Two Visits to the Cinema

On February 3rd Nick and I went to the cinema with my in-law siblings to see The Artist.  On March 2nd I went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Maddy, Andrew and Elisabeth.  What happened inbetween is both an Open Chapter and a Closed Book.  So here to plug the void is a selection of images:

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The Runaway Jan’ry

February 1st, one month down and 11 to go before the next year turns.  What a chilling thought.  As I review the past month, icy temperatures have hit the UK.  The cold snap, according to forecasters, is due to an area of high pressure that has extended across Europe from Siberia and is expected to reach its peak at the weekend.  We had a small fall of snow at Winterborne K on Monday, otherwise it has been a matter of hugging the Aga and getting out the winter woollies which have languished in drawers until now.  The cold weather is timely in one sense; 65 years ago I was born in one of the coldest winters on record when, I have been told, my teenage uncle trudged to Portsmouth Grammar School on the morning of my birth, through a foot of snow.

It’s been a real mixed bag of a month since New Year.  I’ve been up to London a couple of times; once to attend a Conch Society meeting at the NHM and on the second occasion I met Dan at his office in East London, we went to lunch then walked over to see the Occupy London sites at Finsbury Square and at St Paul’s.

Dan and I stood in a small marquee, and watched from the margins, as a vociferous group sat in circular forum and barracked a couple of fellow protesters who seemed to be ‘in charge’ of the meeting.  They were trying in vain to obtain approval for some relatively modest, it seemed to me, expenditures, firstly for a fiver to compile an emailing address list of supporters, and secondly for funding someone (to the tune of about £130) to stake a claim on a new potential Occupy site, should the appeal against eviction from the St Paul’s frontage fail.  In this microcosm you could see why true, pure democracy can never be achieved.

In this month Tobias Maxwell was born.  With his birth he brings the gift of motherhood to my niece Briony and the gift of grandmotherhood to my very deserving sister.  Towards the end of the month he was brought to Winterborne K for tea and cake.  He also met a second great-aunt and his great grandmother.

We are managing a health issue with our 8-year old feline.  Upon our return from Mauritius we noticed that Rooney was drinking copious amounts of water and seemed permanently hungry.  A trip to the vet confirmed my suspicion that he has diabetes.  At the time of posting he is being monitored to assess what level of insulin he should receive.  He may not have to be on such a regime permanently.  We have switched his food from the very convenient dried biscuits originally recommended by the owner of Rooney’s mother, to the rather more toothsome-smelling sachets of meat in jelly.

In the garden we have taken two steps forward and one back.  We have had panels of trellis made for the brick wall which forms our eastern boundary.  Andy the carpenter has fixed them and we have started to weave such climbers as we have through the wooden  fretwork.  This has increased our privacy levels somewhat.  On the other hand, under neighbour Anne’s guidance, Nick has topped the Victoria plum trees and removed the young Ash which was crowding the younger plum tree out.  He has also started to shape the southern boundary hedge, bringing the height down so the bushes can thicken up.

Free time has been given to dealing with the mollusc sortings from field trips to Skye in 2009 and Connemara in 2011.  Identification and segregation of species, tubing, and labelling all take inordinate amounts of time. As that task progresses I become more inclined to discard some material for which I already have plenty of reference material from mixed localities.  This desire to put my conchological house in order is derived from the shining example of Stella Maris who lives in Cornwall and who started the task of dissemination of specimens, artefacts and books at least 10 years ago, possibly a bit more.

In the middle of the month I drove down to Cornwall to visit Stella, also to visit Dave Fenwick,  a regular contributor of mollusc records and other sightings, and to stay overnight with friends Pam and Andrew.  On my drive home I made a detour to spend a second night away, as guests of Bas and Rosemary, friends who live in the sticks on Exmoor.  Bas is a fellow sheller so lots of shop was talked, and as the current President he was in a position to rattle my cage over the resolution of certain conundrums in respect of the biological recording database we maintain.  Not a man for excuses.

