Epiblog for the Feast of St Ethelred of Bardsey

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer seems to be arriving in instalments this year, some days better than others.  We got back from the trip to the Lakes over Easter to find that, of course, at the start of the week, just when we were both still in holiday mode, and not feeling at all like tackling the huge mountain of tasks which awaited us, the weather turned bright and sunny, making the unutterable tedium of some of the things I had to accomplish even more unutterably tedious.

The animals, at least, were free to wander in and out at will, onto the decking, and lie in the sun if they wanted, even though I wasn’t.  Not that I particularly want to lie on the decking, unless it’s voluntary, and there’s someone to pick me up afterwards and put me back in my wheelchair, but it’s the principle of the thing.  Misty and Zak flopped out on various rugs at various angles, and Matilda prowled around, in and out of the flower tubs, seeking whom she may devour.  Zak is staying with us at the moment to ease the burden on Granny while Freddie is ill, but even little Fred seemed to take heart from the upturn in the weather, and rallied a bit, possibly with the aid of his change of medication from the vet.

Debbie has plunged back into the regime of teaching, as it’s all hands on deck, or feet off the pedals, or insert any other metaphor of your choice, from now on until the end of term, and the exam season is looming large, as it does tend to at this time of year.  Meanwhile, Kirklees College continue to argue the toss and pass me from pillar to post in an attempt to avoid paying Debbie what she is due, on the day she is due it. In any other walk of life, this would result in a letter before action, threatening a summons, costs and interest, and I have actually contemplated this, several times, except that of course then Debbie might get identified as one of the “awkward squad” (simply for asking for what is rightfully due and which should already have been paid, but for the crap, inefficient system that makes the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit look like an MBA model of business efficiency.)

I have also toyed with the idea of a Freedom of information Act request to the College, asking how many part-time hourly-paid lecturers are in arrears with their due pay, and how much money in total this means they are lending to Kirklees College on a month by month basis. I wonder if it’s enough for a Winding-Up Order and a Class Action? Mr Cat, may I introduce you to Mr Pigeon? Don’t think I won’t do it. There comes a point where the lack of money outweighs the residual goodwill and desire to be considered for any hours going next term, and the Samson Agonistes defence kicks in.

Other than that, the contemplative, quiet, peaceful mood of the previous week vanished with a bang and a flap, to be replaced by endless screeds of words and figures.  The outside world was also, sadly, much in evidence.  We go away for ten days and the country drifts even further towards Hades, in a hand-basket, Lady Bracknell notwithstanding.

According to George Osborne, the economy has been growing by a whole 0.8% and therefore we should all be dancing the Shepherd’s Hey in the streets and waving our hankies in ecstatic jubilation.  However, as Aditya Chakrabortty (crazy name, crazy guy!) pointed out in a piece for the Guardian,

Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, "sticking to the course". Now things don't look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound. Only a prude would expect their politicians not to exaggerate. But getting to such upside-down conclusions requires more than that: it requires fictionalising and even lying.

Quite so. And he goes on to provide the solution to the conundrum of “if the economy is recovering, how come everyone still feels so brassic and hard done by?” The answer is that the recovery is measured against the GDP, not the GDP per head.  We may be producing 0.8% more (hardly a figure to write home about in any case) but it’s taking many more people to do it. Chakrabortty again:

Yet while our national income is almost back to where it was before the crisis (rejoice!), our GDP per head remains almost 7% below where it was at the start of 2008. The Britons of 2014 are as poor as they were in 2005. Whether in Westminster or the media, Cameron or Paxman, you don't hear much about that measure of GDP per head, yet earlier this month the Office for National Statistics said this: "If GDP increases, but the population producing it rises by the same percentage, there would be no reason to suppose the well-being of individuals would have increased."

No, indeed, there wouldn’t. But once again the Junta is employing smoke and mirrors, selective cherry picking of statistics, and hoping against hope that the patchy and sector-specific “recovery” it has fostered by abandoning austerity and turning to a Keynesian solution in the private housing market, will see them safely home past election day 2015, after which we can all go to hell again. In a hand-basket.

