NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

I'm pretty sure that most of us measure our lives in blocks of time, based around the calendar year. I know I do. Always have done. There's something cathartic about December 31st giving way to January 1st, a cleansing of negatives which are now going to be turned into positives - at least, that is the hope. And this is no more true than when it comes to our natural history recording - think year lists, resolutions, plans - all that scheming and plotting that bouys us up during the dark nights of early winter. When I used to year list (some time way back when, before mobile phones and the internet) I would forgo an alcoholically infused New Year's Eve to ensure that I was out of the door, pre-dawn, on New Year's Day, ready to add species to the brand new notebook (always a brand new notebook), to start to populate that shiny new year's list. Madness really, rushing around celebrating each species even though I'd seen most of them 24-hours previously... What of n...

Just before Christmas I had a spring clean of my natural history memberships/subscriptions. Three of them bit the dust and for differing reasons. First up was the RSPB. I had been a member for over 40 years. My reasons for cancelling membership were down to a few episodes of shoddy treatment towards certain individuals I know who had worked, or volunteered for the organisation. I won’t mention names or places. These episodes make me feel as if the society that I first patronised back in the late-1970s had become an altogether different animal, one that puts money before people without a second’s thought. Maybe this is the way of the big charities today, but it saddens me. The next casualty is the periodical ‘British Wildlife’. I have subscribed (on and off) for maybe 15-20 years, but have increasingly found that I was only reading 50% of it. The third up is The Wildflower Society, a modest and charming collection of botanists but one which I am no longer an active part of. The £100 or ...