim Dixon's quote in the London Literary Gazette was William Henry Pyne (1769-1843), writing as Ephraim Hardcastle "a Cockney Greybeard". Pyne was a water colourist who took to writing a series of reminiscences and after dinner gossip in the Gazette, later published in book form as Wine and Walnuts 1823/1824. Steve Roud in Folk Song in England points out that there are reasons to doubt Pyne's veracity. Pyne/Hardcastle claimed however that his mother, Mary Craze, had sung the song to him in his childhood, having learned it in her childhood in the hamlet of Holcombe Rogus, near Tiverton in Devon, so that possibly the original song might be a Devon hunting song of the mid-18th century.” (Matthew Edwards on a thread on mudcat.org) Online at: <https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=104277>; date accessed Monday 26 February 2024
Roud, Steve. Folk Song in England (p. 281). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.
Boris Johnson faces backlash over ‘pitiful’ NHS pay offer. By Jim Pickard and Sarah Neville in London, March 6 2021. FT. Online at <https://www.ft.com/content/6ed5b838-6c7d-47ff-bc27-59f594159785>; date accessed Monday 26 February 2024
Online at <https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/benchmark-trig-pillar-whats-name>; date accessed Monday 26 February 2024
love the way you weave together photos and scraps of writing - captures a sense of fragmented memories/emotions/thoughts ✨
I am only half way through - with an imminent zoom, so will have to return to it - but what a great read, thank you. And like you, very much saddened by the death of the brilliant Andy Gill of Gof4