As this first month of 2012 takes its leave, I sit at my screen, tapping out the memories that sprang most readily to mind.  In the course of surfing for a line about the passage of days I was beached on a website which purports to offer an explanation for the familiar phenomenon.  Have you ever heard the phrase “time flies while you’re having fun”? Do you wonder why older people say time flies while little kids can’t wait to grow up? Or what about those moments that “last for eternity”? This might seem like a mystery but it’s actually very simple.  Open up this link and read on………….

Charlie and the Great Big Hot-Water Bottle

It was Charlie who coined it.  The waterbed he said is like a great big hot water bottle!  And he is not wrong.  It warms you gently and rocks you to sleep and keeps you that way as long as it can.  The visiting grandchildren this year took turns and two of them overslept by two hours.  Someone said to me ‘A waterbed?’ That’s for ill people isn’t it?’  Well if it is good enough for the ailing, it should be even better for the well.

After a prolonged absence of water beddery, arising from our holiday in Mauritius and the waiting list of family who wanted a turn over New Year, I finally sought hot water bottle sanctuary this afternoon, with my current read, for a rest.  Later with the light fading (but not this one!) I floated back up to consciousness feeling very much revived after a busy interlude.

Barns left this morning taking JACS back to Cholsey.  Coming back into the house it was at one awesomely quiet, and disconcerting too.  My mother always said that we young families filled the house when we stayed at the parental home in Weymouth and I know what she meant.

Whilst JACS were with us we taught them to play Newmarket.  This is a card game I played with my parents and siblings often, and always when we were on holiday.  The essence of the game is ably described by this blogger except to say that whereas in his version the 4 Kings are the ‘horses’ we play with the Ace of Spades, the Queen of Clubs, the Jack of Diamonds and the King of Hearts as the four horses.  It is a perfect game for children, it’s about chance and a bit of concentration and with multiple opportunities to gain winnings.

We also play the game with shells, cowries in fact.  We have a tall jar of them, accumulated over the years from such places of holiday pilgrimage as Shell Beach on Herm and Prussia Cove in Cornwall.  On the former beach you can find them scattered liberally along the strandlines but in Cornwall you must comb your fingers through the shingle in Bessy’s Cove to rake the small pink shelly ovals to the surface.  Memories of competitions with the Goldmans…..

It is appropriate that we use these tiny cowry shells as our currency for Newmarket.  Cowries have a pedigree when it comes to their use as money.  Cowries, particularly the Money Cowrie (C. moneta) and Ring Cowrie (C. annulus) have circulated as currency in more places in the world than any coin.   In China, from 1200-800 BC, cowrie shells were important valuables and in India cowries have been found in association with coins from sites dating from the first century AD.  Cowrie shells arrived in Africa by the 10th century and possibly earlier, preceding European colonization by some hundreds of years.  Their use as money spread throughout the African continent and eventually European settlers and traders brought Indo-Pacific cowries (both C. moneta and C. annulus) to North America where they were readily accepted by the native peoples in barter.  You can read more from the link at the head of this paragraph.

I wrote the text for that Conchological Society web page a couple of years ago, and the Society is going to claim rather more time over the coming weeks.  There are many loose ends to tie, some conundrums to solve, some biological recording data to process.  This year is earmarked to get it all signed off…………… note to self, review progress in a couple of months!

Christmas in Mauritius

After a year of dotting between WK and St V we felt like some winter sun.  So we opted off the festive merry-go-round and took ourselves to Mauritius for Christmas.  We were lucky to have a recommendation from Charles and Susie, who had visited the hotel a month or so earlier.  Our every need was catered for and I will remember the holiday for the warmth, the balmy breezes, the sunshine, the very equable lagoon sea and the variety of gastronomic delights offered in the main restaurant. I also read novels to my heart’s content on my new Kindle.

