By ‘C’:
Clocks being laboriously wound back an hour
is one good marker of the year falling back into nature-sleep-mode.
As folks used to say in the days when clocks
were rare and expensive luxuries:
At St Simon and St Jude [28 Oct – Ed.]
winter may be viewed
Yesterday morning the season was dressed in
its ‘new’ finery. Filigree frost
decorating some of the remaining foliage:
Sadly, today – Green Gym day – was “the first
really cold Green-Gym day after the summer”, but a bit of a dull day. Weather cold and grey. And not the most exciting or demanding of
tasks either: putting to bed the nature-area portion of the yard of one of
Wallingford’s town churches.
There was not that much to do compared with
previous end-of-growing-year tidies. Partly
because the summer of 2018 was so hot and dry that many of the types of plant
which otherwise threaten to overrun the churchyard, had either nodded off, or
were hanging on in the English way: in quiet desperation. And partly because repeated cutting back by
Green-Gym parties over the years is steadily weakening target species.
This meant that fewer volunteers were needed on
the main front, at the west end of the site.
Other Green-Gymmers had the chance to seek out other spots where they
could make a difference. Much of this
was painstakingly detailed work, eg gently removing ivy from trees, stonework,
etc:
As always when vegetation is cut back, there is
the occasional interesting ‘find’. What
a broken chisel was doing in the undergrowth we do not know.
If this were an episode of ‘Midsomer Murders’, there would be deep significance, even if only by way of ‘red
herring’. As it was, the artefact was
promptly presented, with all due solemnity ; ) to our Tools Officer “for sharpening”.
And this dented tin …
besides being posed for a photo-call before
being transferred to the recycling bin, prompted an animated conversation:
When I was in Australia I was really surprised that people were telling me, “Nar, you don’t wan’ to drink tha’ […]”– No, they know it’s rubbish. That’s why they export it.– The Foster’s drunk over here is brewed in Reading …– The same way it doesn’t make any commercial sense to transport soft drinks in any quantity: it’s mostly water. That’s why Coca-Cola is made in the USA, but transported in concentrate, and bottled in the country where it’ll be sold.
By 11 o’ clock – despite the fact that, for
once, we had hardly started promptly at 10:00 – most of the work was done:
 |
| Before |
 |
| After barely an hour |
In some places, that Green Gym had been could
readily be seen. In the short term, one
might not consider that the result does actually look like an improvement. One just has to have confidence that medium-
and long-term, it will be better that this patch, for instance, is not given over
to being ‘Nettle Corner’:
 |
| Before |
 |
| Done |
If the tea-crate volunteer is going to forget
the milk [and that’s something many of us
have done in our time – Ed.] a site in Wallingford town centre is a much
better place to do it than out on the Chilterns scarp. Tea-break was re-arranged for a
little later than usual, to give volunteer time to nip over to a well-known supermarket to
‘replen’.
In the remaining third of the session, some volunteers
elected to put the finishing touches to their chosen task, and then take an
early bath. It was after the official
photographer had left for home (via the well-known supermarket) that most of
the volunteers seem to have finished off lined up against a wall:
They were probably removing ivy, but why is
one of them looking so furtive? That remains a mystery!
