Spring in the village

birdsong and beeping

Isn’t spring great this year? Do I say this every year? There’s something about the abundant bridal hawthorn blossom that drifts like confetti in the wind, the cow parsley lining the village lanes and abundant bluebells that makes me feel like this time around it’s better.

I am on a writing deadline, so I thought I would come and hide in Substack while I drink my coffee. I have already checked my sweet pea seedlings, put a washing load on, dawdled through Instagram and watched a fat pigeon balancing on the telegraph line, so it’s been a productive procrastination.

Every morning this week I have walked to the bluebell wood*. It’s still not quite warm enough to go without a coat first thing and I can tell you that because I tried it and had to brisk march for an hour. The sun doesn’t reach the village until later and the track is shaded under a canopy of beech, oak and overgrown hedgerow. Once out in the meadow, the wind whips across the damp grass, but I can feel the warmth of the rising sun.

I am trying not to listen to any podcasts when I am out with the dog because the birdsong is insane. I have a plan to get out of bed for the dawn chorus, but it won’t happen unless someone else makes me and that someone else has tried and I missed her message because I was still in bed.

There is a gate into a private wood which I always touch out of superstition (I am not sure what I think will happen if I don’t but there we are), and then about turn and head for home. This week it has been impossible not to open the gate and keep going, mesmerised by the haze of purple blue. The ribbon of path makes a centre parting through a riot of bluebells, punctuated with pretty white marsh stitchwort (great name for a fictional character if Dickens hasn’t already baggsied it), the flowers running wild under the trees and up the bank stretching into the distance. I don’t stay for long. It would be embarrassing to be escorted off or shot at.

Walking back home, I often hear my elderly neighbour, leaning heavily on her car horn as she rounds each bend, as if this negates the need to slow down. She stuck two fingers up at me once because we met bumper to bumper in the lane and I pulled in so she could go past me, but I was apparently in the wrong spot. Several villagers have politely asked her not to beep as she careers past, so now she does it louder and longer. When she gets to her house, she honks to her husband announcing her return so he can put the kettle on and scurry out to open the gate at the bottom of their drive. I would like to put her in a book. Maybe call her Marsh Stitchwort.

My writing deadline has now reached the point where all I want to eat is peanut butter on toast. Thinking about food for the rest of the family becomes a panic around 7pm when I am still at my desk, and I can sense teenagers roaming. So, this weekend, due to popular demand (3 people) and a great antidote to being stuck at my laptop, I made a moussaka for the first time in years and possibly ever. I chose a recipe that promised the prep would be done in under 30 minutes and 90 minutes later I was still frying aubergine. It did the trick though and I can highly recommend it as a Saturday night supper. Just start getting organised at breakfast.

Right, best foot forward. Here’s to a new week ahead. I would love to know what you are cooking at the moment. Any inspiration gratefully received because I can’t think beyond fish fingers in my current state.

*Sorry to those of you who are nowhere near a patch of bluebells. This may mean you are very near a cinema, of which I am extremely jealous, so swings and roundabouts.