Bourne Diary - January 2000

by

Rex Needle

Saturday 1st January 2000

I have never been able to keep New Year resolutions and so I no longer make them but such determination of future conduct does have its place in our psyche at the bewitching hour of midnight as the old year fades and a new one begins. What better way to celebrate the dawn of the year than to make earnest vows to relinquish bad habits, to stop smoking, reduce the intake of alcohol, lose a few pounds around the middle, be more generous to beggars, walk the dog daily and put a few more coins in the charity collection boxes that come our way.

Such declarations rarely survive more than a few days into January and we are soon back into our old ways and so we no longer make empty promises knowing that they are unlikely to be fulfilled. As the old proverb reminds us: hell is paved with good intentions. But my thoughts on this matter as we approached the gate of the year 2000 have been so intense that a few nights ago I had a dream in which things were suddenly very different, when everyone who has a part to play in the future wellbeing of our town resolved that this year would be different, that resolutions made would be resolutions honoured . . .

I awoke from my dream in a cold sweat for these matters had filled my sleeping hours and sometimes reached nightmarish proportions and I thought that there had been a cultural revolution in our town, that it had been taken over by an alien authoritarian regime that insisted on law and order and responsible conduct from all of its citizens. But then I realised that all of these good intentions were nothing more than a dream and even though today heralds the start of no ordinary New Year, because it is also the millennium, I realised that things will continue during 2000 pretty much as they have done before. John Stuart Mill, the 19th century philosopher summed it up thus: "No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought." We do, however, live in hope.

Saturday 8th January 2000

The birds in our garden are a constant delight and in return for the pleasure they give us we provide them with food, especially during the winter, replenishing supplies every day and ensuring that there is water for them on severely cold mornings when ponds and dykes are frozen over. Our most frequent callers are collared doves which sit on the rooftops cooing until I have put their breakfast out on the bird table, but we also have many greenfinches, hedge sparrows, blue tits and coal tits, bullfinches, a few thrushes, magpies and crows, the ubiquitous blackbirds and flocks of starlings, the most gregarious of birds that frequently swoop in to devour everything in sight before taking off to find more elsewhere. These starlings have even learned how to take nuts from our feeders and their acrobatics in pursuit of a meal are most entertaining.

Newcomers continue to arrive and last year we were hosts to pairs of long-tailed tits and goldfinches although one of those was taken by a sparrowhawk that often sits in a neighbouring pear tree ready to swoop on unwary birds as they fly in to feed on the bird table. A few days ago my wife excitedly called me into the kitchen to look at a bird she had seen hopping around on the patio. It was so tiny that it could only be a wren, one of the smallest of our native birds and has long been a favourite along with the robin and considering its piercing, trilling song, one which is penetratingly loud for such a small bird, its perky stance and cocked-up tail, it is easy to understand why we like it so much. It hopped around for several minutes and then flew into the garden and settled on our ornamental rocks for a few moments and gave as untold pleasure.

This bird's nickname is the Jenny Wren and the species has an absorbing history and despite the affection in which it is held today, wrens were the victims of a cruel ritual which was carried out in many parts of the British Isles until quite recently when on St Stephen's Day, December 26th, groups of youths in motley dress would beat the hedgerows, singing and trying to kill any wren they could find. The origin of this wren hunt is obscure but Edward Armstrong, an authority on folklore, links this hunt with New Year ceremonies of the Bronze Age megalith builders. There was also a belief that anyone who harmed a wren was sure to meet a terrible fate soon afterwards, a superstition that persists to this day and so helps ensure that they were well protected.

The wren is under four inches long, so small that it is difficult to understand how any withstand sub-zero temperatures when I have seen robins fall off a branch having been suddenly frozen to death. Wrens are about half their size and yet they survive year after year and to imagine how tiny they are, ten or more have been found huddling inside a single coconut shell to keep warm while as many as forty have been found roosting in one nest box. Keeping warm then is a constant problem in cold weather and so they do suffer heavy losses, particularly in severe winters when their numbers drop alarmingly. Our wren has already been back and we hope it will remain with us throughout the winter and we will be keeping an eye on the thermometer with some concern when the nights become really cold.

