Lockdown Day 45 - allotment tasks

Another nice day today, with early cloud clearing to a lovely warm Spring day! Today's tasks were mundane but necessary - watering and weeding as well as earthing up the potatoes. 

The forecast is for a lot colder weather from Sunday onwards with the possibility of night frosts. This really isn't what you want at this time of year and I have had the damson blossom and potato foliage affected by a late frost in the past. So, by earthing up the potatoes which involves covering up most of the foliage with earth, I have made them more protected - if needs be I can now quickly cover up the foliage that remains above ground on Saturday evening to protect them completely. If potato foliage gets affected by frost it shows up as looking like the leaves have been burnt. In general I have found that the potatoes recover but are set back a bit. 

I have plenty of plastic sheeting in the shed and in the corner of the allotment so things like the peas and borlotti beans as well as the Meyer lemon tree, blueberries and the spinach and beetroot seedlings can be quickly covered up as well. 

I also weeded the strawberries, some of them are now setting fruit. The onions and garlic are doing well and to be honest these are pretty hardy especially the ones that overwintered. It is very dry still and there's a lot to water, luckily we have access to a tap and so it isn't a problem - for a couple of years at the start of our allotment rental there wasn't one and so I had to carry water up from the house (about three minutes walk luckily but still a long way with water!) or rely on the water butts. All in all things are going well and hopefully we can escape the frost!

Lockdown Day 44 - quick allotment update

There will be more from the allotment tomorrow, but there's plenty going on right now.

The strawberries are starting to produce fruit and so are the blackcurrants, damson, pears and blueberries. The pea patch has been extended with some in situ sown peas (as compared to plants started off at home) and a few borlotti beans are now in from plants started indoors. Plenty of spinach, spinach beet, beetroot and radishes have been sown and there's still more cabbages and broccoli to go in. I've made some rhubarb compote which is great in porridge and on crumpets!

There's a frost predicted from the weekend onwards despite it being May - this is not unknown in this part of the world at this time but it could be quite damaging - will need to earth up the potatoes, and protect various fruit bushes and young plants with plastic coverings, as well as making sure seedlings are in the greenhouse or house.

Lockdown Day 43 - Remembering birds in Iceland Part 2

This is the second half of a piece about some of the birds we saw on our trips to Iceland back in 2009 and 2010, the first bit of which can be found here

By the last houses opposite the road to the airport from the town centre of Akureyri are some lagoons and, despite being overlooked by what was essentially suburbia, had some lovely birds to see. These are a pair of Red-Breasted Mergansers (Mergus serrator) from a family of ducks known as "sawbills" as they have serrated edges to their bills for gripping fish, their main prey. They are related to Goosanders which are more commonly found on rivers in upland Britain although Red-Breasted Mergansers are found in parts of Scotland all year round and along coasts in winter. These type of ducks dive a lot and I have found when trying to photograph them that they usually dive just as you have focused the camera on them!

On the same lagoon, at the airport end, were a group of Red-Necked Phalaropes (Phalaropus lobatus). These beautiful birds feed on insects and spin around catching them which makes them look as if they are performing a pirouette dance on water. 

These birds are a bit more common in Iceland than in the UK, in fact you have to go to the Shetland Islands to see breeding pairs of these birds and there are, according to the RSPB, only 22 breeding pairs there, and it takes considerable effort to see them. All we did was go for a walk one evening about twenty minutes from the house we had rented in Akureyri and there they were!

This isn't a great photo unfortunately of a Slavonian Grebe (Podiceps auritus) as I was facing into the light on the northern shore of Myvatn, a large lake surrounded by volcanic activity, hot springs and mud pools. These birds, again only rare breeders in Scotland, are easily recognisable by the golden stripes on each side of the head. Also on Myvatn were Great Northern Divers, Whimbrel, Barrow's Goldeneye and at the Laxa river which feeds the lake Harlequin Ducks flew over. The latter two species are more typically from North America and Iceland is the furthest east they breed. One or two accidentally end up in the UK from time to time, typically in the west and north of Scotland.

