By ‘C’:
After
yesterday’s red skies at tea-time …
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| ‘Hurricane sun’ over Wallingford, 16 October 2017 |
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| dust from the Sahara + smoke from Iberian wildfires borne by ex-hurricane Ophelia scattering blue light |
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| ‘sunset’ conditions for photography 3 hours before actual sundown |
Today was a
date in our titular home-town, in the churchyard/nature reserve around
Wallingford’s oldest place of worship, St Leonard’s. Task: a tidy-up. Not after the storm, just a tidy-up after the
exuberant growing season.
St Leonard’s
is a shy church. The tower can be
glimpsed from Wallingford Bridge:
Approaching
from that direction, one has not to be seduced by the welcome of the first Anglican
church one comes across:
That’s St
Peter’s: now largely a concert venue; also an important place as far as
visitors from the USA are concerned, as it is the resting place of the mortal
remains of William Blackstone, one of the great & good of his day, and author
of the Commentaries on the
Laws of England (¹1765–69),
which are still consulted for guidance on principals of common law. Many a person trying to find Green Gym @ St
Leonard’s has fetched up outside St Peter’s by mistake.
If you have
confidence in your map-reading skills and continue along Thames Street, you are
eventually rewarded by the sight of the tower once more, this time peeking out above the roof-tops of the old
part of Wallingford:
It is very
difficult to get a full view of the church.
This, as you approach the point where Thames Street at last gives way to
St Leonard’s Lane, is about as close as one can get to that:
It took a little while for the whole gang to
assemble this morning. The session
leader did wonder for a moment if half the team had fetched up at the wrong
venue. The answer, however, was “the
machine”: a new payment-point at the nearby municipal car-park. Apparently there was a long queue of people,
all trying to figure out how the thing worked!
Once on site, volunteers got stuck in with a
will. Any slight delay in starting more
than made up for by speed and enthusiasm once work began. Essentially today was about cutting back
anything growing tall and unwanted, and flinging it into bags for disposal:
As one of our visitors today kindly said, we’re
“not the great and the good, but the green and the good.”
Mysterious snippets of chatter floated on the
air (“It is a graveyard after all … coming up to Hallowe’en”) as the summer’s
growth of vegetation was tidied up. This
included some expert (retired-professional) pruning of a venerable cherry tree,
which had been showing alarming signs of wanting to take over the pavement as
well as monopolising its corner of the yard:
(Note the hi-vis for operating street-side of
the wall.)
Oh, and there was an unusual job for Green
Gym: de-mossing old memorial stones which had been laid flat on the lawn
section. There was some discussion of
how best to set about this, and what tool(s) would be sufficient. But session leader need not have
worried. As the first volunteer on that
task cheerfully explained: “I’ve got a poke-y thing. I’ve got a blade-y thing. And I’ve got determination. So I should be able to make quite an impact.”
Progress was indeed made. As the inscription on the stone began to
emerge, the volunteer cheerfully reported, “I found out that someone died.” [Thou
know’st ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to
eternity.” (Hamlet I ii) – Ed.] What
was seriously uncommon about this as a Green-Gym task, was that it seemed to
involve rather a lot of sitting down …
and finished with going over the area with a
little brush:
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| “More like archaeology than Green Gym!” |
As usual at this site, the session finished
when rubbish-bags were loaded to capacity.
(Which was well full, on account of risings being dry, therefore not so
heavy.) One or two volunteers looked
around ruefully, and were more aware of what still remained to be done than of
what had been accomplished.
Here, however, is the
proof that you can see where we’ve been:
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| Before |
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| After |
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