Water Worlds

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

I MUST HAVE BEEN NO OLDER than five when I noticed the rain rushing down the driveway in my mother’s garden at such a volume that it could not be absorbed or carried away quickly enough to keep it from flowing into our garage. In Bermuda we had sudden rainstorms, often with extraordinarily violent thunder and lightning, and if the Island had been having one of its frequent droughts, the ground would be packed down as hard as concrete. All moisture would puddle and flow, absorption might happen gradually, and saturation would take a great deal of time.

And I crouched in my bare feet, in my Bermuda shorts, in our garage as several inches of water collected on the rough cement floor. The water, I recall rather well, was warm, and there were bits of sand in it. It had a slight texture besides that of pure flowing water. I found some pieces of wood, remnants from the roof beams of the garage (it had been only recently constructed to replace an open trellis with stephanotis vines on it that did nothing to protect the car), and tried to get them floating. Some were too heavy, some too thick, to sail about easily on my own private inland sea. Some, however, became ships and boats.

As the rainwater continued to drain into the garage, the currents within it would move my wooden ships about. No need for me to guide them with my hands. Like some sort of lazy god I could watch my creation work itself out. Some of the ships sailed safely to ports within the garage, others snagged on the uneven parts of the floor, and a few were carried right out of the garage door and down the driveway to the lower road behind our house.

Many of my Eldridge relatives have served in the Royal Navy. A cousin is an officer in what remains of Britain’s navy at this moment. It is worth noting he was on HMS Manchester last summer when she was sailing off the shores of Bermuda during Hurricane Igor, in case the Island needed help when the storm had passed. As it happened, no help was requested, and one assumes none was required.

The closest I have come to boating was a spell of rowing a relative’s punt (called Swampy) in Hamilton Harbour on a weekend. My plan was to build up my scrawny body. It did not help.

On my travels I have seen a good deal of water, salt and fresh. I have sailed across Lake Michigan on a car ferry to Beaver Island. I have driven up a fairly shallow stream in the mountains above Salt Lake City in a Ford Bronco SUV, which was hardly kind to Nature. One of the most incredible rainstorms I have witnessed was in Hurricane, Utah, in about 1994. That is a desert area, usually dry as a bone, where tumbleweeds rolled down the gravel-coated Main Street and orange dust blew about and coated everything the colour of the landscapes in John Wayne’s western movies. One afternoon I was in a car with a friend at the junction of Main and State Street and a microburst opened above us. We pulled over to the side of the road and slowly moved into the parking area outside a Taco Time fast food outlet. The world vanished as the rain poured onto the Hurricane Valley, and in a minute there was a foot of water on the roads and low-lying areas in the centre of town where we were attempting to shelter. If the water had been much deeper it might have been a flash flood, but it was able to move quickly enough to even lower ground at the south side of town. Still, it was rather exciting, rather frightening.

Having lived through several major hurricanes in Bermuda, complete with tornados and water-spouts and deluging rain, I can answer the frequent questions I get regarding the Bermuda Triangle with my general theory that it just happens to be a part of the western Atlantic that has frequent and often sudden storms, and it is a busy area for shipping and air travel. I’m almost certain that there are no more UFOs near Bermuda than there are anywhere else. Wind and rain happen, waves happen, things go down.

Last Wednesday we had a spectacular day. It was so bright and sunny, and fairly warm, that we took the dogs for a walk by the River Coquet. We even sat in the sun and talked about the sparkling light on the water in the River and out towards the Harbour entrance. The dogs ran about at the end of their longest retractable leads and returned with clean feet. The bank of the River has been under ice, snow or mud since last autumn. This was the first walk there since then.

Since Wednesday, we have had steady rain. It is snowing on higher ground, but we’ve only had some sleet on the coast. Howling winds. Dark skies. Wet footprints (dog and man size) in the hallway.

To summarise: Summer of 2011 was on 16 February this year, and it was lovely.