Finally in this section is the Snow Bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis). These little birds are, at least in Iceland, reasonably unafraid of people, and feed on seeds and invertebrates. This one was on Grímsey, an island off the north coast of Iceland that is the only bit of Icelandic territory that is on the Arctic Circle (which, incidentally, is gradually moving up the island and will be to the north of the island by 2050!). Also here were a large number of very aggressive Arctic Terns, one of which hit my head and I felt the soft feathers of the underwing brush along my hair!

Part One of this piece can be found here 

Lockdown Day 42 - Roman Road

Today I went for a walk with my eldest daughter onto an old Roman Road, which connects York with Tadcaster. Most of the route is still traceable and the Ebor Way footpath follows it. Along the route are fragments of old woodland with carpets of bluebells, and you wonder whether these woodlands are the fragments that remain of woods that were present during the Roman occupation of Britain, albeit several generations of trees hence.

Whether the road has been used for all that time by people, I don't know, but limestone from around Tadcaster was used in the building of York Minster in the Middle Ages and there will have been much use and trade since. Nowadays, the actual Roman road surface, if it still survives at all, will be buried, and for much of the way, the route is a footpath. However, some sections near Copmanthorpe and into York and also near Tadcaster are still tracked by modern day roads.
I would like to think that we were just the most recent of walkers in a long history of feet walking this ancient way. Can you imagine the year 3700 and whether anyone will still be around or need the motorways or other roads we have carpeted the country with? Will there even be a record of where they were? Will a future archaeologist try to guess what the white lines - if they survive - or cat's eyes were used for and what measurement system we used to mark out the way?

In some woods along the Roman road are some abandoned caravans, horse boxes and derelict buildings. They've been like this for at least ten years, before the first time I came along this road. Nature is taking over, trees and bushes are covering the site, brambles climb the outside. This photo is of an old freight wagon, minus wheels. This wagon is perhaps eighty to a hundred years old and would have been pulled by steam engines. 

On the way back, we tried to see a garden warbler whistling away from a bush, but as is usual with this type of warbler they seem to stay in the middle of bushes and are not showy like blackcaps, willow warblers and chiffchaffs can be - and they can be hard enough to find once trees are in full leaf!

Lockdown Day 41 - Remembering birds in Iceland - Part 1

In both 2009 and 2010 we undertook trips to Iceland. Both holidays started and finished in Rekjavik however in 2009 we spent several days next the south coast overlooking the Vestmannaeyjar (Westmann Islands)  and in 2010 we spent time in the north, basing ourselves in Akureyri. These were real adventure trips, we hired a 4*4 each time so we could explore some of the sights off the main roads. In Iceland a lot of roads are gravel rather than tarmac and to be honest the road to Dettifoss in the north was an organised trail of rocks!

I have already done a post about the blue whale we saw off Husavik but we also saw plenty of unusual (for us) birds on both trips, some even on Tjörnin right in the city centre of Reykjavik (Tjörnin means "the lake" or "the pond", very original!)

On the first trip in early April 2009, we visited Þingvellir which is where the North Atlantic Ridge - the separation between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates - cuts through and is visible in a chasm with two walls of rock on either side with the path down through the middle. So you get to walk between continents! 



Whilst we were there it was still quite cold, with plenty of snow about and on one day we woke up to about six inches of snow. However, this didn't deter the winter plumage Ptarmigan (Lagopus mutus) we saw munching at the vegetation by the side of the path. It was not perturbed by our presence and it was possible to take some really nice photos of it. During the summer months Ptarmigan lose the pure white plumage that keeps them camouflaged in the snow and take on a mottled white and brown appearance, we saw a summer plumage one crossing the road during our June 2010 holiday (they are as lacking in road sense as pheasants here in the UK!) 

One day when driving along the south coast we had stopped off to admire one of the many tumbling waterfalls on the road towards Vík (famous for the black volcanic beach) when we saw a large flock of Whooper Swans (Cygnus cygnus) in a nearby field. These birds visit the UK in winter, and many gather in the Lower Derwent Valley near where I live, however they breed in Iceland. This group (over 30 individuals in all) took off and made a spectacular sight!