The trouble is, trying to get that message across. Even the BBC, even the fearless attack Rottweilers of the media can’t seem to lay a glove on Osborne, and as for the Labour Party, they have absolutely no chance.  As I have said before, they have already tacitly conceded 2015, which is very bad news for anyone old, ill, poor, disadvantaged or (given the rise of UKIP) a bit brownish-looking. I got criticised last week online for saying this, in response to Miliband’s proposals on Rent Controls.  My actual comment was:

In any case, Labour has already fled the battlefield without firing a shot and let the Tory Junta scum dictate the terms of the argument as far as the key "issues" of the 2015 election are concerned: benefits, "scroungers" and immigration. Miliband has been a disaster for the Labour party and a disaster for the poor, the ill, and the disadvantaged.

Which was in turn derided by various Labour supporters as talking down the party’s chances!  As I went on to say:

My father was a lifelong member of the AUEW under Hugh Scanlon, and voting Labour was in my blood. The last time I voted Labour was 1997.  I have watched in growing horror since 2010, the Labour Party, which seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word "opposition" totally failing to counter the war being waged by this unelected Junta on the poor, the sick, the ill, the unemployed, the disadvantaged. The very people they should be standing up for.

On issue after issue, be it benefits capping, or Rachel bloody Reeves saying she is going to be more Tory than the Tories, or Simon Danczug saying its OK for people to have to wait two weeks longer for a fresh claim, on and on and on...

Plus, we have seen Miliband apologising for things that weren't even Labour's fault, implying that there was some iota of truth in the Tory lies that Labour caused the credit crunch crash and that Labour "opened the floodgates" on immigration. This is what I mean when I say they have unquestioningly accepted the Tory frame of reference, the terms of the argument. Oh to hear Miliband say, just for once, "I entirely reject that premise, now sod off." As it is, at the moment you can guess that the Labour policy on any given thing will be a few millimetres to the left of the Tory policy.

The next election will be fought on xenophobic lies and slurs about immigration, begun by the Junta and picked up by the likes of UKIP and the BNP. Whether you like it or not (and personally, I hate seeing what my country has become) there are millions of white van men and racist pensioners in the UK who have had four years of the Junta saying "there's too many of em over here taking our jobs and houses" and they will vote based on that. These are the people Labour needs to be reaching, but Miliband has washed his hands of the whole issue, especially on Europe, instead of challenging and debunking the falsehoods on which the premise is based.

That is why Labour will lose in 2015, consigning us to another five years of Tory nuclear winter, and yes, I blame Ed Miliband - or his advisors - or both. 

Where was the Labour comment on the people in Derby who will be forced to give up their assistance dogs when moved into smaller, non-pet-friendly accommodation because of the Bedroom Tax? Where was the Labour condemnation of the case of Linda Wootton, who received a letter from Atos saying she was fit for work while she was lying in a hospital bed after a heart and lung transplant, and died nine days later? Where was the Labour protest about the case of Aderonke Apata, a lesbian asylum seeker fleeing death threats and or imprisonment under anti-gay laws in Nigeria, who is currently under threat of deportation from the UK back there, to face an unknown fate?  Where, come to that, was the Labour party condemnation of the disgraceful remarks by Katie Hopkins, failed TV reality show contestant, that the long-term unemployed should be made to wear “some sort of uniform”? It was left to people like me to reply that I’d be quite happy to do so, provided Katie Hopkins, in return, wore a uniform with a label that said “vacuous, attention-seeking, rent-a-gob media whore.” Labour probably think it’s a good idea, but to differentiate their policy, if they follow previous form, they might suggest a slightly different colour, other than yellow, for the stars.