This afternoon we went to lunch at The Fleece Inn up in Alnwick. The landlord opened the doors at noon and had a coal fire going. On a cold, rainy day this was appreciated. It is an old pub, full of character. It happens to have a men’s toilet (the Americans might call it a restroom) for customers only (reads the sign) that is the most hideous public bog I have ever come across. The walls seem to be running with moisture, the urinal is along two walls with a stinking trough at one’s feet, and the red-tile floor is puddled. The single cubicle does not lock. I am rather surprised that a business would present itself so badly, even if it may be that most of the lads who use the toilet are off their faces and cannot focus on anything at all. I can only guess that the toilet is so ancient that it is “listed” and cannot be renovated or replaced; it is caught up, trapped, in history. I like history well enough, but I don’t care to paddle across a toilet’s floor to reach a smelly urinal. To use the cubicle, to actually sit on the commode, one would have to push on the door with one’s feet to keep it shut while one did one’s business.

I recommend The Fleece Inn, but do relieve yourself before you leave home.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts,

or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

It is a little after five o’clock in the evening. I woke twelve hours ago having a peculiar dream about North and South Korea. In my dream the North had finally lobbed some sort of nuclear bomb at the South. It has not been mentioned during the day, I’ve not watched the telly though. I imagine the booming wind and the rattling sleet on my windows at daybreak may have turned my dreams to thoughts of war, or my thoughts of war to dreams.

There's high, and there's high, and to get really high -

I mean so high that you can walk on the water,

that high-that's where I'm going.
George Harrison (1943-2001)

It’s full moon just now and the water in the Estuary is as high as I have ever seen it, perhaps a foot more and the road to Warkworth will be awash. The pastures on the other side of the road were puddled this morning, and are pond-like tonight.

The sky is dark as I write this, the rain is merciless. I know there’s a spring and summer out there. The snowdrops are up and blossoming, the daffodils are several inches high. We don’t really do crocuses up here, not the way they do in, say, Hyde Park. We will have wild bluebells and then the cultured plants. I usually invest in daisy-like seedlings and petunias. Most years I am inundated with flowers on my side of the courtyard.

One has to remember all that when it is this grim. In this Water World.

An Amble Spring into Summer

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
William Shakespeare (Henry VIII. Act III, Scene I)

WE WHO NOW IN ENGLAND LIVE have had the coldest winter in a decade, and the snowiest in about twenty years. Even Amble by the Sea, which tends not to encourage winter precipitation to linger, had hard frosts, ice, hail and considerable snow settling for days at a time. Fortunately, Cailean discovered that he liked the snow, taking great bites of it and flinging it over his shoulders as he ploughed across the courtyard.

My mood this past winter has been upbeat, sometimes a bit too "high" with nights spent unable to sleep for the rush of adrenalin and thoughts. At extremes or not, the cold weather season has passed quickly, quickly by the hour and day, quickly by the week and month. The bare courtyard, sometimes under a fresh, white cover-all, hardly had time to pull my mood down this year.

For the previous two years the garden furniture was stored inside, making the space really bleak. This year the table and benches braved the weather (and came out looking just fine having had a coat of varnish in 2008) and there's something attractive about furniture out-of-doors out-of-season: it becomes a kind of artwork, a sculpture, buffeted and coated by the elements and coloured differently in the dim winter light.




One might play music to welcome the spring, melodies that rise and songs that soar. The bulbs, in the courtyard and all over Amble, planted who knows when and by whom, started pushing through when frosts remained a nightly reminder that the winter does tend to follow the calendar. Snowdrops and crocuses, followed by tulips and hyacinths and daffodils, such a madness of daffodils that even a Wordsworth (and certainly a Midas) could tire of so much gold. The bluebells are starting to flower now, and will be fulfilled in about a fortnight, by which time the trees above them will form a thick, green canopy. There will be bluebell woods for people to admire. We have a small but lovely one just down the hill at the entrance to the Amble Marina. There are other more-wild flowers: dandelions, thistles, daisies. There are mushrooms (or are they toadstools?).

In the sunshine, I'm now taking Cailean to the Marina and we lie on the grass and watch the world wander past. Boats in the Harbour, people and dogs walking along the edge of the River, boys playing cricket on the meadow, RAF bombers down from Scotland doing dummy runs on Amble, microlight aircraft and the occasional antique aeroplane, it might be a Spitfire. Birds land and scatter. There are robins darting in and out of the pine trees, and songbirds in the hedgerows. Our geese are passengers on the way to Iceland and Greenland and Canada's Hudson Bay. The seagulls, so many varieties, linger.