A pied wagtail spent a few weeks here last year and many robins stay with us through the winter. One spring, my wife rescued a blackbird from a marauding cat and it lived to nest and lay its eggs in our surrounding hedge and when the young had fledged it brought all four of them to the back doorstep where we fed them all with raisins and other tasty morsels for several days and they became so tame that they would come hopping down the lawn for their food whenever I whistled, an occurrence that startled some visiting friends from London who had never before seen a blackbird and thereafter regarded me as a latter-day Dr Dolittle.

We welcome all of our birds but we now have one that has both surprised and enchanted us because a pheasant has joined our occasional collection. It flew in shortly before Christmas and has been coming here ever since, feeding on anything it can find, strutting and scratching in the leaf litter along the hedgerows and poking its beak into my flower tubs for wireworms and grubs and foraging for seed scattered from the bird table by those unruly starlings. Our cock pheasant is a proud and gaudy bird with a green head and a red eye patch, a mottled copper brown plumage and a long pointed tail, but it is also very big, several times the size of a blackbird and not much smaller than a cockerel. There is a theory that the pheasant was introduced into Britain by the Romans although there is no firm evidence for this but it was definitely recorded in Britain in 1059, a few years before the Norman Conquest.

The true home of the pheasant is in Asia, from the Caucasus across to China, and it was this species that became known as the old English pheasant but there have been more introductions from Eastern Asia since the 18th century of a species with a white neck ring and so our current stocks are an amalgam of forms, those with and those without a white neck-ring and I note that our visitor is of the former variety.

Its habitat, especially in the winter, is in the fields, the woods and the marshes, and it is a much sought after game bird during the shooting season which started on October 1 but this one has shown its flying prowess by escaping the guns of those who comb the fen seeking to kill it, either for sport or for the table, and now for whatever reason prefers our company and spends several hours each day with us and has become so confident that we often look out at mid-morning to find it perched on the garden seat, the monarch of all it surveys.

It became so familiar with our terrain that a visit to the bird table was inevitable, however incongruous this may seem. At first, it eyed this sumptuous supply of seed from the roof of the shed but was hesitant to alight and sample what was on offer but its curiosity had been aroused and I knew it was only a matter of time before it eventually succumbed to the temptation of such an easy meal and so I kept my camera at the ready and was rewarded with a photograph from close range while it was busy eating its fill. We have a new friend and hope it will continue to visit.

Saturday 15th January 2000

Trees are among the natural stately sculptures of our landscape and it is a sad occurrence when we lose one, whether through wind and weather or the determined action of man to clear the countryside. They are a welcome sight in the fens and in those prairie acres devoted to cereal production and it is a sorry sight to see one brought down.

Recent storms have toppled an ancient ash alongside Obthorpe Lane, a remote country road near Thurlby, two miles south of Bourne, and I spotted it a few days ago as I drove past, a once proud and mature tree that has stood like a sentinel since the mid-19th century while all around was change and confusion but had now come to an ignominious end, its upturned roots forcibly ripped from the earth and facing the road while the trunk stretched out over the green shoots of a crop of winter wheat, awaiting its final fate from the chain saw.

The annual cycle of the growth and flowering of our trees is one of the most wonderful of nature's marvels and is plainly displayed for those who care to observe it. Our trees stand still for everyone to see and are all around us everywhere and yet it is quite astonishing how few people, even among those who live in the country, ever trouble to give them more than a casual glance. They are always there, always with us, and we only miss them when they are gone. Such it will be with our wayside ash.

The ash (Fraxinus excelsior) is a tall and handsome tree which is found all over Europe but is a well-established native of Britain. It grows well in any soil but prefers a moist site and is a rival of the oak for the first place among British trees and although it lacks the rugged strength of the oak, it has a stately beauty that is equally impressive. It may grow to a height of 80 feet with a bole six feet in diameter but it is comparatively short-lived, beginning to decay at the end of 200 years and the position of this particular ash determined its fate because it stood on the edge of a drainage dyke and the ash dislikes a site where the soil moisture may become stagnant and so its close proximity to a slow flowing waterway must have hastened its end. It was blown down during the December storms on the eve of the new millennium and a close inspection revealed that the trunk had been weakened over the years by water and this was why it had eventually succumbed to the gales that swept across this open countryside after withstanding extreme weather conditions for well over a century.