Each day we draped a pink towel over our chosen sunbed, and as the sea lapped gently close by we gazed out to the reef-line, marked by the crests of white surf breaking over it.  The reef marks the seaward edge of the relatively shallow lagoon around the island, before the seabed falls steeply away to deeper, clearer water.  Nick fished these deeper waters when he booked himself for fishing one day.  Outside the milky millpond waters of the lagoon Nick was surprised to find himself afloat amid 3-4 metre-high rolling waves.  The promise of marlin and sailfish did not materialise but he enjoyed being afloat and chatting to the boatman – another Nicolas..

But the holiday was not without its minor glitsches which were entirely self-inflicted: we each had to fend off a gastric upset and I managed to burn a bit of myself badly on the first day by failing to cover that area with Factor 50 and then taking an unscheduled nap under my shade whilst the sun crept round to find me underneath.

It was a holiday of luxury and self-indulgence but on Christmas Day I found myself a bit distracted, glancing intermittently at my watch which I had kept on British time, and wondering what our nearest and dearest would be doing back home.  This was only the second time in 40 years of marriage that we have taken ourselves away at Christmas.  On the first occasion we booked ourselves into a hotel in Padstow where we celebrated a Christmas which was orchestrated for us.  That felt a bit strange bit I guess we had to try it again to see how it would feel.  It still felt odd.

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Winterludes

After Winterval comes a mixed bag interval whilst we count down to our trip to Maurice’s Island.  The following week saw me witness young Ted, crowned and cloaked as he carried out his kingly duties in the school nativity play.  I met Vikky for lunch whilst in Surrey and busied myself at the old homestead, a helpful Granny.

Returning to WK I spent the following day at my screen, honing a Powerpoint presentation for the Conch. Soc. at the Natural History Museum. I have already spent many hours at the screen retrieving suitable photos from numerous folders to compile a talk about my shore activities along the Normandy coast.  The amount of preparation time has been utterly disproportionate to the 45 minutes the talk will take.

Saturday arrives, I give my talk and the relief is immense.  Shortly after the meeting we meet Dan outside the Museum and take delivery of Lola and Ruby who will spend Sunday with us whilst their parents party.   We drive back to Dorset and pop the children into their beds.  On Sunday I bring out all the pens, pencils, paper and show them the magic delights of carbon paper.  After lunch we go to the time capsule cinema in Dorchester to see Arthur Christmas.  Before bed we have tales of Mog, Little Rabbit Lost and Angelina on the wobbly bed.

On the 13th Nick and I take a birthday walk, a very blustery one, and in the evening we join Maddy and Andrew for a curry at the excellent Rajpoot in Dorchester.  On Thursday we drive to Surrey so I can join my Book Groupies to discuss Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending and A D Miller’s Snowdrops.  Meanwhile, whilst Charles and I discuss the merits of the books we have read with the others, Nick takes Susie to dinner at The Withies.  This restaurant has expanded around the core dining area, which has remained pretty much unchanged since we first moved to Godalming nearly 40 years ago.

The clock is now ticking.  We join Rollo and her family for a festive Sunday lunch party in East Chaldon.  Monday dawns, we are on the threshold of a flight from rain into sunshine.  Claire and JACS arrive for some Dorset days.  Hugs all round and the stage is set…

Winterval at Winterborne

Christmas came early for the Light Clan and extended family.  We needed to find a day when we could all congregate for a seasonal celebration.  The first Saturday in December found us converging at TOW for a late afternoon feast.  I cooked Venison Casserole, Moroccan Chicken and a Lamb Curry.  Thanks to a good crop of French strawberries I conjured up Eton mess and my sisters provided a Christmas pudding and Mince pies.  Once again we pulled Christmas Crackers in the big hall, and we lined the children up the staircase in age order and captured the moment.

This year we were missing Sam and Joel who were otherwise engaged at their Harry Potter-themed Cub and Scout camp.  Out under canvas!   I was suitably impressed.  I thought H&S had gone so mad children would not be allowed to camp outdoors in December.  And Dan had a workshop to run in Luxembourg.  But it was a full house all the same.  The children all had a present to unwrap and the Lights exchanged their gifts before the children went to bed.  It was a busy and tiring day for everyone but no less convivial for that.  We’ll be doing our respective things come December 25th………….. and there is a rumour that TOW will be reinvaded on the 30th!

