For an occasional, ill-informed stargazer like myself, I think the only pastime that comes close to watching for shooting stars around the time of a known, annual meteor shower is waiting for a fish to take a fly or lure. You stand, or this year sit, knowing that one could potentially appear any time. However, it’s still a fantastic thrill when something actually instantly flashes from nowhere amongst the background scene of a myriad of stars before racing on its brief path to oblivion.

Unlike fishing where if one strikes, hooks, plays and lands or nets a fish, there’s something physical to see or hold – shooting stars just sear a memory in your brain. Of a night, a time, a year. Although as memories fail, it’s really handy to have a blog like this to remind oneself just how rarely one’s watched a multi-shooting star session. Much to my surprise, it was only last December that was nearly as good as this year, as my best-ever shooting star session. However, the weather in 2022 was completely different after a run of clear, dry days and bitingly cold weather down to minus 7 degrees C with a keen Northerly wind. However, I did see about 15 stars.

In some ways this year was more special since I’d remembered about the optimum dates for Geminid watching, done some preparatory reading and been encouraged by spotting my first one whizz above the yard as I popped out shortly after dark to see how clear the sky was. Looking for Orion, and his distinctive 3-star belt, which is one of the few constellations I can recognise, I spotted it quite close to the East/South East horizon. The advice I’d found was to take a diagonal line from Orion’s bright foot star through the belt to Betelgeuse – the most elevated, Northern, and slightly reddish star. And then extend this line for about a held-out hand’s width which will take you into the area of the sky where the less obvious Gemini constellation lies. And in particular a couple of brighter stars, called Pollux and Castor. Since the best advice was to look up at about 60 degrees above horizontal, I’d set up two of our metal chairs with cushioned seats, suggested to Fiona that the sky was clear enough to be worth sitting out for a bit, and well wrapped, we headed out after 9 pm. I reckoned I saw about 14 over half an hour, and even better Fiona spotted 4. Her cold tolerance isn’t as good as mine, and historically she often returns inside just as a sequence of meteors appears. The following night in just 5 minutes I glimpsed another 4.

The Geminids were only discovered in the 1860’s, as an apparently new phenomenon, with a few stars radiating out from this particular zone of the sky, and were noticed independently by several astronomers in the Northern hemisphere. (Sadly, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, the radiant area of the sky rarely rises much above the horizon so the display is always less dramatic). I’ve failed miserably with photography of meteors, but even the technically superb images like this one, by Nigel Waters aren’t really reflective of what you experience.

There are obviously two other critical points for seeing meteors clearly. Firstly, how dark the sky is at the point of viewing. We’re very fortunate to live in an area defined by the Bortle dark sky scale, as being 3, or below, where 10 is a very illuminated urban sky, and 1 is a truly dark rural sky. Unlike much of the UK:

But secondly, the phase of the moon around the time of the meteor shower. I only realised after the event, that 2023 was one of the best years in recent times, with no moon visible for most of the night. The chart below from the Wikipedia page shows just how much of an impact this can have from year to year, and how the predicted maximum hourly meteor count can vary.

All this wordy waffle pre-amble could be distilled to three brief moments, and just one loud, repeated sound, when the three best shooting stars appeared, brighter than the brightest planet in the sky, and leaving lingering, visible tails.

Trailing away for …… Seconds????

Each time, I couldn’t help myself, reflexly exclaiming to the vast silent space above me.

WOOAAHHHHH!

Just after posting this, I found a wonderful recording of a contemporary carol, only uploaded on 18/12/2023, which seems rather appropriate to include here. Sung beautifully by the Recordare choir, it’s Ben Ponniah’s wonderful carol ‘Seeing The Star‘.

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Much more predictable for me now, above the special molehill-strewn turf of the upper hay meadow, is the arrival of our immigrant woodcock, back from Kazakhstan for our rich earthworm winter pickings. I can attempt to capture these on camera, at the limits of its technical ability in low light. Starting from the very first sighting – almost to the minute, the same as last year, around 5.15pm on bonfire night, November 5th. 4 days later 4 were sighted. Soon swelling by the clear dusk on December 1st to a fabulous dozen or so in just 20 minutes.

However no sounds of delight from me on seeing these. Or indeed the pleasure of sitting down. Rather standing silently, well wrapped in dark clothing beside the tall sleeper gate post at the bottom of the field, with the camera steadied on its top, and trying to press the shutter and pan as the birds flew in, or past. I reckon I did well to capture about 7 of these in this one session. It’s wonderful to see them, so far, still managing to complete their epic migration cycle to and fro, over war-torn Ukraine, to make it back to the safety of these sparsely populated Welsh hills.

