Of TGIF, Monumental Weeks And A Move Afoot.

Friday is the day I go to an organic farm a few miles away to collect my week's order of vegetables. Most Monday evenings an e-mail arrives detailing what will be available that week. The weather has been challenging over the past few months and on this last day of April the ground in the Fen is caked dry and cracking. This follows the very wet and sometimes very cold winter. We've had very little rain and the temperature has been dipping into low single figures for weeks. 

Not a satellite view of an alien landscape, but the farm near here

Gardeners will know that they have not been able to risk putting out anything liable to be affected by low temperatures. I collected my order of carrots, cauliflower, beetroot, celery, spinach, purple sprouting broccoli, kale, leeks, rocket, turnips and potatoes, most of which were plucked from the ground yesterday. When I had a garden I never managed to grow anything nearly as interesting. There is an increasing variety available. How can I choose between the amount I can eat in a week and the variety I would like to buy?

Since lockdowns began over a year ago, my weeks have not really changed, but just occasionally a week crops up with a few differences. This week has been one of those different kinds of weeks. In short the following happened:

I had my second covid vaccination. I am now among the growing population quoted in the nightly news bulletins. I know of and have read about people who have experienced painful, debilitating symptoms after either the first jab or the second. I noticed nothing at all after the first and about twenty-six hours after my second one earlier this week I felt tired enough to retire early to bed. All now seems as back to as normal as anything gets in the marsh. 

I applied and paid for my boat licence six days ago. This is nothing new for most boaters, but it is a new requirement in the Fen and it is my first time. Licences only became mandatory here following the Middle Level Act (2018). I have mentioned many times the disagreements I have had with the stewards of these waterways, The Middle Level Commissioners, and the fun and games I have had taking my grievances to both Houses of Parliament. If you've forgotten you can try to pick up the pieces here. The Byelaws with which I also take issue have still not received the approval of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It has been my contention that the licence cannot be imposed until the byelaws are in place. I've taken soundings from a number of authoritative sources and my contention may be built on sandy foundations according to some. The whole miserable process has been drawn out over the past few years. I had some pre-conditions which I felt were fair before I parted with my money. While the Byelaws are still not in place, including some dangerous requirements for single-handed boaters, there is evidence that work has been carried out to make safe some dangerous public moorings, while the navigation authority has actually constructed its first public moorings. These are four "rural moorings" - overnight stopping places in four locations. It will be interesting see how these are maintained. They do not consist of solid landing stages, but rather a reasonably straight piece of riverbank with the normal jungle of reeds and nettles cut back and into which five stakes have been driven - hopefully at a depth to hold fast when mooring ropes are tied to them. Here's how the one on the Sixteen Foot Drain, far from anywhere, looked last weekend.

 

The Rural Mooring on the Sixteen Foot Drain

At an estimate there should be enough space for two boats the size of mine to moor. I'll give it a go sometime soon I hope. The fact that similar moorings have apparently been constructed near Ramsey Forty Foot and further away from my home mooring and adjacent to Yaxley Lode and New Lode near Holme give me reason to venture further into areas hitherto unexplored, boat engine permitting! I just hope there are places to turn the boat round, because those last two places don't actually lead anywhere.

International Workers' Memorial Day was a couple of days ago. I was one of six people who gathered at the foot of the Thomas Clarkson Memorial in Wisbech to remember our fellows who have particularly suffered as a result of the covid pandemic. Socially distanced, restricted in number and fully masked we observed a one-minute silence and listened to some short deliveries of heartfelt sentiments. Last week I was working in a school for the first time in five months (which was itself the first time in nine months), so I wanted to remember in particular school staff who have worked right the way through the pandemic, putting themselves at risk with no sense of government priority in terms of protection for the workers, just the shrill cries of politicians wanting to get schools open again. Well here's the thing - for the children of non-school-based frontline workers, schools have never closed. Teachers have worked right the way through and many have had to learn new ways of working to provide remote learning opportunities for those pupils who stayed at home. I also felt I wanted to continue to draw attention to self-employed, sole-trader musicians who have not been allowed to work and are among the three million workers who have fallen through the safety nets of the furloughs, grants and loans the government has made available to the employed. My work supporting a teacher last week meant that the total of my earned income since January 2020 has come from four hours work and half a dozen album sales. I am lucky to have had sufficient savings to help me survive. Next month I'll be old enough to receive my state pension.