This photo of another Whooper Swan was taken on Tjörnin in Reykjavik. The main difference between this swan and the Mute Swan which is much more common in the UK is the colour of the beak, with the Mute Swan having an orange beak and as you can see the Whooper Swan having a yellow and black one. 

Another common bird in Iceland but quite rare in many parts of the UK even in winter is the Scaup (Aythya marila). This one was one of many pairs of these ducks on Tjörnin in Reykjavik. They are similar to Tufted Ducks (Aythya fuligula) which are on most lakes here in the UK. This one is the male duck with the females being brown and grey with a white patch just above the bill. 

In part 2 I will show some of the birds we saw in the north of Iceland in 2010 around Akureyri, Mývatn and Grímsey

Lockdown Day 40 - Road to Recovery Part 3

This post is part three of a series looking at how we build in benefits from the recovery from Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Part 1 can be found here
Part 2 can be found here

In this post, I look at how building community, reducing poverty and investing in public services and assets can all help in the recovery from this virus.

Without fundamental changes, our society is very fragile. Many political elites only serve themselves and those who fund them, the excessively rich hide their wealth. Many people are unquestioning of a diet of self-reinforcement of prejudices and hate and don't think beyond easy slogans and empty promises made at election time, and, to them, the vacuous stream of reality TV and celebrity gossip is often more important than the real issues in our society. Many people in our society are selfish and only think of what they can get for themselves and their material wealth. 

Those who struggle to feed themselves or can't find work, or have disabilities that hamper their lives are demonised as a whole based on a few rogue examples splashed across tabloid pages, and their lives are made harder and hungrier by a system that just ticks boxes and creates more hoops no matter how many times one jumps.

Can we build a better system, a more caring society, a more equal, tolerant one where all are valued and rewarded for the essential nature of their role to others, rather than one where going to a particular school, knowing the right people in the establishment, pushing the right buttons on a keyboard in front of a trading screen gets you ahead no matter what the cost to others?

This crisis has shown that those who often are in the lowest wage earning jobs in our economy are actually some of the most vital. For instance, care workers - I have worked as a support worker, with clients who had learning disabilities and a range of other issues including mobility and autism. The pay rate was pretty much minimum wage and over a number of years the terms and conditions had been eroded due to cuts in the amount of money paid from central government to local government and this was passed on in the form of cuts to the social care providers working with social services. Many people just think of elderly care when thinking of social care, or maybe children's homes, but a lot of money is spent on a huge range of vulnerable adults and children with a range of physical and mental limitations. 
In order to perform my role I had to undertaken a lot of training and retain a lot of knowledge, whether this was the various pieces of legislation governing the care of vulnerable individuals such as the Mental Health Act or Social Care Act, I had to know about Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, medication, person-centred planning, mental capacity as well as the more personal details of each client's care plan and how to care for them. I had to have empathy, patience, tolerance and was trained in a number of safe and legal restraint and defence techniques in order to prevent clients from either harming themselves or harming others, among many other things I could talk about. All this for the minimum wage and shifts that could be at any time of day or indeed sometimes night. Compared to some of the clients elsewhere that other homes looked after the clients I supported were relatively safe to look after. 

Whether you think about people in the food and retail sector, warehousing and delivery, workers in the NHS or public services that do the hardest and often dirtiest jobs, and indeed in the present crisis many at much greater risk of catching COVID-19, it is clear that the rewards for that labour are not sufficient for the value to society of these roles. This is especially when many in roles that effectively just involve moving a few numbers around and jetting around get telephone number salaries. The latter also often do not pay their fair share of tax whether by their own account or from within the companies they control. 

