Letters To A Kingfisher - 6

 Dear King (if may presume such intimacy?),

It has been a while and for that I apologise. It's not as though we haven't been keeping an eye on each other though. Do we be both know the other is there? You seem to watch me sometimes while I make sure to watch you often. If I shelter in the little summer house on my landing stage, where I find I can focus better on writing, I see you land and perch on the swan neck of my tiller. When you do that you are only two metres away from me. We are separated by that short distance and a pane of glass. Your colours are more glorious and bring me more joy than you will ever know. Are you shy, nervous, or are you playing a game? Do you know how much I want a good photograph of you? Although I have learned to sit and watch for extended periods I am sometimes tempted to reach for my phone to take the best photograph ever. As I move so do you. You take off and dart away down the river, hurtling mere centimetres above the surface until you reach your next perch. John the fisherman said you perched on one of his rods a couple of weeks ago. He was very pleased at your stereotypical pose. It's hard to avoid a tinge of jealousy when you share your favours so freely.

I don't know whether you and the cormorant are rivals for the same meal of fish. You, as with your cousins the herons, egrets and gulls are quite forensic in your approach to fishing. You watch, wait, dart and retrieve. I saw the moorhen making off with a small fish in its beak a couple of days ago. I didn't realise they were omnivorous until then, but I looked it up on a wildlife website and yes, they are; mainly pesca-vegetarians. I do wonder what cormorants do when they dive. Are they indiscriminate as they sweep into a shoal for lunch or do they pick off smaller fish one at a time; swallowing one before grabbing the next? Why would they hold their breath for so long if they only wanted one fish? I know when a submerged cormorant is near me because the fish scatter, many leaping to break the surface with a splash like the sound of falling dominoes, in tiny flashes of silver. In panic they will often knock into the hull as they dart to escape. Sometimes, the panic is caused by a pike and I know there are a few of those around at the moment. I've seen them reeled in by the anglers. I don't like the idea of catching fish simply for sport, but it would be untoward if I made a fuss. One of the anglers said there was a zander under my boat the other day. I didn't know they'd reached this part of the river, but I suppose it was only a matter of time since they are invasive and predatory. When someone is fishing nearby I try to show neighbourly interest without offering encouragement. It's a fine balance. For my part I prefer to watch the fish in their environment. The view into the water is only clear on still and sunny days when the sun is high over the opposite bank. Most of the time the surface is almost opaque making fish only visible when they come very near the surface or nibble at a piece of passing jetsam much of which has been discarded by nearby plantlife. When the water is dark I watch for the v-shape that breaks the surface denoting what I have always imagined to be the passage of a pike deeper down. Those v-shapes move at speed. 

There are three or four swan families that pass this way. I have kept an eye on one special family since they were eggs in the nest on the opposite bank. Eight cygnets hatched earlier in the summer and grew in their juvenile plumage. One day there were only seven. I thought one must have fallen foul of a predator, pike, mink, fox ...? Then, a few days later, there were eight cygnets again. This time they were chasing away the runt, the one that had yet to begin to develop its white feathers of adulthood. This behaviour continued for a several days and I assume the poor young thing eventually got the message and left because, now once again, there are only seven cygnets. Strangely, the cob has been absent over the past couple of weeks. Swans mate for life, but perhaps he has a bigamous family elsewhere? Perhaps he decided he needed time out from the kids. The pen is still with them. If I go out when they are near, or if I open the galley window, they come to greet me. I'd like to think it was for the conversation, but I suspect they want an easy meal. I don't make a point of feeding them, because I rarely have any scraps. They would reach up and take food from my fingers if I offered it. Yesterday, the family came by. One of the cygnets had what appeared to be a fishing float poking from its beak. I suspect it had taken a hook from a discarded fishing line. They left before I could do anything helpful. I looked up the nearest RSPCA wildlife centre and phoned. I was subjected to a many branched tree of options. By the time I got to option five I'd forgotten options two and three. I pressed the wrong button and halfway through the next speech I was cut off. I sent them an e-mail message, but have not yet had an acknowledgement or a reply. The office is not attended regularly because of the virus situation. Swans are now also victims of covid.