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From my records, the last time we had such a gloomy December was back in 2015, which was significantly worse with higher rainfall and even less light – take away the first 2 days of the month this year, and it would indeed be a close run thing though.

However, a bonus from this gloomy and therefore generally mild month, after early December’s 2 hard frosts, and a flurry of wet snow, has been that the early snowdrops are now beginning to emerge. In 2015 I recorded we had about 20 different cultivars open by Christmas. This year we’ll perhaps do even better. A consequence of this was that for the first time, I was able to see honey bees visiting open snowdrop flowers in early December – December 11th in fact, when a brief sunny interlude with light winds saw our 4 remaining viable colonies active – albeit with very variable degrees of activity.

Appropriately enough, the snowdrop I first saw a bee inside was Galanthus elwesii ‘Gabriel’. This form was discovered in the eighties at the Avon Bulbs Nursery, which sadly I see is about to close, following the recent death of their amazing galanthophile and main snowdrop propagator, and finder, Alan Street. ‘Gabriel’ was so named because its outer segments (tepals) have a tendency to spread wide, like angel wings, in mild weather – thus allowing easier access to any nearby honey bees. I watched this bee for a while and checked temperatures – the nearby ground surface was only 6.5/7 degrees C. The base of the ovary was about 8.5 degrees C. However, a key part of the bee’s ability to forage at such low temperatures was the direct insolation warmth from the sun’s rays. As soon as the sun disappeared behind a cloud, the bee struggled, and I could see it gradually shutting down with hypothermia. It would only have a roughly 50-metre flight back to any of the hives, but since its flight muscles have to be around 35 degrees C to take off, it looked like it was doomed.

Fortunately, a few minutes later the sun re-appeared and the bee had disappeared – hopefully back to excite its co-workers with the prospect of goodies to be discovered for the intrepid few to venture out around the shortest days of the year.

I was pleased to deliver my contribution to the Honey Bee Watch (HBW) cafe last month, on the subject of winter forage options for honey bees in more temperate climates.

Just a week ago HBW hosted another fascinating symposium exploring just how “unmanaged” honey bees should be described – “Wild, Feral or Free-Living”? Steve Rogenstein, HBW’s lead co-ordinator, explained at the beginning that this is of some relevance since the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) which is the primary global authority on “the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it”, currently lists the Western honey bee (WHB) species as “data deficient”. They’re not convinced that the WHB, Apis mellifera mellifera, even still exists, “in the wild”. See more here.

The excellent 4 speakers with research experience from Sweden, Germany, France and the USA, all working with “wild” colonies had some fascinating insights, and the discussion that followed raised lots of interesting questions:

Is the genetic makeup of free-living colonies significantly different to neighbouring managed ones? Possibly not. Part of the reason honey bees perhaps shouldn’t be viewed as being domesticated is that there’s really very limited ability to control the mating of the queen bee – barring technically very fiddly and rarely performed artificial insemination. Most virgin queens therefore fly out and mate with many different drones from any other colonies in the locality, be they “wild” or managed.

Much has been made in recent years by many ecologists of the negative impact that “invasive species” honey bees can have on other native, and often solitary bee species. However, much of this research has been carried out where the only honey bees in the area are living in managed colonies, not free-living ones.

Why is it that studied “wild” honey bee colonies in forests in Germany which all tend to use nesting cavities created by black woodpeckers have a survival rate of less than 10% in their first year? The research discovered that these colonies were mainly derived from the immigration of swarms into the forests from neighbouring managed colonies. Whereas studies of “wild” honey bees in a large forested area in remote Sonoma County, California, with no nearby managed colonies, have survival rates of nearer 80%.

The Swedish contributor cleverly played around with semantics. And discussed whether “rich”, or “poor” might be provocative alternative terms to apply instead of “wild” or “managed”. The “rich” honey bees living in trees, or wall cavities, get to choose their own nest sites which tend to be much better insulated than many modern hives. They get to keep everything that they collect as nectar, and never get any nasty chemicals chucked at them. In contrast, the “poor” managed colonies probably have to live in colder, draughtier accommodation, often have their nest regularly disrupted and opened, much of their stores removed and substituted with junk food, and are even periodically subjected to chemical treatments.

Another fascinating insight was that in many countries, describing a colony as “feral” or “wild” invites state authorised destruction of the bees, as a potential disease reservoir – even though many such “wild” colonies” can apparently survive just as successfully and with lower mortality rates than many managed hives.