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Savouring French Flavours and Customs

Mid-November finds us in St Vaast.  We had set aside the best part of two weeks to catch up with building work (some hope ) and our French friends.  Nick spends much of the time in the garden, and makes a few fishing trips as the squid are about.   He also catches whiting and Francois gives us two dozen fresh herrings (given to him by a patient).  We eat them fresh for a couple of days, enjoying the roes as a separate delicacy, and then hot-smoke others.  We often get rather good food items passed to us by our French GP – I rather think that customs of yore still prevail in rural France.  In the matter of my ‘flu jab I find it refreshingly amusing that I can buy the vaccine over the counter in the pharmacy, and instead of making an appointment to have it administered in my doctor’s ‘Cabinet’, I am required to fetch some alcohol (in the absence of Calvados, Bombay Sapphire will do), to roll up my sleeve, to be swabbed with gin, to receive the injection in the privacy of my own kitchen.  Then Francois goes fishing with Nick.

I pass the time indoors, sitting at the computer screen, trawling my numerous folders of pictures in order to start compiling a Powerpoint presentation for the December meeting of the Conchological Society.   Entitled ‘Blogging a Way along the Normandy Coast’ the idea is to draw on some of my blog posts and talk about the various beaches and shores which have provided pleasure and provender since we bought our house here.

I do find time to cook in the kitchen which has also been our living room and study this past year.   I make some seaweed rolls and winkle butter.  The former were inspired by some bread rolls we were served at Hotel Fuchsias along the road, and the butter is a recipe I found in a book by Jacqui Wood called ‘Prehistoric Cooking’.  That recipe will soon be found on the revamped Conchological Society’s website, which goes live on January 1st.

Then we do a curry evening chez Poulet.  I cook it all and we cart it over the road.  The lamb curry is extremely well received (thanks to a great recipe from Waitrose) and they love the red lentil dall.  It will be good when we can entertain in our home again.

We are still cropping a few raspberries and figs.  One day Nick lugs a large pot of lemons up to the house.  There must be about 50 from the small tree in the walled garden and we have left some for our neighbours.  We have now found a way to get the best out of our lemons.  When first picked the skins are thick, the layer of pith dominates and the flesh is dry.  Kept indoors for 2-3 weeks the skin becomes more pliable, the pith dries out a bit and thins, the flesh becomes juicy and we have very usable lemons.

The night before we return to Dorset we eat supper at Le Debarcadere with Jean-Pierre and Tanou, then we cross the Channel with a car loaded to the gunnels, much of the space being taken by the small scaffolding structure we will assemble in order to hang Victoria Doran’s pictures in the hall at TOW.

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Protected: A Cluster of Rubies

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And the Other Prize Was………

…………. a Venus Vase, gift of Peter Dance.  Just over a year ago a volunteer from the Sheringham Preservation Society sent me a photo of a bizarre object.  It was an exhibit on display in their Shell Gallery and by their kind permission I have included the image in my slideshow.  (Personally, I think the single unadorned structure is so beautiful as a simple funnel that it needs no embellishment by being mounted in sextuplicate on a Pecten shell to form a ‘candlelabra’!  I was completely foxed and could hardly believe the object was biological in nature (apart from the scallop shell base).  I forwarded the photo to Peter who emailed me right back to tell me exactly what the object was, and with the offer to give an example he owned, to me.  I accepted with pleasure.

Also known as a Venus’ Flower Basket the object is the skeleton of an Hexactinellid sponge, the skeleton, or test, being made of siliceous spicules (hence their name Glass Sponges).  Glass sponges are relatively uncommon and are mostly found at depths from 450 to 900 metres.  They are found in all oceans of the world, although they are particularly common in Antarctic waters.  They are funnel-shaped animals, ranging from 10 to 30 centimetres in height, with sturdy lattice-like internal skeletons made up of fused spicules of silica. The body is relatively symmetrical, with a large central cavity that, in many species, opens to the outside through a sieve formed from the skeleton.