This year I decided to invest about £100 in planters, soil and seedlings. It does not cost a great deal to put on quite a show by my kitchen door. My neighbours put hanging baskets in the courtyard and the pots and planters there have perennials that have not failed in four years now. There will be roses in the summer, clematis vines and sweet peas will scramble up the walls. Birds are already coming to the hanging feeders and once the flowerbeds are thick with growth there will be blackbirds nesting. Apparently we have no cats, the blackbirds have set up home only a foot from the ground for several years.

In my planters I have geraniums, nasturtiums, carnations, pinks, azaleas, vine petunias and regular petunias, marigolds and pansies, asters, cornflowers and cosmos. I also have three blueberry bushes: sticks at the moment, but one year they may be fruitful. The catalogue pointed out that blueberry bushes have lovely foliage in the autumn.

Last week the swallows returned to Amble by the Sea. Not all of them, we'll have hundreds by mid-summer, but a pair have moved into the ruined garage behind the flat. Might they be a pair that nested there a year ago? We had three tenancies in 2008. The new arrivals ignored Cailean as we sat outside and watched. Cailean is not a bird-dog, today we had four mallard ducks touch down near the courtyard entrance and Cailean yawned. I found some bread for the ducks (and dozens of gulls and jackdaws that suddenly joined them) and they were not at all concerned at the small dog sniffing around.

I've got a deck chair and a chaise-lounge, and I've already had a few late afternoons baking in the sun. It's a long-term tan-plan at less than 20˚C, but in the courtyard when the wind is reasonable, one can redden up quite nicely in a few hours. I like to read in the sun. Cailean lounges as well, usually along my legs on the chaise. I drink coffee outside just now when it's not too hot (I look forward to days with iced-tea). Coffee tastes so much better out-of-doors.

This being England, I'm writing my report on sunshine, flowers and birds on a chilly, rainy morning. There's a stiff breeze coming off the North Sea. The four mallards have moved on, bird-wise: only some damp jackdaws are sitting on the garden walls. It will soon be time for rough winds to shake the darling buds of May. Cailean has gone back to bed; he's burrowed under the duvet. Dreaming of badgers and bunnies, perhaps.



There's something very pleasant about having a dozen or more planters ready for any burst of sunshine. I can shift into High Summer at a moment's notice. My courtyard is a place of refuge from the Swine Flu, AIG Corporate Monsters, Recession, Euro-Politics and Hooliganism. Let there be sun on the face and notes by Orpheus.

High Tide and Low Batts

Cailean (centre) 8 March 2008

THE MEN IN TOWN seem to recognise immediately that Cailean is a male dog. They bend down, scratch him around the ears, and say: "Hello, son …" which I think is a particularly charming way of addressing a dog. I tended to call him "baby", but have recently switched to "kid". He's no longer a baby: Cailean is a year old tomorrow, 8 March 2009.

The women in town nearly always take Cailean for a female. Now I know he's lost his goolies, but his todger is intact. Of course, said todger is nearly out of sight as Cailean has very little clearance from the ground. He also squats to pee, unable to easily salute fire hydrants and utility poles. A miniature dachshund thing.

It's the children who could care less whether Cailean is a boy or a girl. He is, foremost, a "sausage dog". Toddlers hardly able to frame a phrase seem to know that they're meeting a sausage dog, and it's often for the first time. I think parents must read about them to their young children, show pictures. The sausage dog is awfully cute.

Fortunately, Cailean has a lovely nature and adores children. He's very fond of the extreme-aged as well, and all in between. He does, for some reason, take a minute to click with a few people, and he's not much for fox terriers because there's one in the village who has made barking threats on a number of occasions.

Cailean at two weeks, March 2008

Cailean had four siblings (a brother, Billy, and sisters Ruby-Roo, Lucy and Delilah) in his litter, and has a number of half-siblings in other litters. Cailean's father, Buttons, is a stud. Cailean looks like Buttons, a black and tan, though there's just a hint of his mam's red fur here and there below the surface of the black.

Cailean at ten weeks, May 2008

I have been lucky in that Cailean was house-trained within a very few weeks of coming to live with me, and we've had perhaps three "accidents" in the past nine months. As he sometimes stays alone for four or five hours if I'm out and unable to take him with me, I expected we might have puddles when I returned. So far, not at all. He holds his water. The two or three untimely widdles came when visitors arrived and Cailean was that overjoyed to see them, so just a wee trickle.