Stay well, my friend.

marsh

Of Things That Crash And A Sting In The Tail

I don't have a television. I don't have a television licence so I refuse to use the watch again services of the terrestrial channels. My closest interaction with terrestrial television occurs when I pay for each Doctor Who series as it comes out and download it weekly as it becomes available. Otherwise my go to source of mindless entertainment is Netflix. Many times now I have found myself caught in the spiral of watching a series until it comes to an end. Unfortunately some are just too badly written to make it. A series I am currently watching started with a promising premise - a bunch of genius young adults with mathematical, engineering, computer and problem solving skills decide they need a "human" (their affectionate term for the rest of us) to help them negotiate their way through life. In their world EQ is not the equalisation I apply to my recordings, but "emotional quotient", something that scores far less highly than each individual's IQ. Their interpreter turns out to be an attractive young mother of a child who refuses at first to interact with the outside world. This team of exceptional people, known as "Scorpion" (giving the series its title) comes into the orbit of Homeland Security and is pimped out to solve problems and save the world - a different and often unbelievable crisis featuring unlikely solutions that are written to sound quasi-plausible per episode. As I said the premise sounds interesting, but after so many episodes and so many seasons the arc of most of the stories has become predictable. I may not make it to the end if it doesn't pick up.

I'm no genius, but ideas I have a few, though mostly these days it is my own fear and lack of knowledge that prevent me from getting on with carrying them through to completion. I have a page on Bandcamp where visitors can listen to whatever music I decide to put up and they can even buy the download version should they so wish (that would, of course be marshlander.bandcamp.com)  There is a "merchandise" option and I thought that some people might like to buy one of the limited edition and remaining copies of my CD. You know, Christmas is coming and all that. However, dealing with postage costs, returns policies, codes for esoteric functions ... I look at the page with all the boxes to fill in and my heart quails, I can feel the quailing. I have blank greetings cards of the album cover with the beautiful Mark Whittle-Bruce portrait of the not so beautiful me and the same applies. More quailing.

Another brilliant idea I've wanted to implement for some time is to make videos of some of my songs. I have lots of footage of boat trips I've undertaken, but somehow using iMovie or Final Cut Pro X escapes me altogether. I fall at the first hurdle. If I decide to start a new "project" why is anything I've imported from a previous failed project still on the screen? In my imagination "new project" suggests a blank page. If I start deleting the leftovers, what am I deleting? Do I lose the video altogether or is it simply removed from the "new project"? The video I have recorded is mostly loaded on to my computer from my phone. I attempted a Facebook live stream. I was proud of myself for managing to keep a fairly coherent commentary running during the filming while I was trying to keep the boat on course and not crash into bridges. However, somehow the audio track has been chopped into unintelligible machine gun rattles of sound. I realise that an audio commentary is of limited use in a music video, but it should make sense if I want to edit together a record of a journey I've undertaken and post it here, for example. It does nothing of the sort and the video is also pretty jerky. The "mute audio" function in iMovie took a moment to find so I clicked it, but the stuttering noise persists.  What!!?

I quite like the idea of having my music collection in one small place. After much research I bought a Brennan BB1. This has the advantage of being an internet radio as well as a music player. I can use it to listen to my friends Richard Penguin, on Future Radio and Simon J on the famous ex-pirate station 242 Radio. Unfortunately it does not seem to find West Norfolk Radio, so I can't listen to yet another friend, Jane Clayton. Regarding its other main function, it looked perfectly straightforward to copy the albums I have stored on my computer to the BB1. It is not. My BB1 seems to have given up at about 250 albums. I bought a large capacity USB key that should have had enough additional capacity for my whole collection. The BB1 does not instantly recognise the music on the key, but instead shows lots of folders that need to be scrolled through before getting to any music. The key filled up a whole lot faster than I was expecting too, so I spent more money on a solid state drive. That drive is not recognised at all. There is a computer app that is supposed to be the interface between the computer and the BB1. It is supposed to make the whole process easier. It does not.

In desperation I have referred to YouTube instructional videos, my usual source of helpful knowledge, but I've yet to find one that addresses my problems. I have registered with the Brennan users forum where the uninitiated can seek help for whatever ails them. If help is there it has passed me by because even the questions appear to be asked in some secret language. This is supposed to be a consumer product, but it is seriously "nerdy" - sorry, but I cannot think of another and less emotive adjective to describe the discussions. The questions just about make sense, but the answers are riddled with the kind of jargon that leaves me reeling. Support? It does not.

There was a time when my job was to help teachers cope with new technology in music. Maybe my brain was better joined up in those days because I thought I did a reasonable job of interpreting some tricky concepts and processes. Now, the shoe is truly on the other foot and I am lost. I think I need to engage the services of a younger enthusiast, I wonder if Ralph, the twelve year-old genius from Scorpion could help. Probably not.

Of Angling Martins and Smoke Reduction

I ... barely ... dare ... move ... to ... type ....