Being deep water animals relatively few people have seen or studied glass sponges.  An exception is the “Venus’s Flower Basket” (Euplectella aspergillum).   In some Asian cultures, such as Japan, these sponges are given as marriage good luck charms – rather like horseshoes.  Often this species of sponge has two tiny shrimps (always a male and a female) living, symbiotically, inside the sponge’s body cavity. They swim in as larvae and are then trapped and mature inside the sponge’s mesh-like tissues. They would appear to be perfectly happy though, as they feed off the filtered food debris left by the sponge!  Any young can escape from the sponge as they are small enough to swim through the mesh of the sponge’s tissue and can move to find their own sponge ‘des res’.  If you peer through the mesh on my example, you can see the exoskeletal crustacean debris of its former occupants.

Many people may well have encountered the cleaned and dried skeletons of these sponges in an art class, or seen them in a Victorian glass dome display, as they have always been popular for their delicate beauty. Mine sits alongside other fragile marine curiosities, such as the Paper Nautilus, in a conchological vitrine.

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A Golden Opportunity

I’ve been collecting seashells since I was five years old, or thereabouts. The three years I spent in Hong Kong between the ages of 6 and 9 provided frequent opportunities to glean treasures from the beaches. My father worked in the dockyard on Hong Kong and took a launch across the narrow waterway that separates the island from the mainland. We lived in a verandahed two-storey house near the water frontage in the dockyard in Kowloon. My primary schooling was a morning affair; in the afternoons I was bussed with other children of Services’ families to spend time on local beaches…….. Silverstrand, Bays with the names Deepwater, Clearwater, Big Wave.

There must be many children who pick shells up from beaches and take them home. The fate of most of these shells must surely be File 13. Luckily my mother kept our shells, stored them in chocolate boxes, and these boxes found their way back to England when we returned to resume the remainder of my childhood in north London.

Many years later I found myself, as a young mother, cooped up in our house in Godalming with three sick children. The month was February and each of the 3 children had its own brand of winter virus: ear-infection, asthma, head-cold. In those days – late 1970s-’80s – we kept poorly children indoors for the duration of a fever.

My mother had recently passed the choc boxes of shells to me after an attic clear-out. I also had two rough wooden trays – relics of the full size Brie cheese we had bought for a Christmas party. The four of us sorted, paired, grouped, and then matched the shells like with like. We arranged them in the circular trays and when the children were well enough we went to the library and borrowed a book to name the shells. In the back of the book were the details of a shell-fanciers’ organisation; a learned society which invited membership and held meetings at the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. I joined.

Thirty years later, along the trail of a journey of discovery which never palls, I have a network of contacts in Conchology - an unlikely community, in many ways, of friends, colleagues, acquaintances who share a common fascination for the World of the Shell.

Many shells have a certain myth, mystique or anecdote that surrounds them and this holds true for the Golden Cowry. It is a marine snail in the family Cypraeidae named for its brilliant orange shell. It is among the largest of the world’s 250 known cowry species, reaching four inches (ten centimeters) in length.

Nocturnal and reclusive, these molluscs spend most of their lives hiding under rocks in the cracks and crevices of reefs in the South Pacific, emerging at night to feed on sponges and algae. Golden cowries are egg-shaped with a flat base and a narrow opening. Like other cowries, their shells are smooth and highly polished. They protect their glossy finish by wrapping their brightly coloured mantle lobes almost completely around their shells when they move. The mantle also secretes a substance which constantly renews the surface patina.

Golden cowry shells have been used as currency and religious symbols throughout the South Pacific. On the island of Fiji, they were worn on a necklace by a chieftain as a symbol of status and rank. For this reason they have been highly sought after and specimens have, until relatively recently, exchanged hands for high prices. Golden cowries are easier to find in the wild, which has reduced the price and brought less than perfect specimens down to a budget price. For less than the cost of a couple of pints of beer I am able to bring a Golden Cowry to Winterborne Kingston.