Talking of vacuous media whores and xenophobic lies and slurs about immigration, my campaign leaflet for the local council elections arrived from UKIP this week. It’s a slick production. All that’s missing is the free dog-whistle sellotaped to the cover, and it presses all of the buttons that will get the white van men and racist grannies trundling out n droves to vote for Farage and his band of merry men. Men who believe that women should wear skirts and clean behind the fridge because that is more likely to give a man an erection, or something. UKIP, in their leaflet, are very, very careful, unlike that buffoon Jeremy Clarkson, to accidentally say the very word they are striving to avoid.  In fact, they don’t even mention the woodpile. But it’s all in there. “We can deport foreign criminals (even if they have a cat)” they say, referring to a case where the judge actually ruled that the fact that the accused has a girlfriend a place to stay, and a pet was overall evidence of a settled life in the UK. But the people who will read this leaflet and act on it won’t remember that fine detail, because they are people whose lips tend to move even when they are not reading.  They are also a bit short on detail: apparently we should not fear withdrawing from the EU because “we’re one of France and Germany’s biggest customers, and they sell us … £50 billion more than we sell them every year” – So a balance of payments crisis is a good thing, then?  And the cost of imported goods wouldn’t rise outside of a common market? Two pages further on we’re being told that “Only by being outside the EU can we negotiate our own global trade agreements” -  and this would make British exports grow how, exactly? The fact is, the only good thing about Europe is the Common Market, which is what I thought we had first joined.

UKIP’s detailed policies are clearly bollocks, but that doesn’t matter, because the current of suppressed, aggrieved racism they tap into, coupled with people’s dissatisfaction with the “established parties” and their snouts-in-trough approach, will be enough to ensure a massive protest vote in their favour in two weeks’ time. In his unashamed nationalist posturing and his willingness to surf a hidden rip-tide of casual racism, Nigel Farage is the English Alex Salmond.  And I blame the following people for creating him: the Tory Junta for their anti immigrant black propaganda, no pun intended, which they have been pumping out since 2010 and which has now, under the law of unintended consequences, turned round to bite them on the bum as it is actually fuelling support for UKIP, and yes, once again, the Labour Party, for failing to engage with the issue, ignoring it, ignoring their white core working class supporters, and creating a political vacuum to be filled by UKIP, instead of providing a balanced, nuanced and believable alternative debate to the problems of immigration and the EU political project.

So, it’s been pretty grim news everywhere you looked this week, and none grimmer than the very sad death last Monday of teacher Ann (or Anne, the media can’t quite seem to decide) Maguire, who was stabbed to death by one of her 15 year old pupils in front of her class, at a school in Leeds. The Daily Mail printed several hagiographic articles about this poor lady, and it is, indeed,  a tragedy that this should happen to anyone, let alone so dedicated and caring a teacher who had devoted her life to education and who was on the eve of retirement. We should remember, though, that this was the same Daily Mail that regularly puts the boot in when teachers strike against the theft of their pensions, or the latest lunatic attempts by government to impose yet more paperwork, targets, free Bibles or other unworkable garbage issuing in torrents from one of Mr Gove’s offices, or do I mean orifices?

Sadly, teaching is the one job where everybody from Mr Gove downwards believes that they can do it better than the teachers. You wouldn’t stand over the heart surgeon who was operating on your auntie, nudge his elbow and say, “I think that bit there needs a stitch”, yet teachers have to put up with precisely that sort of interference every day, from a wide spectrum of sources.

This was a point very well made in a letter widely circulated on social media during the week, an open letter from Alison Utting to Michael Gove. Mrs Utting’s husband, Gareth, has very recently died of a heart attack, aged only 37. The entire letter is a dignified and stately debunking of everything Gove has inflicted on the profession, and is all the more powerful for that. I admire Mrs Utting’s restraint. If something similar happened to Debbie, which heaven forfend, I would be carving my version of such a letter with a dagger straight into Mr Gove’s desk. Or even straight into Mr Gove.  She says:

Gareth died at the age of 37 of a massive heart attack. There were a few contributory factors to his death, but looming large was the word ‘stress’. He leaves me a widow with three children, aged fourteen, four and one.

She discusses the need for performance measurement:

I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the changes that have hit teachers in the last few years. I qualified as a teacher myself but have been at home raising our young children, so have not been directly involved. But I can tell you what I see around me.

Teachers like Gareth have changed. Their hopes for the young people in their care have not changed. Neither has their willingness to go the extra mile to help those young people to succeed. But the work-load that they struggle under and the pressures that are applied to them from above have greatly increased. If this led to better education for our children, then I would be supporting these changes. But I don’t see better education. I see good teachers breaking under the load. I see good teachers embittered and weary. I see good teachers leaving the profession. I see good teachers never even entering the profession, for fear of what lies ahead. I see pupils indoctrinated with achievement targets, who are afraid to veer from the curriculum in case it affects their next assessment; pupils for whom ‘knowledge’ is defined by a pass mark and their position within a cohort.