Baths are welcomed. My dachshund Aleks also liked to be bathed. Cailean enjoys the shower spray, quite hot water, lots of pet shampoo and then conditioner. I heat a bath-towel and wrap him in it after the rinse and rub him dry. This appears to be the part of the process he likes best. Then he's wrapped in a blanket and he usually kips for a few hours with the heating on if the weather (and the flat) is cool. Grooming is easy too. Aleks did not much care to be brushed, but Cailean will sit below where I keep his brush at least once a day and look up at it. I do as ordered.

We travel about in cars and on the bus. In both cases Cailean looks out of the window a good deal of the time, but if he can catch the eye of someone on the bus he'll do the "cute sausage dog" and we soon have someone cooing over him. That's more fun than looking at castles, sheep, cows and great rolls of hay.

Cailean, aged one year, March 2009

Cailean weighed just a few ounces at birth, less than three pounds when he came to me aged seven weeks. He's heavier than a sofa now; at least it seems so when he wants to be lifted onto the bed. I think he's probably around twelve pounds. He's sleek like a seal, and looks not unlike one at times with the long, mostly black body and abbreviated limbs. Short legs notwithstanding, we walk every day for an hour, sometimes more. Cailean also enjoys running around the fenced-in garden of some friends down the hill from us. He's active in bursts, and enjoys sleeping soundly for hours afterwards. He actually watches the television from the end of the sofa, and will bark if there's a barking dog on a programme. Other animals quacking, mooing or bleating have no effect on him.

This June we are going on our first holiday away from Amble, to a lodge in the Scottish Borders. Just for a few days, but it should be fun for the boy. It will be nice for Cailean to galumph around on the grass, and there are many acres of forest to walk through apparently. Cailean may meet his first red squirrel. Will he bark?

Tomorrow, on Cailean's birthday, I'm hoping for weather fair enough for our usual Sunday morning walk to the once-weekly open-air market on the far side (which is ten minutes' walk away) of Amble. There are at least two stalls featuring pet supplies and I thought I'd let Cailean pick something for himself. I shall get bread and vegetables and look in the book stalls and shall be proud to have the best little dog in Amble by the Sea.

Cailean glows like a Midwich Cuckoo. 7 March 2009

BEFORE I GO I must wonder if a sign of spring is the sudden failure of all the batteries in my flat. It was the digital camera first, then the "Bark Free" electronic device that sounds if Cailean barks indoors (he doesn't now, it took a morning to train him) starting winking at me, and this was followed by the television and DVD player remotes. I trotted over to the minimart with a list of the batteries I needed and then the telephone screen started flashing "Low Batts" instead of the date and time. Back to the corner store for a few more batteries. I know it is time, too, to change the batteries in my smoke detectors. Fortunately, my mobile telephone can be recharged from the mains.

As for me, the sun is above the neighbouring rooftops now and shines into my courtyard, and into my front room. Soon enough there will be natural light in the kitchen and on the back porch in the late afternoon. Cailean likes to sleep in any puddle of sunshine, indoors or outside, and I like to join him. The daylight lengthens considerably every week. We've had snowdrops, the crocuses, irises and hyacinths are blooming now, and the daffodils and tulips should flower within a week. Eight weeks from now there may be bluebells in the wood. My batteries are definitely being recharged.

February Flowers

A DAY SUCH AS THIS ONE is all promises: The promise of warmth, of sunlight, of shoots breaking through the crusted soil, of spring's blooms and a withering heat on a summer's day. There is promise of picnics by the River, drives in the countryside and long lunches on the patios outside public houses and inns. Promises include exhausting walks along the beaches. Just another quarter hour. Just to those tidal pools. Cailean will enjoy a few minutes more. Just a very few more. I promise.

In my neighbourhood, the banked earth around the keep of Warkworth Castle must soon by covered in daffodils fit for a romantic poet. The cherry and plum and apple trees will be fragrant with blossoms, and then will be weighted down with fruit. Vines will rise and twine. Flowers will droop and drip; floral flames will attract moths and butterflies. There will be nuts and tight berries. Fruit will burst and blaze like phoenixes, attracting flies.

