Notes from the country with Vicky Turrell

  They did not choose me. It felt like being at High School again when the two captains were choosing players for their teams in games lessons. “I choose Pauline.” “Christine.” “Kathleen.” And so, it went on until all the players were chosen and my name had not been called. I was one of the spares again in our games lesson. I had to practise with a few rejected others at the side on the grass; the unused land that no one wanted for the game. They did not choose me this week either but this time it was the house martins, not a team captain. They did not choose our house, but they did choose next door. There they were chattering excitedly as two of them squeezed head to tail on their new little mud platform. I watch them from my car as I drive by. I was not lucky that day, but I did feel very fortunate indeed to hear the cuckoo this week. The RSPB has them on their danger list now that they are becoming so rare. They need ‘urgent action’ but what can we do?  All I did wa...

  “Some are, some aren’t” “What do you mean?” “Some are modern and some are not” We were buying a replacement plant pot for a shrub we had. The diameter was thirty centimetres. And the plant was quickly outgrowing the container with its roots showing through the holes in the bottom. We (foolishly) had not taken anything to make a measurement. The new pot was measured in old fashioned inches. It was fifteen inches. Is that more or less than thirty centimetres? Nothing is as it used to be these days. The poor old elm trees must think that too. A friend of mine was telling me that in her overgrown hedge she gets sapling elms growing, but when they get to a certain height they die off. Her gardener said that it was because the beetles fly at a certain height, so young elm trees can thrive until they reach the height of the beetles’ flight. I am not sure about that, but I know that it is not the beetle that kills the elm, it is the fungus that it unwittingly carries. The same is...

  Zoom, zoom, they were frantically invading the clear blue sky over our house. And not just one or two, there were about ten of them. They went under our eaves and clung to the east side of the wall. Then they tried the apex on the south but in the shadow under the overhang. House martins, looking like glossy black toy planes with flashing white undercarriages, were suddenly everywhere. I was not sure if these were recently fledged from elsewhere or this year’s adults desperately looking for a place to stick their mud nest. In any case they soon lost interest in our eaves and to my dismay they went next door, swooping up to their roof tops. ‘Oh, please choose our house,’ I urge to the empty sky. Martins bring luck and I would love to watch them here through the summertime. My friend told me that she did not have time when she was waiting in A&E the other day. I was at a belated party with a group of colleagues from my working days all those years ago. I told of my nine...

  It is empty at last. I had a good idea. It was so clever that I cannot have imagined it myself. I must have read it or heard about it somewhere. I thought that important items should be easily identifiable when we moved house and so I bought a red box. In it I put vital documents. Just like the Chancellor’s except that mine was plastic. Amongst the tumble of brown card boxes, we could immediately spot the red for alert. But once we were in the new house my cousin said, “Now the work starts” How right she was. Document after document needed to be dealt with and more came in the post. Each one went in the red box as we settled in. It has taken me months to deal with my red box papers.   I would not make a good Minister. Now the bright container is finally empty and I am sure someone moving house would like to borrow it. I will be ‘borrowing’ the Fire Station this week as I am to have my Covid jab there. How strange it would have seemed before the pandemic to go any...

  “No larkin’ about,” said the notice. Not that I am of the age to lark about, but it was reminding us to be on best behaviour, because although the sign seemed funny it had a serious note. We were being asked to steer clear of a mound where our rapidly declining larks nest. They nest on the ground here and one was in the sky hovering and singing its high note song. I have never seen a skylark’s nest. I often heard its song especially in my childhood. We were in Ifton Meadows going for a walk. It used to be colliery land but now there is no coal to be seen and the grass and shrubs have taken over. Of course, the wildlife has moved in as we are hoping it will do in our new garden. So far, the common small birds have ventured in along with the crow family. We see house martins overhead and hope that one day they will spot our eaves which are just the place for a nest. I spotted a house martins’ nest yesterday. I was sitting down at the entrance to a nearby park. It was a hot sunn...

  It came straight back the following day in the post. How could that be, we wondered? It had taken me a long time to secure a postal vote in our new house. I thought it would be a simple matter of changing address. But no, we had to prove who we were all over again, then when that was done, we had to apply (again) for a postal vote, they are not transferrable from one address to another even though we are the same people. We put our votes in envelopes. You must be sure that the Shropshire Council address is showing in the envelope window. Your own address is unseen. Except one of us (and I am not saying which one) put the form back in the wrong way and our address was showing, so the following day it was posted back through our house letter box. The swallows are back. I see them flying over the house catching insects on the wing. But sadly, they are so rare that when we see one through the window we shout out, “There’s a swallow,” and we rush outside to watch as it wings i...