 

Something which I can attest to as well, having seen the sheer amount of bumph that clutters up the professional life of my nearest and dearest. Finally, towards the end of her letter, Alison Utting says something which I have also often thought:

Here’s an interesting theory of mine that I was discussing recently with my husband. If you took away all external inspection and supervision, all targets and reviews, if teachers were left to themselves to teach what they wanted to teach, the way they wanted to teach it, what do you think would happen?

This is what I think: Every teacher that I know cares deeply about their subject and their students. They would teach marvellously. They would share knowledge and encourage each other. They would deal with problems (including less-than-perfect pupils and teachers) with the professionalism that they possess in spades.

Of course we cannot remove all monitoring of teachers and schools. But it seems to me that you have forgotten this basic fact: Teachers love to teach, and they want to do it well.

Which of course is how I was taught when I was at school, by a type of committed caring teacher who would undoubtedly, these days, be hounded out of the profession.  So, the next time you feel the need to comment on how cushy a number teachers have, and to make some smart comment about six weeks’ holiday every summer, pause to reflect that Ann/Anne Maguire and Gareth Utting won’t be spending any extended time abroad this August, if indeed they ever did.

By Friday, the advent of the potential Bank Holiday and the even more potential good weather had sparked in us a desire to get away from it all once again, not surprisingly, in view of the depressing news from the world at large.  Much of Friday was spent looking up and printing out potential routes, mountain weather forecasts and the like, completing urgent things that couldn’t be left, and sweeping the rest into a heap till Tuesday, and briefing Granny to feed Matilda and water the plants, or vice versa.  By 11.30 on Saturday morning, we were loaded and ready for the off – mainly because most of the stuff was still on the camper from two weeks ago!  We duly trundled through town and joined the M62, the dogs snoozing in the back, blissfully unaware that Debbie had decided that they were all going to “bag” some more “Wainwrights”.

We arrived in the Lakes at an awkward time of day, however; too late in the day (1.30pm) to consider embarking on a long walk that day, but too early just to go straight to our usual spot on Walney and park up. Debbie sought to fill this gap by going shopping in Ambleside, which boasts a plethora of camping shops all rammed to the gills with shiny things, all of which are positively begging to be looked at twice. The only problem being that, before she could embark on this much-needed retail therapy, she would have to find somewhere to park the camper.  There was space in both the major car parks, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that we didn’t have enough change for the meter and they charge even for disabled blue-badge holders (as do several other of the more grasping and heartless local authorities in the Lakes).  Debbie decided to try the side streets, and in the course of the next fruitless half-hour, we discovered that the double yellow lines extend way, way out into the countryside. We didn’t follow it in its entirety to check, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole Kirkstone Pass was double-yellows, all the way to Ullswater!

Clearly a change of tactics was called for, and I remembered that there was a little car park at Loughrigg, on the way to Grasmere, where an ice-cream van customarily plied its trade. We went there and this proved to be true, especially with it being bank holiday. In the space of one short transaction, Debbie was the proud possessor of a stack of pound coins and I was the proud possessor of the first ice-cream I have eaten since I came out of hospital in 2010.  I think it’s referred to as a win-win. Not that I’m a particular fan of ice cream, though I suspect Debbie was harbouring suspicions that I had in fact engineered the whole situation somehow, yellow lines and all, just with that end in mind. Back into Ambleside, back to the car park we went, with Debbie leaving us parked up in a nice shady green bay with cooling trees all around. The dogs had some water and some treats (start as you mean to go on) and settled down to snooze, while I read H. V. Morton (and settled down to snooze).

After the retail Gods had been propitiated with due reverence, we rumbled on across the face of the  land, pausing briefly at Ulverston where Deb took the dogs up through the park to the obelisk on the hills overlooking the town, then quickly nipped into Booths supermarket before it closed for a couple of things we’d forgotten, and, eventually, quicker than I expected, we were parking up beside the beach on Walney, the dogs were having a last game of “stones” on the sands prior to retiring, and I was cooking supper. It had been a long hot tiring day and once everybody had been fed and watered to an elegant sufficiency, we all fell into a deep, dreamless, and surprisingly comfortable sleep.