We shall be asked to cut back on our water usage, the reservoirs will run low. Foreigners (never ourselves) will smell less than fragrant in the heat. Shirts will come off and legs will be bared and naturally tanned. There will be concerts in the parks, and cricket games on the greens. Fishermen will sit for hours by the water, near weeping willows, while dragonflies dart back and forth across the infinity of summer, hurrying to breed in their allotted and most brief lifespan. Dandelions and thistles will cast off their seeds on fluffy parachutes.

All is promised: A new baby dribbling and great-grandfather in his deckchair with a bead of sweat on his forehead. Keep them out of the direct sunlight, Suzie.

All is promised: Church fêtes and village galas. Vicars on a mission. A new set of bells.

Trips to the seaside, Welsh mountains and Aviemore. Donkey rides on the sands. Rowboats on the Serpentine. Slot machines on the best pier in Britain, wherever that might be. Rock festivals at Weston-Super-Mare and the Isle of Wight.

Newborn lambs and fattened lambs and lamb chops. Lettuces and tomatoes straight from the garden. Tea in the conservatory. Earl Grey or Orange Pekoe? I have both.

So much promise, one is quite overwhelmed.

And it is snowing this February afternoon over much of Great Britain. The roads are in chaos, the trains are not running, the Tube has ground to a halt, Heathrow has no flights until at least this evening.

I have a small wicker pot of golden narcissus bulbs and they've chosen to bloom this week. Their promise has been kept. The first, fresh, home grown flowers of the year. On the windowsill above the radiator, spring came early. Mine for just £4.50.

Outside the window, beyond the net curtains there's swirling snow. Great, big flakes this time, very wet. Here by the sea the snow doesn't lie long, it is soon slush. Inland is another matter. The Cheviots will be small Alps for a small season.

Yes, all is promised. The Poet: Miles to go before we sleep. Miles to go. The year is just beginning. One cannot sleep with promises to keep. Promises to keep. How many miles?

Aren't we there yet, Mummy?

Promises, Promises (Hay Among the Lovestacks)

The bloom that promiseth a mighty fruit.

William Shakespeare (King John, Act II, Scene I)

ONCE UPON A TIME, no doubt, one could live off the berries, roots and fruit growing by the footpaths in this part of England, if one could dodge the henchmen of the Dukes of Northumberland. Dukes who seem to have owned (and still do) vast acreage attached to an inherited family title. There are things to pick and eat, to this day, in our hedgerows, in their due season. If one fancies meat, there were, and are, plenty of bunnies, and pheasants leap out of the fields into the paths of oncoming traffic, foot or motor. I've even had a red squirrel commit suicide under the wheels of the vehicle I was travelling in. Can one dine on Emily Wilding?

Given our chilly climate in Northumbria, Scotland just a few miles to the north of me this afternoon, a line that has moved over the centuries, I imagine that the secret of successful dining and surviving before TESCO came along included putting on several layers of insulation: Leathers and furs for the outside, fats within the body. The Duke's venison. Some long-haired highland cattle. A woolly ewe. An anxious lamb. Whatever one could nick.

As a very young boy, I was always amazed to find apples, plums, greengages and pears ripe for the picking when I went walking in the orchards of Kent with my cousins. We didn't pick them, of course, much as I longed to, for they belonged to some farmer or other. I have picked and eaten fruit directly from the tree since then, ignoring the word of the Lord a few times, paying heed to the Snake. The fruit tasted no better than the packaged variety, perhaps tarnished by guilt. Do you suppose that Eve, after her bite (and did she have but one nibble, or chow down on a bushel basket of fruit?) went directly to Adam and said: "Husband, these are truly champion … There's nothing like them! I tell you, these are to die for!" And Adam replied, reaching for a plump specimen, "Wife, that was Elohim's point. We're going to take up wearing clogs, and then pop them."

In Bermuda, I recall trying the then-ubiquitous Surinam cherries and loquats when they were fruiting. I disliked the raw flesh of those two then, and still do. However, the cherries make a wonderful jam, and loquat chutney is delicious. I believe the prickly pears one could find in Bermuda near the shoreline could be eaten, though I'm not exactly sure how one might prepare them. Other than those, roadside vegetation wasn't particularly palatable.