Before it fell, this tree was about 40 feet high and possibly 150 years old which is quite astounding because this means that it was growing when Queen Victoria was on the throne and it was a sad sight seeing this once grand and proud tree with its large spreading crown lying on its side as though it had finally given up the fight. What an inglorious end to a tree that must have been revered by those who lived hereabouts in past times because there are many ancient superstitions concerning the ash. One belief was that if a live shrew mouse were buried in a hole bored in the trunk of an ash and then plugged up, a sprig of the tree would cure paralysis. The ash also had a reputation of magically curing warts which when pricked with a new pin that had been thrust in the tree would disappear after the following charm had been repeated:
 

Ashen tree, ashen tree,
Pray buy these warts of me.
 

But all is not lost. The ash is valued for its timber and wood carvers have laid claim to it and the farmer who owns this land has given it to them provided they cart it away and so it will have a new lease of life because the wood is pale and valued for its toughness and elasticity, in which quality it surpasses every other European tree. The wood is heavy, strong, stiff and hard and takes a high polish and bends well when seasoned and was a favourite material in olden days for spears and bows and can be used for more purposes than the wood of other trees. It is today in endless demand in coach building and for the manufacture of tools, from axe and spade handles to ladders and carts, and for sports equipment such as oars and hockey sticks, furniture, walking sticks and pegs, while the waste also makes a good fuel for burning, giving out no smoke, and produces a top quality charcoal.

Our ash tree has disappeared from the landscape but its wood will live on to give pleasure to another generation. Let us hope that our farmer plants a new one in its place.

Genealogy is one of the most popular subjects for those who use the Internet and since launching the Bourne web site in 1998 I have had many inquiries from around the world from people anxious to trace ancestors who lived in this town and the surrounding villages. The first thing new computer owners seem to do is to surf the net for a mention of their name or the place of their birth and those whose family originated in this locality invariably end up at the Bourne web site.

I am therefore adding a new feature which will be devoted entirely to family history and although this would at first seem to favour anyone living overseas it should also stimulate interest among those who reside here but are curious to find out what happened to their forebears who left for foreign parts in years past. For those of you who live abroad, I would mention that I write a regular column for our local newspaper on Internet affairs and genealogy is a frequent topic and I am inviting readers who wish to participate in this feature to add names in which they are interested with their telephone numbers and/or postal addresses and so we should have the area well covered for those busy with their family trees.

The new feature has an alphabetical index of names connected with Bourne and I have already combed through past email messages from various countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to compile a starting list which already has twenty names of specific families from this area that are being researched by relatives in this country and overseas. To those who would like to add a name to the list, please email me using the same format as that used in the Family History page and although there will be no restriction to the length of an entry, it might be useful to remember that brevity is by far the most effective method of evoking a response.

The Internet is embracing more and more people and a figure of 320 million users worldwide has been estimated by the year's end. Perhaps some of them out there are related to you.

Saturday 22nd January 2000

When I was a boy in the early thirties, we lived in constant dread of illness. Not coughs and colds, cuts and bruises which were always with us, but the very real possibility of contracting one of the more formidable diseases which were ever present in large working class communities such as ours where overcrowded living conditions were commonplace, food was short, clothing inadequate and the standards of hygiene way below those of today although mainly through ignorance rather than neglect. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, yellow jaundice, chicken pox, measles, mumps, meningitis and tuberculosis were the subject of constant discussion among mothers gossiping at the garden gate and all of these illnesses came to our street and claimed their victims while scabies, bilious attacks, boils, impetigo and constipation were frequent visitors among the kids who played at the kerbside.

These were the days before the introduction of the National Health Service when we depended on the panel patient system for our wellbeing and for the annual payment of one shilling each, the family's names would be added to the list of the nearest general practitioner who would then be obliged see you at times of illness although subsequent treatment and medicines would have to be paid for extra at the time.

My family was registered with a doctor who operated from a large Edwardian house on the main road into our town which meant a walk of over a mile if ever we needed to see him. He was in partnership with another doctor and their living quarters were upstairs while the ground floor was used for consultations, both having a room as their surgeries while a sitting room across the hall was used as a joint waiting room with an aspidistra in the corner, velvet curtains, upholstered chairs around the wall and a walnut loo table in the middle of the floor strewn with old magazines. There were no signs either outside or inside the house that this was a medical practice except for the brass plates bearing the names of the two doctors on the front wall and anyone entering had no reason to think that this was anything other than a family home.