Over the past ten years, the money going into public services from central government has been cut and cut, and many vital services - whether it be social care, children's services, libraries and local council offices, youth services, education etc - I could go on - have lost thousands upon thousands of staff and local people have been left without many of the services that actually provided a social safety net, community spaces and services, education and support for the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society. The axe has disproportionally fallen on councils with high social deprivation, especially in former industrial areas. One of the greatest losses was the closure of a large number of Sure Start centres, in fact maybe one thousand of these, and these were focused on providing support to vulnerable and impoverished families with young children and had many benefits, not least in terms of the health of children from these backgrounds. 

Another area of cuts has been local bus networks which rely often on council subsidy to provide services into areas that may not be commercially viable but provide a vital link for many communities, especially for those who do not own a car, whether for travelling to nearby towns for education, shopping, banking or to attend appointments. In fact, when coupled with the fact that many job centres and local council offices have closed there have been examples like this one  where people are prevented by logistical issues caused by lack of bus services from getting work and being penalised by the Government for it. 

If you go back forty years, there were a huge number of manufacturing and primary industry jobs, often in local communities whose life often revolved around the solidarity and security provided by those industries. I saw the decline for myself in the mining area I grew up in. The mines shut, hundreds of local people thrown out of work, the shops, community venues and pubs they patronised lost money and often closed and there was a knock on effect into the ancillary industries linked to the mine. Sometimes - as happened around my area to a little extent, there were jobs able to be found in other areas, the Selby deep mine complex had just opened and several pupils in my class moved away to that area with their families. As more mines closed, people either moved away for work - the lucky ones - or languished in unemployment. Other industries such as textiles and clothing and indeed steelmaking were undercut by cheap imports and huge numbers of job losses happened in the 1980s as I was growing up. There was no work to be found for many and unemployment rose above three million. The heart was ripped out of so many communities. 

Now, I acknowledge that many of these industries had polluting effects, but in many cases these could have been solved by technology, regulation and appropriate incentives or taxation policies. Burning coal of course has contributed to climate change but some renewable technology was around in the 80s and 90s and many jobs could have been shifted into such manufacturing. However, "green issues" were often regarded back then as a fringe or "loony left" interest and the political will just wasn't there on so many levels to retrain and re-invest into the areas losing manufacturing to keep and grow skills and provide local work or indeed tackle climate and environmental issues. 

Supposedly, we were promised a "rebalancing of the economy", a "Northern Powerhouse", a "skills led recovery" and all the other vaporous slogans. This hasn't happened, and together with the punishing cuts to services, sanctions on the unemployed and disabled, inflation and a systematic demonisation  and undermining of the poorest, we now need wholesale systematic change and investment into our social fabric, employment and meaningful skills and work for many millions of people. 

Start at the beginning. The Sure Start model was to help the poorest families with life and parenting skills, with accessing education, health and wellbeing. It has been shown time and time again in a whole range of social care areas that early intervention and help saves money but more importantly improves outcomes for families. The closure of so many libraries has meant that many cannot now access computers - whether that is for education, job hunting, skills or networking with others - and indeed access to hard copy resources is important for skill building and child education. My children love reading and the time we both spent reading to them in their younger years has paid dividends I am sure in their educational abilities and interest and they loved going to the library. Reading to children also is meaningful family time - undivided attention and is relaxing and fun for parents too, a happy child is a secure and mentally calm one. The cuts to youth clubs have reduced the opportunities for young people to spend productive and positive time together and opportunities for those running those services to notice issues that would benefit from guidance and support. 

The cuts to the EMA - Educational Maintenance Allowance - prevented so many teenagers from accessing skills and college courses that would have provided them down the line with meaningful work and security of income. The punishing sanctions regime for people on unemployment benefit, together with cuts and dishonest assessments for people on disability benefits has resulted in people going without food and warmth, and at times shelter, and indeed has been a factor in many deaths.

Add into this the cuts I have mentioned above and it shows the need - in so many different areas - for a restoration of so many services, an investment in industrial strategy and public infrastructure and a need to give people a safety net of income that allows them to be able to rebuild their lives.
Local assets - whether that's early years, youth services, community activities for adults and families - are vital for community cohesiveness and giving people opportunity within their area to mix, support each other, gain new skills and take pride in their area. Connectivity, whether via public transport, or indeed internet connectivity is vital to ensure no one is left out or disadvantaged in accessing public services, education, work and lower cost products and services - often those who can't afford to be online have to pay way over the odds for such as gas and electricity services. 