Sunday, the feast of St Ethelred, brought us an early start. Indeed, the rain beating on the windows and the wind which had sprung up overnight roused me better than any alarm clock.  While waiting for the kettle to boil, I busied myself thinking of alternatives to Debbie’s planned route for the day, in case it closed in still further. At the same time, I was mentally crossing my fingers and hoping that Granny Fenwick’s old adage would prove true: rain before seven, fine before eleven. By the time we were all up, dressed, breakfasted, and everything else-ed, and all the sleeping bags and bedding had been stowed away, it was indeed brightening.  The dogs seemed to expect a game of “stones” so Debbie gave in for about ten minutes and then we were rolling gently along the A590 once more. Coniston, Torver, Ambleside, and finally, Grasmere were circumvented, and we found ourselves looking for Ghyll Foot, the start of the walk. The contrast to yesterday, in terms of population density, was marked. Whereas Ambleside had been an absolute anthill, the very epitome of the problem I’ve written about before, where a tourist destination becomes so popular it actually starts to impact on and erode the things that made people want to go there in the first place, today there was hardly a soul about, as we crept along little lanes in the shadow of Helm Crag.

The first setback was that the designated starting point in the book, a companion to the Wainwrights which Deb had acquired a while ago, was no longer available. The space where the author suggested leaving your vehicle was festooned with “private” notices and “residents only”.  Fortunately, the enterprising farmer at Town Head Farm, just up the lane, which is, it turns out, also a B&B, has had the nous to offer all day parking on a field at one side of his yard for the princely sum of £1.00, so we settled for that.

Nobody seemed particularly anxious to collect the money, and time was knocking on, so I suggested to Debbie that she get herself and Zak and Misty ready, and leave me to deal with the financial aspects, since I’d be sitting in the van and painting the view anyway.  Her route today was to take her up Steel Fell, across to Calf Crag, which is described on the internet as “part of the High Raise massif”, bringing to mind an unfortunate mental image of Wainwright and his “posse” all climbing Striding Edge in shades and baseball caps.  Then she was supposed to make her way on over to High Raise itself, retrace her steps slightly, then down the ridge over Gibson Knott and onto Helm Crag itself, descending off Helm Crag via Easedale Tarn, back to ground level in Grasmere and home via the lanes. The cloud had lifted a lot, and while there was a degree of wispy mist about, it was nothing tragic.  The walk was 10.5 miles in all, and they set off, finally, about 3pm.

I settled down to paint, and eventually the farmer’s son appeared, a young lad of perhaps eight or nine on a mountain bike, so I duly paid him my £1.00 and settled down to do a preliminary sketch of the landscape before me. I had long completed that painting, and one other, and several other sketches, read most of H. V. Morton and done half the Sudoku in the paper before Deb and the dogs returned – at twenty-five to ten. The first part of the plan had gone very well, and Steel Fell proved no obstacle. Unable to locate Calf Crag from the instructions on the printout she’d take n with her, Deb had detoured and climbed what she thought was Calf Crag, only to find, a mile or so further on, another rocky outcrop.  So as to be sure of “bagging” it she detoured and climbed that one as well, a process which was repeated apparently a couple more times with two other candidates for the title along the way, which resulted in her missing the turn for the path up to the summit of High Raise.

Eventually, she found herself on a summit which she was pretty sure she could identify, as being Sergeant Man, which is a Wainwright, but not one of the ones she’d planned on visiting in that particular walk. She retraced her steps for a few miles, the dogs at her heels, and eventually did pick up the path along the ridge to Helm Crag, via Gibson Knott.  She then decided she could see a better and more direct path down from Helm Crag than the one in her original itinerary, and set off down it, only to find that a) it soon petered out and b) although it did take you more directly to the foot of Helm Crag, there was then no direct way across the fields back to the starting point, so she still had to do the extra couple of miles round the little lanes to get back to the van, after all.

Since it was so late we decided to feed and water the dogs there and then, before we set off trying to find somewhere to spend the night a course of action which proved very popular as they hoovered it up, jumped on the bed, curled round and promptly fell fast asleep, taking no further part in the proceedings. In fact they had to be picked up and bodily moved, when we actually decided to go to bed.