A visit to the surgery was a forbidding affair for a child because it was a step into the unknown and schoolboy tales of medical horrors added to our anxieties. There was no organised system of appointments but each patient made a mental note of who was in the waiting room when they entered and then took their turn as the doctors tinkled on their respective handbells to signal "Next please" after the last patient had left. There was invariably a long wait, sometimes an hour, and even those who had the foresight to arrive early in an attempt to be first to see the doctor, would find a small crowd on the doorstep because others had the same idea.

Our doctor was a whisky-drinking Scotsman, a large fat man, weighing well over twenty stones, but despite his girth and massive weight, he had managed to struggle up the narrow stairs of our council house some years before to bring me into the world and therefore he always greeted me with a friendly smile whenever we met. His consulting room was more like a study with glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls while he sat in front of a roll top desk lit by a green-shaded library lamp, his immense body overflowing from a swivel chair with a gold watch chain draped across his waistcoat front and the only sign that this was a doctor's surgery was a white cabinet standing in the corner and next to it a table with a small white enamel bowl, a jug of water and instruments laid out beside it on a linen napkin.

Such meagre medical amenities were no deterrent to the doctor because it was here that he lanced boils and removed ingrowing toenails and performed other small surgical operations, usually with a local anaesthetic, a jet of ethyl chloride to freeze the affected area and kill the pain, before applying the dressings and writing a prescription for subsequent medication. All of this in the space of ten or fifteen minutes and as you left he would say "Leave the door open laddie" and after a few moments he would reach for his handbell and summon the next patient. There was no nurse and no receptionist. Just the doctor and when his partner was ill or on holiday, then he dealt with his patients too.

What changes we have seen in patient care since those days. Here in Bourne, a small market town, we have two modern medical practices staffed with doctors, nurses, receptionists and ancillary workers. The premises are luxurious, management is of the highest professional order while medical records, prescriptions and appointments are computerised. There is also access to a host of other associated services including physiotherapy, psychiatry, speech and language therapy, chiropody and dentistry. My old Scots doctor would never recognise the system today and even the language of the doctor-patient relationship has changed.

Now, one of them, the Hereward Group Practice, which moved into its new premises in Exeter Street in December 1998 with 9,000 patients on its register, has taken yet another step forward by going online and can be seen on the Internet. This is a highly professional web site listing all six partner doctors together with the practice team, their qualifications and duties and in addition to the administrative details of the practice there are many useful pages of information about patient rights, what you need in the home medicine chest, links to other useful medical and community sites, repeat prescription orders and a form for comments, suggestions and complaints. The site is a worthy addition to community medicine and should provide a wider understanding of today's role of the general practitioner.

The National Health Service is currently beleaguered by cash and staff shortages, mounting waiting lists for consultations and hospital appointments and an increase in complaints about treatment but despite this gloom that we hear daily from our politicians, the press, radio and television, most people out there are satisfied with the way in which they are being treated and the speed in which that treatment is given. If we do have cause to complain, we should pause first and think about the way it was.

Saturday 29th January 2000

We are experiencing a mild winter here in South Lincolnshire and there has been only one snowfall of note and that was on December 21st when we awoke to find the fen a blanket of white but its appearance was transitory and it had gone by lunchtime. There have been many severe overnight frosts that deter all winter growth and so the garden looks bare and we yearn for the those long summer days when we look out to see it full of colour as our seasonal flowers come into full bloom.

It was then with some surprise a few days ago that I found in a corner of my secluded garden on the very edge of the fen, a rose in flower and can find no possible reason why this should be because they normally appear only in season and dislike sub-zero temperatures. But there it was in full bloom after surviving many nights of frost and as fresh and as fragrant as though it were a summer's day and so I cut it and presented it to my wife and it now stands in a slender vase on the kitchen sill, a beautiful sight in the depths of winter and a reminder that spring will soon be on the way.