One of the interesting points from the follow-on Q&A was from Derek Mitchell, a British beekeeper and research scientist in the field of fluid thermodynamics, who raised the issue that the German bees may be dying out because the tree cavities are simply too small to allow the bees to maintain temperatures during the winter months. His other recent research uses powerful computer programmes to model the influence of honey bee body diameter (and thus volume) on heat retention within a hive (“Honey bee (Apis mellifera) size determines colony heat transfer when brood covering or distributed”).

It proposes an explanation of the evolutionary pressures which have probably transformed Northern climate honey bees into having hairier, wider bodies than their more tropical cousins.

I’ll retrospectively include a link here to the symposium videos when they’re available online.

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The graph below, reproduced from a recent financial advice magazine, caught my eye. The concept that I’ve long passed the peak, and am well into a “decumulation” zone of wealth possession, tied in with recent thoughts about both the garden and our home. However I wonder how few will time their decumulation with such precision?

The garden has to be nearing its peak – at least in our time as stewards. For sure some bulbs, trees, and maybe even the meadows will continue to improve. The challenge will increasingly be the maintenance required to keep things looking good. In 2011, when I fashioned the spruce stumps into mushroom forms around the garden, I reckoned that they would probably decay and deteriorate around the same time as the gardeners. The first few are now looking a bit ropey, but still standing! Indeed the text I wrote on our About Us and the blog page back in 2010 seems apt. ‘Like a garden changing, maturing, and ageing with time and the seasons, I see the main value of the blog as recording information and experiences, and reflecting the blogger’s own development, struggles and ageing over the longer term.’

Around the house and outbuildings, our reluctance to ever throw anything out, since it might just come in handy one day, or be useful in the future, has on reflection, been a bit of a curse, and gradually created a clutter-filled property. So a big drive is on to decumulate! We were much helped here by the advice of our older son’s partner who is having to deal with a similar situation with her ageing parents – keep doing it regularly, take a bag and fill it, even if you can’t go to the tip immediately. And so far it’s both working and proving to be remarkably therapeutic.

But we’re obviously starting with the easy pickings – things we haven’t used for years or had indeed forgotten we ever had, hidden away at the back of cupboards or barns. We’ve set ourselves a (hopefully realistic) two-year target, and I’m sure whatever happens by, or before then, we’re much more able to even tackle the task now than we will be in later years.

In so doing, I made a lovely discovery, whilst dismantling an old wardrobe. Not any old wardrobe, but a lovely oak veneered wardrobe which had been part of my paternal grandparent’s furniture. My grandmother Lois survived Fred but died shortly before Fiona and I married. We were allowed their spare bedroom furniture set – the rest of their belongings, including a couple of glass cabinets of lovely Royal Worcester vases were shipped off by Dad to an auction in London, where apparently they sold for peanuts. (“There’s no pockets in shrouds”  – a wonderful comment lobbed at me across the consulting room table one day, by the lovely Mr Ettle, a painter/decorator client. It took me a while to work out what he meant, but as a philosophical take on life, it’s always stuck with me – more so in recent years).

We liked the furniture’s solid construction but hated the dark brown stain to the oak, so between us, we stripped it off with Nitromors in the days when this worked, and we weren’t so bothered by toxic fumes in our lungs. The dressing table was tackled outside at Fiona’s home, the wardrobe in our upstairs flat at Humberstone Road Cambridge, where we set up home in a college flat, just after our wedding and before my fourth year started. Fiona remembers we stripped the wardrobe in situ, and because of lack of space, the side facing the corner remained un-stripped! Only later getting tackled after one of our moves. Waxing of the the stripped wood produced a lighter pleasing colour where one could make out the quality of the veneer on the doors and dressing table drawer fronts.

The stripped bed ends became our bed for many years, moving to Leicester for my first job, then Bristol. Sadly after our last move to Gelli, we discovered the wardrobe wouldn’t fit in our bedroom, so was moved to an outbuilding for storage, and with damp taking its toll, finally being dismantled a few years back with parts being saved as usable timber. I’d kept the double front panels, with mirror inserts on the reverse, as having ‘potential’! Meanwhile, the dressing table went to our younger son and his wife, for their bedroom and growing family a few years ago, and when we moved into a wider bed, the bed ends were saved, and parts of the metal base used to form my compost reactor!

So now was the final moment of recycling, when in our move to declutter, the mirrored panels had to be taken apart to take to the tip – such is the detail of recycling options at our nearest “tip” that everything has to be separated. I wasn’t sure the iron screws holding the fillets securing the mirrors in place would loosen after all those years in a damp environment. but they did, and I carefully lifted out the 2 mirror panels.

