Second year of this blog, still so much to learn, but my new book is ready
Cassandra’s Phoenix – out October 18th, Kindle.
Would like to share this with a close friend,
Love wouldn’t be so disastrous if the right people loved each other. No loving family, sadly, but Cassandra seemed to have everything else, even brains. When Laurie Rendall didn’t want her, Cassie moved in with clever Mark, thought he loved her. One day, they’d marry. They had each other and their child, lived in a pretty village. Mark’s software’s brilliant, Cassie’s journalism hard-hitting. Then Mark fell in love, must marry the mother of his new child. When Cassie and Mark’s weeks old daughter died in a car crash, Mark and Felicity claimed four year old Ella too. Activist, allegedly, is Cassie fit to be a parent?
‘ Go away.’ says Anna, Cassie’s omniscient lawyer friend, Pangloss to Cassie’s Candide, ‘Let the dust settle.’
On her travels with Ella, Cassie records broken lives, finds healing. Some old friends seem like Job’s. Anna’s changed too. Then Rendall finds Cassie again.
- Green Pompeii ?
The bracken’s dying at last , fading to a pale red gold . Dry, brittle, in this state, so long as the rain holds off, it’s worth filling a few sacks. Peat free compost, if you live surrounded by the stuff that shrouds our world from May to November. Except on the highest hills, bracken rules, poisonous, invincible. Delayed and stunted for weeks by the lockdown drought that left us without water, this year’s bracken topped three metres, rivalling Japanese Knotweed. Giant Hogweed and Himalayan Balsam
Himalayan Balsam, Endless torrential rain, summer heat, hungry mozzies and clegs lurking ? Bracken loved all of that, made up for lost time. Its rivals are official criminals, on the list of notifiable plants, but allegedly, the young fronds – fiddlesticks – can be eaten. Like fugu fish ? Bracken’s laced with cyanide, but none of Christie’s killers tried to dispatch victims with a dose of bracken. Hiding a body dosed with strychnine or arsenic would be easy enough though. In the bracken belt, footpaths and bridleways disappear into summer rainforests, My usual companion’s about 6ft 3, or 190. I’m just under 5ft 2 or 156. Most years, I can spot his head. Not this summer. The bracken won. Searching for the footings of any structures picked up on Google Earth and LIDAR, we gave up, defeated for the duration by the green Pompeii that smothers our Northern hills. Keeping track of each other was hard enough. Imagine, if you can, a vertical bog, clothed in bracken up to three metres high, with occasional orchids, or more likely, Himalayan Balsam as landmarks.
Slowly, a lost world emerges from its summer shrouds. Unlike the lava from Vesuvius that smothered Pompeii, bracken dies and fades away. Green Pompeii’s over for another year. But our kind of archaeology doesn’t involve heat, dust, lizards, brothels, frescoes, pyramids, lost cities like Kweneng or Khami, or even so much as a Viking sword. We search for the ghosts of buildings,. The footings that might be all that’s left. Why now ? Once the bracken’s down, the shadows of lost buildings record where people used to live. In 1901, twenty five children under 15 lived in our hamlet of seven houses. Today ? No children, and three of the seven houses are holiday homes. Around nineteen hundred years ago, Roman soldiers from North Africa, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Iraq and Romania marched across the skyline, building the wall from Solway to Newcastle. Complete with souvenirs, the Wall was major tourist attraction for Romans , long before Edward I built all those ruined castles in Wales and Henry VIII sacked far more monasteries than any Vikings.
This week, the bracken’s down – an announcement like that scene in Seven Brides, when the snow melts at last, Echo Pass opens, and the outraged gun toting fathers, brothers and even the pastor can reclaim their kidnapped daughters. Time to sort out he archaeology kit, 30 m tape measure, GPS, cameras, not forgetting the red and white metre pole, essential for scale in photos – and check the forecast. Even without shrouding bracken, the right kind of weather’s essential. Reaching a promising site, we need to view every aspect, including, for any former settlement, the nearest water supply, and the view – not aesthetically, but for security., scanning the horizon for Picts, Scots, or even Vikings. On the ground features will never look like Google earth, or LIDAR
Last winter, checking potential Roman signalling stations, near lead mines, we found that one location now looked nothing like the LIDAR image. Masses of rock and earth had fallen down the hillside. Overnight, torrential rain can trigger a landslip, that feature you hoped to record could be gone forever…
East of the Sun, West of the Moon, sat nav won't like that 