The most vulnerable in our society need to be cared for and be able to have the quality of life - as far as they are able - as ourselves who often take the ability to go to the park, the shops or see friends for granted - this coronavirus crisis actually shows what we lose by these things being restricted. I recall one local authority that cut day centre provision in the early days of the austerity driven cutbacks, and the clients I met when at a supported living care site lost one of their opportunities to see friends and do enjoyable activities, and just simply get out of their house into the community - and this was further limited by staffing issues caused by not enough money being paid for the contract to look after these clients.

The sell off in the 1980s of council houses, and more importantly the lack of political and investment to replace them has created a huge shortage of affordable homes. Another factor are the buy-to-let incentives and removal of rent controls which has resulted in a boom in privately let properties, pushing the house prices in many areas for starter homes to unaffordable levels for local people, the same has been known for a long time about second homes in tourist areas. Not enough affordable housing is being built, whether public or private and basic economics shows that if there is a shortage that doesn't meet the demand, the price goes up. The profusion of television programmes and newspaper articles that have encouraged people to view properties as assets rather than family homes has also over time created price spikes and an asset bubble. Also, in Liverpool and elsewhere, large numbers of what were affordable terrace houses have been demolished rather than improved to modern standards, and the root causes of depopulation and deprivation that may have caused areas to decline and properties to become unkempt not tackled.  

If you have read this far you probably have some affinity with the sorts of future systems and practices and political structures I am talking about. You probably know the sorts of investments that are needed, whether in local public services, housing, educational services or transport. The changes that are needed are possible and we need to mobilise whatever connections and outlets we can to bring this better future about. Unfortunately, a fixation on ideology and slogans and playing to the base attitudes of some have meant that those parties and prospective MPs and councillors that would have wanted to, and would have tried to, make a difference haven't been able to gain power and make those changes. 

Don't be afraid to write to your elected representatives, join campaigns, get involved in community and environmental projects, raise concerns and work with others. Look at what you consume, evaluate what you need, what matters most in your life, what you can grow and provide for yourself and re-use and recycle. Support those in need how you can, with what you can and campaign for change and investment in your communities. Use social media for good and drown out, block and report the nastiness and hate on and off line, call out the micro-targeting and misinformation. Invest wisely in those companies that seek to mitigate climate change, produce environmentally friendly products, support local communities and treat workers ethically. Don't be afraid to question, to challenge, to correct with facts. 

It is do-able. Vested interests will seek to block, to delay, to water down, to silence and slander those who put themselves forward to make a better, fairer, more environmentally friendly future, but there are successes, there are positive changes that have happened that never seemed possible ten or twenty years ago.

We have this opportunity for change, not a situation you would wish on anyone, but there's hope too that it can be the catalyst for a better future for all of us.

In the part four of this essay I look at how investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency can play a part in powering the recovery from this virus. 

Lockdown Day 39 - Curlew

Today it was another cycle ride and with showers forecast (but yet to transpire at time of writing!) I decided to get a few miles in before any rain came.

Over the past couple of weeks, two Curlew (Numenius arquata) have been present in fields around a little village called Catterton near where I live. One of the things I like about them is the haunting calls they make, they remind me of wild open moorland and hills, which is where a lot of them hang out for breeding in summer.

However, this pair seem to have stuck around - I expected when I saw them a fortnight ago that they would carry on migrating up the Wharfe Valley to the Yorkshire Dales.

This individual today, probably one of the pair I saw a few minutes previously, was working its way over the field, probing its long beak into the ground in search of worms and other invertebrates. Their main distinguishing feature, a really long curved beak, is ideal for searching the ground for these, and when you see curlew at the seaside, they will use this beak to search out molluscs in amongst rock pools.