And then I spotted the text – completely unexpected, and provoking. Words from and of a different age. A maker’s stamp. And carefully handwritten pencil date and signature. Dewsbury in Yorkshire is about 9 miles from Halifax. My brother Mark quickly supplied me with this record of Fred and Lois’ date of marriage. (Thanks, Mark).

So from a distant era. A world before anonymous global mass production, celebrity and overt branding, and a record of skilled craftsmanship. Locally made and purchased. Yet only ever discovered as the furniture met a brutal and untimely end. A mirrored door of reflections. A reminder of grandparents who left me with few tangible personal memories, aside from this much moved and travelled object:

Halifax/Street/Wellington/Cambridge/Leicester(twice)/Bristol(three times)/Wales.

A century’s history of these Wormalds in a single object.

A wardrobe. And doors of special significance. Hidden words and untold stories.

For another recent short piece about a door, a wardrobe, and more famous mysteries, watch this by the excellent Malcolm Guite – such a wonderful communicator.

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With 2024 approaching fast, and for us a new garden opening season too, it’s always great to receive the annual thank you video message from George Plumptre, the CEO of the National Garden Scheme charity. Apparently this year, the NGS has for the first time topped £4 million in receipts, which has been passed on in major part to the charities it supports. George included links to a few short videos of projects directly supported and enabled by NGS funds, and I’m going to share just a couple – a local one:

and one more national, to show just how much the recipients of these funds value them.

And how life-changing the impacts can be on individuals suffering greatly from ill health or tragedies.

In turn, I’d like to thank anyone visiting the garden either in person, through this website or our YouTube channel, or even better the NGS YouTube channel where I’ve just noticed one of my video pieces from this February has now been viewed nearly 4,000 times. Vastly more impact than I can ever achieve with these scribblings, and hopefully also contributing a small amount to the NGS fundraising. So if you haven’t yet checked them out, have a look at the range of virtual garden visits available, and maybe subscribe to the NGS channel. 2024 promises to be an even more successful year for the NGS, with the creation of a Chelsea flower Show garden designed by Tom Stuart Smith, and funded by Project Giving Back, which is likely to raise awareness further about the garden delights and work of the NGS charity.

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I’m going to finish with four short music videos – the first three are very different recordings, in different languages, of what is apparently the favourite Christmas Carol, in the UK. ‘O Holy Night’.

The original French ‘Cantique de Noël’ is based on a French-language poem from 1843. The carol has an interesting backstory, beginning in Roquemaure, SE France after the church organ had recently been renovated. To celebrate the event, the catholic parish priest persuaded poet Placide Cappeau, a native of the town, to write a Christmas poem. The French composer Adolphe Adam set the poem to music a few years later in 1847, and it was premiered that year in Roquemaure by opera singer Emily Laurey. (The English version, with small changes to the initial melody, was created by the American John Sullivan Dwight in 1855).

Strangely, although instantly popular across the whole of France, the catholic church moved to ban its performance, after the priest who’d started the ball rolling discovered that the poet was a socialist (!) and that the composer was Jewish. Despite the church’s efforts, the carol was so widely liked that its performance couldn’t be stopped. People loved hearing and singing it. Its popular resurrection came towards the end of the brief but brutal Franco-Prussian war (July 1870 to January 1871), when on Christmas Eve, a French soldier left his trench unarmed and began to sing this carol, in English. No one shot at him and shortly afterwards, a German soldier left his trench, approached the Frenchman and began singing a popular German carol, ‘From Heaven Above to Earth I Come’. A 24-hour Christmas ceasefire followed as a forerunner to the more well-known Christmas truce of WWI.

Many who enjoy carols will have their own favourite versions, and I trawled through lots of previously undiscovered ones, to come up with these, which demonstrate how well the carol translates and has been appreciated around the world. I hope you enjoy them all. I’ll begin with one of Norwegian soprano, Sissel Kyrkjebø’s, fairly early takes of ‘O Helga Natt’

 

And follow it with a wonderful Welsh/English collaborative version, ‘O Ddwyfol Nos’ made even more special by the technical demands of recording it, disparately, at the end of 2020, when as we all recall the world was somewhat disrupted! Recorded by the Fairey brass band and Côr y Penrhyn, a Welsh male voice choir based in Bethesda, North Wales, with its director Owain Arwel Davies as the soloist. It deserves to be watched and listened to more often, I think. Loud.

And finally, this better-known (at least in the UK) version was recorded last year, sung as a duet in English by the amazing and wonderfully expressive boy treble Malakai Bayoh, and Aled Jones.

 

I wish any readers who read this before Christmas, a very happy and peaceful festive time, and best wishes for 2024, wherever the year’s journeys take them.

Even if not through snowy pine forests.