Our garden in Bermuda was rather barren. My mother had the opposite of a green thumb. This affliction extended to her cooking: I don't recall a single tasty vegetable (or meat) dish prepared in our home. Everything was average, plain, boring. We could have, assuming the earth, moon and stars had been differently aligned at my mother's nativity, grown various fruit and vegetables in abundance in our back garden as there was some red soil there. Our front garden grew only rocks and a Poinciana tree that clung to them. We tried to grow beans. Can one go wrong with a few beans? Well, yes. Carrots and potatoes also came a cropper. Tomatoes, that most delicious fruit to my mind, simply withered at the surface.

We had banana trees in the garden and most rarely a small bunch would appear. This when my mother's brother had a banana patch next door to us so successful, so bounteous, that he sold the bunches to the Friendly Store supermarket. Occasionally we'd be given a hand. My uncle also had orange, tangerine and pink grapefruit trees in his orchard. I'd gather up some of the windfalls for fresh orange juice or broiled grapefruit. We took most of these to my grandparents.

My father's mother, my Nan Eldridge, did have the green thumb. Green fingers, if that is possible. I don't ever recall Nan buying food other than bread, biscuits, orange squash, a rare bottle of sherry, and the dreaded roasted chicken. Nan's chickens were dreaded because she could make one last for a fortnight or longer, even without benefit of a freezer or even a refrigerator. In Nan's Garden of Eden, it could be a taste of the chicken that might make one surely die, or surely have a case of the trots. If one wanted meat with a meal at Nan's, the only safe way to have it was to purchase it on the way there and serve it up. Tell her that last month's chicken will keep …

My Nan grew vegetables, rhubarb, tomatoes, currants, vines and flowers. Anything she had a mind to grow, she did very well, thank you. I wonder if her parents had that gift. I saw my great-grandfather Crow's terribly overgrown garden in Uxbridge as a boy, when he was months from dying of old, old age, and, looking back, appreciate that it must have been quite wonderful in its day.

I have had a little experience of gathering in crops, though I do not look back on most of it fondly. In southern Utah the Mormon Church had farms that grew, at least where I was living, peaches and apricots. When the fruit was a-growing, it would have to be thinned out. If a branch was too overloaded, some proportion of the fruit would be plucked off and flung to the ground. And then harvest time would come along. One would wear a brown sack strapped so that it opened on one's chest. Up a ladder and the ripe fruit would be picked and dropped into the sack, which would get pretty heavy pretty quickly. I'm not much for heavy, or ladders, and I certainly was put off by the warnings to watch the long grass below the trees as there were rattlesnakes. Every Eden has them. That's what Eden is: A snake's den.

A little over a year ago, I went gathering apples here in Northumberland. Most were windfalls, but a few were pulled down from the lower branches. I wasn't going up a ladder at my age. No way. No burlap sacks round the neck, just plastic bins on the grass. The fruit was eventually used to make a winter's worth of filling for apple and blackcurrant pies and crumbles at Alnwick Day Services.

I did make my own apple and blackcurrant crumble this winter. Apples from friends a few streets over, blackcurrants from a hedge on the street across from me. And, this morning, I noticed the first few flowers on the blackberry bushes. No telling if they will survive the frosts, snow even, that are still likely (for it is only mid-January), but Nature is moving in her gentle way, seeking the sun, the warmth.

Will there be fruit in the hedgerows in 2009? Will the fields produce the tatties we love up here? And the parsnips and turnips? Will there be wheat, rye and barley at the right time? Will the lilies of the field and the daffodils around Warkworth Castle outshine Solomon once again? There is the promise of all that. We must prepare ourselves to actually receive the benefits of these promises. Even the gifts of the hedgerows must be sought out, gathered in, and prepared for the table; they do not drop onto our plates like a micro-waved packaged-dinner from Sainsbury's.

In a few days there will be a new President of the United States of America. Some years ago I first saw Barack Obama on the telly giving a speech at a Democratic Party Convention and I had an understanding, sure as anything, that he would be the next President, odd as it seemed. I told a friend about that and he pointed out that a black man could never become President. America's not like that.

Apparently, fortunately, after all, America is like that. There is not a black man, to be truly accurate, only hours from taking charge of what the Americans at least think of as the most important nation on Earth, for Barack Obama is biracial. I think that's terrific. He also has a background culture that is both western Christianity and Islamic. That's terrific. The new President will be quite a bit younger than I am, and a good deal smarter. That's not a bad thing. But can he pick up apples? I bet he can. Can he share them out so that the hungry receive what they need, and the over-fed be put on a ration? Let's hope so. Warehouses of rotting apples we don't need.