While Deb and the dogs had been off on their adventure, I had been making friends with our host. The farmer’s son was obviously a bright kid, tall strong and sturdy, with already the beginnings of the sort of thousand-yard stare that can pick out a sheep in difficulties half way up the opposite side of the valley. I showed him my finished painting which he declared to be “really good” and which he borrowed off me to go and show his mum.  I had actually intended to give them it as we left, but Debbie’s late return kyboshed that, so I will have to post it to them.

This just left the problem of where to camp up for the night. Clearly driving all the way back to Walney was a non-starter, and in the end we just dumped the camper in a D-shaped layby off the main road that goes up Dunmail Raise. It was an interesting night’s sleep, especially because of the incipient slope. If you forgot to dig in your fingernails and toenails as you slept, through the night you found yourself sliding inexorably down the bed. What was really needed was to drive in a spike and a carabiner, like those idiots who bivouac on ledges one foot six wide, half way up the Zugspitze. Still, by that time, we were past caring. It was surprisingly quiet overnight (and/or we were spectacularly knackered) but I woke to a pleasant green shade coming in at all the windows from the overarching trees, and the quiet sounds of the early bank holiday traffic.  Breakfast and ablutions over, Debbie declared herself, surprisingly in view of yesterday’s shenanigans, match-fit, and we made an early start. We needed one quick Wainwright to bag before setting off home, and I had chosen Castle Crag, in Borrowdale.  We parked up in Grange and the intrepid trio set off on their mission. They were back by three, having crossed it off their list, so I packed up my painting gear and we set off, via a brief pit stop in Keswick, for home.

While we’d been parked in Grange village I’d noticed that the people deficit of yesterday had been more than rectified.  Debbie confirmed on her return that she had stopped off on the way back to dunk the pooches in the river, and it was, in her words “a complete dog-fest down there”. Just then, a hiker strolled by, leading an enormous, shaggy German Shepherd (dog, I mean, not Herr Schafschaegger of Wuppertal) and bearing on his back a huge pack like a British Army “Bergen”.

“What the hell does he need such a big pack for?” asked Deb, querulously.

“Judging from the size of his dog, it’s probably full of Winalot,” I replied.

It was a strain to leave Borrowdale – the fresh greenness on the oaks, the candles nodding on the great horse-chestnuts by the way, and the full throated singing of the birds interspersed with the dulcet, yearning notes of the cuckoo, calling men to travel to lands far away, the first time I’ve heard them this year. We arrived home feeling slightly deflated, to a wet Huddersfield, a cold house, and a cold, hungry, and pissed-off cat.  An hour later, the fire was going, and cat, dogs and wife had had some food, and it felt strangely like déjà vu from the last trip, even down to the soft bed suddenly beckoning my tired bones. During the trip, poor old St Ethelred went un-celebrated.  He was, apparently, the King of Mercia who resigned his throne to become a Benedictine monk at Bardney, in Lincolnshire, and eventually became Abbot there. His story is long and complicated and this is already, to be honest, a long Epiblog. So I think we’ll probably leave him there. Bardney has only ever figured in my life once, and I have probably already told the story of the disastrous weekend I spent there at a pop festival in 1971, in a rain-lashed field full of bullock-high stinging nettles, thistles, and stoned hippies. On the plus side, I did get to sleep in a tent which had been at Woodstock, on the minus side, I caught a head-cold that lasted a fortnight.

So, my spiritual development is still at best, stalled, and the year is slipping by. We’ve had the festival of Beltane during the last week, which always makes me think of Marc Bolan and Ride a White Swan (see under stoned hippies, above) and we are now into May, my favourite month of the whole year, and it’s already a quarter gone.

May is Mary’s month, and I

Pause at this and wonder why

Says Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I much prefer to Katie and who generally talks more sense.  So, without more ado, I am off to contribute my own little bit to the lush green canopy of England, and water in bedding plants.  Tomorrow is going to be a doozie of a day. An early start, and a to-do list which already stands at 31 things.  But for now, like the Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon poem of that name, I can take some comfort in the fact that “the groves assume blossoms” and that I have heard the cuckoo, “the sentinel of Summer”.