A kingfisher, in all its gaudy gorgeousness has just landed on the swan neck of my tiller. I'm sitting in a little shed staring in wonder from barely two metres away. This is a scene that has played out many times. I know from experience that as soon as I move this monarch of pescatarianism will be off. That doesn't stop me reaching in ultra-slow-motion for my mobile phone to catch the moment ... but even that is too fast and it has gone. It will return. The kingfishers (demoted in French to les martins pêcheurs) are one of the great joys of my life. I have had many very close encounters, but have yet to manage to take a decent photograph. Any that I have taken show the bird as a smudge of that electric blue or coral chestnut against a background of green or brownish grey. I know full well that if I do stay still, so will the kingfisher. I have waited before now for a full thirty-five minutes for it to move. One of the wonders is that a bird that seems to live life at such a speed can keep it up without having to feed constantly. I guess the plentiful supply of small fish that swim around the boat (cormorants permitting) are particularly nutritious. A couple of my friends have managed to take some great photographs of kingfishers. One has even managed to take a sequence of one diving into the water and catching its dinner. I am envious of their patience and skill. Ah, I knew it would be back ...

Autumn and this young old man's heart turns to thoughts of how to stay warm when the weather changes. We have "enjoyed" a long warm season this year. I'm not sure that "enjoy" is actually the correct term since any enjoyment is clouded by thoughts of climate change as monthly temperatures continue to break all previous records.

The caricature of the liveaboard boater is of someone who travels about the waterway with lots of wood stacked on the roof. Just look at photographs of people moored on the Kennet and Avon to see what I mean. A friend once told me that trees near the Nene in Peterborough were being coppiced. Within half an hour there wasn't a branch left to be cleared as it was all piled up on top of a line of narrowboats. I've never done that. I would actually rather have better access to what is underneath anything on my roof having spent a lot of time and money fighting rusty steelwork. There is another consideration too. Fresh wood doesn't burn well and certainly does not give off as much heat as seasoned wood. It is also very smoky. Having to work out how and where to season salvaged timber in sufficient quantity to make it worthwhile is beyond my ken. My life is a constant battle with myself to become more aware of the effect I have on my immediate environment. From what I consume and how it is packaged to how I deal with the different types of waste I generate are all constantly fretted over and my systems under consideration. Mostly I devise my own worries, but sometimes these have to take into account changes in the law.

As the colder weather approaches I tussle with the knowledge that it is no longer acceptable to run on mined fossil fuels for several months of the year. It is the middle of October and I am sitting in a little shelter in the bright sun as I write. By the time the afternoon turns to twilight extra layers of clothing need to give way to some fire to warm the boat's interior. Failure to do that just makes condensation a lot worse as the only heat being generated in the boat is through my own expiration. Last winter I experimented with using heat logs - basically compressed sawdust. These seemed to work well, but they don't last very long, they are relatively expensive and the ones that were readily available from the nearest supermarket are insanely packaged in plastic. This season, although advertised in the shopping list for online shopping, they don't seem to be available yet. My biggest expense during the winter is fuel for heating. I would like to use wood exclusively, but it's not straightforward. I have considered, and often used, logs, but I don't have anywhere to store them, so I can't build a woodpile like my artist friends who live in the church across the Fen from me, my musician friends in the cob house, or P's father who has acquired that amazing French skill, where it is indeed an art form, of stacking logs immaculately. It's not as though trees are an abundant resource in the Fen as the photographs of my view from the river bank show. 

I manage to keep a little combustible material on board sufficient for a week or two at a time. The law is increasingly insisting that logs should be kiln-dried and various forms of coal are rightly being phased out. I have only ever used "smokeless" varieties of coal, but these are never truly smokeless, so I don't really understand what smokeless coal is. I want to see if I can manage without using coal at all. After all, there will come a time when I shall have to. Acknowledging this is all a work in progress, I recently bought one twenty kilogram bag of Taybrite (to which I've returned as Winterblaze is not considered truly "smokeless") and another of anthracite (which I've never used before). In the depths of winter I have usually used three to four bags of Taybrite a fortnight. These may pollute marginally less than house coal, but how do I sift information from propaganda? Every other species, most of which we have put at risk, eats its food raw and finds shelter or grows winter coats. Approaching pensionable age I don't think much of this is much of an option. Recently I found a company within the same county that claims to sell kiln-dried logs from local and sustainable sources. The drying process is also apparently sustainable. I ordered some and they took a lot longer to arrive than expected. The quantities were also smaller than I hoped and made the cost about three times what I would pay for a sack of logs bought from the village hardware supplier. It's an ongoing search for enlightenment. I'll let you know if I make any progress.

Meanwhile listen. I just heard the kingfisher.