Those less experienced in the ways of our weather and more influenced by popular opinion will nod wisely and say that global warming is the reason for this horticultural rarity, a projected imminent climate change attributed to the greenhouse effect, and they will use other fashionable terms to describe the warm weather that sometimes comes our way at this time of the year when we are usually shivering from icy blasts and are kept indoors by drifting snow. Most of this talk only occurs during periods of extreme climatic conditions and is always media driven. At the first flash of lightning or the sound of a thunderclap, news editors immediately instruct their reporters to write a weather story and when temperatures climb in July and August the headlines scream "Phew! What a scorcher!" Prolonged rain means that "Britain is soaking wet" and when we have a long, dry spell they announce gloomily that "Severe drought looms" while after a few nights of high winds the front pages proclaim that "Freak storms threaten the country".

There is never any mention that we should expect it to be hot in summer and cold in winter and that if there is no snow one year, it does not mean that we will escape scot-free the next. News means bad news and good weather does not make news. Heavy snowfalls cause great inconvenience but they do not herald a new Ice Age any more than soaring summer temperatures and mild winters are a sign of global warming while short-lived phenomena such as El Nino, La Nina and now La Mama, which purport to threaten a global climate shift, give the newspapers more excuses to print their purple prose about the vagaries of weather when rain, blow or snow become wild and extreme.

A rise in the earth's temperature, later dubbed "the greenhouse effect", was first predicted in 1827 by the French mathematician Joseph Fourier (1768-1830). It was treated as a matter of small importance for the next 150 years and has only recently become a topic of public discussion. The subject is currently a fashionable one and we are therefore hearing many extravagant and ill-considered forecasts about our weather although it continues in its usual but unpredictable pattern, sometimes friendly, often hostile and always unreliable. Some seasons are colder than we expect, others are warmer. Some are wetter, others drier. There are windy spells and, more frequently, long periods of calm, breathless days.

I have observed the weather closely during my lifetime over much of the past century and realise that it has always been so. The truth is that fluctuations of climate have been with us since records began but it is only when meteorological conditions are manifest at their most severe and intense that they become a matter for media interest and public debate. It is the same in life. Turbulent times make the headlines but prolonged peace is bad for the publishers of newspapers.

While we were enjoying this mild spell, I received an email from a friend in Bangor, Massachusetts, U S A, bemoaning their unpredictable and inclement weather in which temperatures dropped to -30ºC and left snowfalls almost a foot deep that brought the city to a standstill until the snowploughs could get through. "Well", she said, "we are told that more snow is on the way and these bone-chilling temperatures have more than put an end to all of that nonsensical chatter about global warming."

My rose in bloom in January then is most unusual but it tells me one thing and one thing only: we are having a very mild winter here in England although next week, next month, next year, a heavy snowfall could bring the nation to a standstill and we will be back among the winters we used to know and all discussion of global warming will also vanish from the pages of our newspapers for a few weeks at least.

The most noteworthy of all Bourne's citizens was Robert Manning, the 14th century Lincolnshire monk who was instrumental in putting the ordinary speech of the English people of his time into a written form that is still recognisable. A brief history of his career is added today to Bourne Focus.

Remarkably, there is no mention of Robert Manning in Bourne Abbey although he is remembered by the Robert Manning School that has been named after him as is Manning Road that runs through the east of the town. There is also a statue to him of dubious merit, erected with the help of public money in Bourne Woods as part of woodland sculpture project launched in 1991 by the Forestry Commission in conjunction with the local authorities. This curious contribution purporting to represent Robert Manning is by the artist John Fortnum and is described by the Forestry Commission as follows: "The sculpture is most impressively approached by a gravelled path from the main track, at the beginning of which a giant footprint gives our first intimation of the sculpture's presence. The path winds through dark pines, emerging at the rear of this gigantic piece. A vertical cone of pine logs soars 30 feet, broken only by the cast concrete head which gazes with remarkable presence across an open area with ponds over the trees beyond towards Sempringham Abbey, the home of Robert's Gilbertine monks. This work with internal ladder and viewing platform, is believed to be the largest work completed by a British sculptor working alone". The statue has been badly damaged over the years and on one occasion attempts were made to set it on fire although it is not known whether vandals or art lovers were to blame.

Many cities, towns and villages in Britain have marked the millennium by launching some project or other but there has been no similar initiative in Bourne. Perhaps our councillors lack the imagination or the will for such munificence but they could have done no better had they decided to erect a plaque or a memorial to the man who gave our English language its present shape. Instead, his reputation will continue to slide into obscurity. For a man whose life's work has brought honour to our town, Robert Manning deserves better.

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