This week I have been working on a Marshlander website. Until now I have only been using Bandcamp, a couple of social media platforms and this blog. The new website is a new venture and coming along very, very, v-e-r-y slowly. Eventually I plan to migrate this blog and other information to the new place and, if I can get my head round how to do it, open up a Marshlander shop too. It's one of those "don't hold your breath" situations. When it's ready to share I'll put a notice to that effect on here.

Letters To A Kingfisher - 10

Dear Kingfisher,

Is this fate? I was sitting at a blank page giving some consideration to the title and you flew in and settled on a post about a metre away on the other side of the glass. I sat very still as a gust of wind blew you backwards off the post. It took you no time to recover and you resumed your spot. I reached very slowly for my phone to try and take a photograph, but you were too wily and leapt off the post veering over your left wing to dart along the top of the river again. This essay therefore has to be a letter to you.

I am aware that my letters to you are generally quite bleak. After more than a year I am tired of my own company and would love nothing more than to be able resume real contact with my lover, my family and my friends. Some of them are three miles away and others are thousands of miles away. P. is only seven hundred miles away, but he might as well be on the moon for all the likelihood we have of being able to see each other in the near future. However, I don't want this message to be bleak. My health is good, I have been out for a few strolls along the riverside, but most importantly, in the past few days I have been easing myself back into rehearsing and a little bit of composing too. An occasional melody has lodged in my brain just long enough for me to scribble it out in my manuscript book, something I always keep to hand, although it has not been required for much of the past year.

The thing I dislike most about depression is the way it drains the will to do anything useful. I guess I've experienced a very mild dose recently, which meant that I did no playing. After a pause of several weeks it takes a little while for my guitar-playing fingers to start working through the stiffness, the tips to toughen up and my legs to build up enough muscle strength to be able to play some of the more demanding rhythms on my footdrums. I have a system for this. The first day I play two or three songs. The next day I might manage half an hour. By the fourth or fifth day I'm easily playing for at least an hour, but my fingers get sore if I go on too long. Once they are sore that makes the recovery more complicated. So it is a balance between regular and often as I build towards performance quality again. Of course, not speaking to many people, I can go days without using my voice, so that too needs rebuilding. I try to remember everything I learned from my friend, L., who took on the job of coaching me when I was taking on more Marshlander gigs. She has a lovely singing voice and has been trained by excellent teachers herself. Her lessons were both inspiring and helpful. I just wish that what she tried to teach me was firmly enough embedded in my practice so that I had passed the point of having to employ all the tricks consciously. Sometimes in mid-song I catch myself not breathing efficiently from the diaphragm or slumping into a poor posture as I balance the guitar on my lap and lean to allow my legs and feet to work efficiently on the drum pedals. I have spoken to the great Arthur Brown a few times over the years and his voice in his mid to late seventies is still in great shape. He used to have a routine for keeping his voice in good working order. He lived in a yurt at the time and would walk down the hill into town every day and exercise his voice as he walked. I wonder what the trees made of a burst of "Spontaneous Apple Creation", "Fire", "Time Captives" or "I Put A Spell On You". These days he lives in bricks and mortar, so I don't know whether that has affected his practice regime.

Anyway, after a phone call from a friend who lost his partner at the beginning of the year I have now forgotten what I wanted to tell you. So here are some photographs from some recent expeditions along the river bank. You'll know exactly where these places are.

                

                        

Love as always,

marsh