Rural meandering; bird survey; horsies

Most of this last week has been filled with a six-day Easter break courtesy of the University … Closure Days are truly a blessing.

I travelled to Hereford on Thursday morning to spend a couple of days with my parents. I took the slower-but-cheaper Evesham (as opposed to Newport) route, which is a pleasant 3-hour meander along the Cotswold Line passing through some pretty pastoral scenery and some absurdly small stations, at least one of them only big enough for two carriages of the eight-carriage or so train I was on. Must involve much frenzied scuttling along the train if you’ve forgotten when your station is coming up. There’s a Wikipedia entry giving a handy guide to the line. There’s also a Cotswold Line Promotion Group - not quite sure what they do. General promotion, I guess.

Went for a lovely 5-mile or so walk in the Olchon Valley on Good Friday. My father is participating in some sort of bird survey for the British Trust for Ornithology, so was armed with binoculars and a pen and notebook. Seems to involve noting all the birds you observe within a one-hour timeframe - I assume to contribute to some sort of overview of numbers, different species etc. Not sure if more points are assigned to certain species, whereby the spotting of one Magnificent Bird of Paradise – albeit improbable in Herefordshire – might be equivalent to spotting 20 song thrushes. Probably not.

Ray in his shed

I kicked off Easter Sunday by strolling up to Ray’s allotment for coffee and bacon rolls courtesy of the cunning little stove he has acquired. I was tickled to note that on the plot next to Ray’s there were the pieces of a flat-pack shed piled up. Evidently the shed anarchy is beginning! Ruth cooked a divine roast chicken in the evening - I can never be arsed to cook roasts, but they do have their place.

On Easter Monday I went to my first Point to Point meeting at Hackwood Park, near Basingstoke, organised by the Vine & Craven Hunt. It was beautiful weather – by far the nicest day of the long weekend. We cheekily managed to bag a prime picnic position near the finishing post, thanks to somebody not turning up to claim their paid-for parking spot. Inevitably, there was much braying and blustering over the tannoy about hunting and how the hunting ban risks the destruction of the entire British countryside (a consequence that needs explaining to me, frankly – but then as a townie, what do I know).

Ruth, me and Claire

The event itself was a little disappointing in the sense that most of the races were rather devoid of runners – there was speculation that they might have b*ggered off to a rival event at Lockinge on the same day. Each race had around 15 runners according to the race card, but several only had 4 runners in practice and the final race, only one – the solitary runner was awarded a walk-over, but this seemed to involve going through a bit of a bizarre ritual involving walking part of the length of the course in the company of a chaperone. The solitary horse did, unsurprisingly, win the award for best turned out horse in that race, and hopefully the jockey will have been cheered up by his winnings of a crate of London Pride. The event also included ferret racing, which we missed, but did manage to see the ferrets in their cages.

In principle, our current status as a TV-free household should be a golden opportunity for me to catch up on some reading. I did, amazingly, read a couple of (short) articles out of The Economist last night – an impressive pile of these has built up on the coffee table since Ruth started subscribing to it. Felt a virtuous sense of being on top of world affairs afterwards. I have to say, though, that I am missing trash TV.