Barack Obama is a man laden with promises. No doubt he has made some, perhaps many, which we do not know about yet. Unlike Abraham Lincoln's presidency, Barack Obama's had to be bought at a huge price and must be paid for.

One wishes Obama well. One wants to love America. It has been most unpleasant simply hating the American Government, especially the President and his Cabinet, for the eight years of George W. Bush. There was nothing to like about Dubya: His never-ending slip-ups and inability to make common sense of issues, or to portray himself as a man of good character and wisdom belittled a decade of Americans. It was embarrassing to watch him fumbling. He even made our Tony Blair and Gordon Brown look sharp.

If George W. Bush let a generation of Americans (and, frankly, the Free World which he'd like to think himself Leader of) down, it seems to me that the American people, and all of us out here must make sure we don't let President Barack Obama down.

So many of us feel good about this man, so let's treat him well, and make it happen.

Just a few flowers in the hedges. And spring is coming

TOAST (Served With No Porkies)

I TELL YOU NO PORKIES: Winter has arrived! That's the way it is in Great Britain.

One day the poets are out raving about the daffodils, and the weather and the scenes are picture-postcard- and calendar-photo-perfect. One writes to the cousin in Australia:

"You'd love this! Warkworth Castle is up to its keep in golden blossoms. Songbirds are flying in from Africa. The sky is an exquisite blue that defies the palette. Our noses have stopped running. Off with the overcoats. Restaurant doors are open and the fragrance of food wafts into the street. Pretty girls and boys are everywhere."

And three or four days later the poets have to run for cover as the rains set in. Rough winds shake the darling buds of May that hadn't been shaken right off the branches in April. The people start coughing, the birds start wheezing. This is the real spring.

One day there are tourists consulting guidebooks and looking up at Warkworth Castle. It is quite warm for England, must be all of 20°C. Suddenly the countryside is green and pleasant. William Blake's ghost must be in Heaven. Well, here.

"Hey there. Nice little castle you Limeys have got. We're from the USA, by the way. Kansas City, Missouri. We're your American cousins."
"Are you Democrats or Republicans?"
"Geez, man, we're McCain-Palin Republicans."
"Then you're not my cousins. Fuck off!"
"Ethel, the natives here are almost as rude as our cousins in France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland, Ukraine..."

Right about then the summer flooding begins, tourist arrivals fall again. The leaves hang on, however, even when the uprooted trees float down the rivers and across the tidal marshes into the sea. The two days of summer, the balmy 20°C, are remembered well as we get the sweaters out in July and when the anoraks come down in August.

A flight of birds, a mad scramble really, heralds the end of summer. A few days of glorious autumn colours (rosy red noses and gin-flowers, hepatic-yellow eyes, and orange fingers on the blokes outside the pubs) and then a violent wind. Something one has eaten, I imagine. And it's over.

One good thing at this point in time is that the great outdoors shops have all their unsold camping gear on sale, just in case you think it might be fit to go out and enjoy the countryside and being close to nature next, erm, summer. Now is the winter of our discount tents, sleeping bags and backpacks.

This year, before Hallowe'en, we've had blizzards in Scotland, moderate snow in Wales and the Midlands, snow flurries in London (the earliest since 1934), and just a few days ago we had about 36 hours of on-and-off hail in Amble by the Sea. Not your picturesque hail, this was heavy-duty stuff which woke me several times in the night with the clattering on the windows (so much for double-glazing), and which made it impossible to take Cailean for a walk past the courtyard. He has a winter coat, but his head is bare and I'm not much for being hailed on either.

On 2 November, 2008, I find myself bundling up, having to have the central heating on, and drinking a good deal of hot tea to keep myself comfortable, which is not to say warm as toast. Even toast doesn't make me warm as toast. In fact, if you've been to England you'll know that toast is prepared the night before and served at breakfast … cold!

It's Global Warming, of course, that is responsible for this frigid weather. Thank God we don't have Global Cooling, or we'd really be fucked.

PORKIES: Cockney rhyming slang. Porkies = Pork Pies = Lies