Collectables 3: Blanchet's Hair Saloon Advertisement

I love ephemera. I love the very word - ephemera. It's so beautiful.

Ephemera.

Fragile pieces of paper that survive the vicissitudes of time to remind us of days gone past.

Postcards, tickets, greeting cards, trade cards, advertisements, letters, invoices...treasures all.

This advertisement for Blanchet's - a hair saloon in Fenchurch Street in London - is printed on very thin (presumably cheap) yellow paper. I bought it many years ago from my favourite dealer in ephemera - Bella. Bella has a stall at Covent Garden market on Mondays and Spitafields Market on Thursdays and is hugely appreciated by a seemingly vast number of customers (mostly men) who throng around her stall, practically pushing other people out of their way in their eagerness to find that elusive special something.

This elusive special something is so charming I framed it.

Blanchet's was run by one Etienne Celestin Blanchet, a Frenchman. It seems that he was quite successful because he has three branches of his business on Fenchurch St, sharing one of them with a hosier, Mr T L Blackmore, next door to the fibre merchants Taye and Bromely.  Just up the road are a clutch of wine merchants including Veuve Cliquot-Ponsardin and Haig - purveyors of champagne and whiskey, respectively; surely the area must have been quite upmarket. An inexhaustible compendium of  Old and New London, published by Cassell's in 1878, begs to differ, damningly describing Fenchurch Street as being 'another thoroughfare scanty in memories, and therefore still open for future fame'.

As early as 1866 Blanchet was cutting hair in Fenchurch Street because I discover him publicly dissolving a partnership with another hairdresser, Henry Mazet. In October that same year, Blanchet takes out an advertisement in the London City Press for his, presumably newly started, Parisian Hair-cutting Saloon, open from nine until seven in the evening at 134 Fenchurch Street. The advert modestly declares that Blanchet's 'celebrated Brilliantine à la Violette may be had in the smallest size bottles.' This is the first of many advertisements for his shop - the same advert runs and runs in the London City Press through till the end of 1867 with the exact same wording throughout the year.

Fast forward to 1870 and Blanchet is advertising in the Clerkenwell Times for a 'boy (respectable) of 18, with good reference' to work at his saloon. Six years later, in July 1876, he is after an extra barber or, as he describes it, 'a good gentleman's hand', putting an advert in the rather more upmarket London Daily News.

By 1886, a decade on, Blanchet's are still in business and Etienne and his hosier mate Blackmore are both paying land tax to the Cooper's Company for their Fenchurch Street premises.

Two years later and everything comes to an end...

Born in Tours in France in 1828, Blanchet and his English wife Marianne can be found living with a twenty-four year old niece and a twenty-four year old boarder (possibly their servant), at 50, Herne Hill Road, Camberwell in the census of 1881. Etienne, now 53, is easily identifiable - he lists his occupation as a hairdresser. There is no evidence of any children. Ten years earlier, in the 1871 census, the couple's names are both spelt differently - Ellien for Ettienne and Mary Anne for Marianne - and they are living in St Mary Newington with an 18 year old general servant. Again Etienne lists his occupation as hairdresser. No children once more so rather than them having left home by 1881 it appears that they didn't ever have any.

Etienne dies on the 22nd July 1888, aged only sixty. Recently, he had been living at 110, Lavender Hill where there is no mention of wife Marianne. Instead, the sole executrix of his will is named as a spinster, Mary Ann Watson...

Etienne leaves her £426 10s. The next person on the alphabetical list of wills of this period, a Norfolk farmer, leaves £37,673 1s and 3d - Blanchet's life savings pall into insignificance in comparison. But then again, after Farmer Blanchflower, poor Margaret Blanchflower from Chester is listed as having only the paltry sum of £30 to leave her husband...

And there you go. But for this framed piece of yellow paper (most probably dating from the late 1860s after Etienne had freed himself from Henry Mazet) there would be no physical evidence of the childless Etienne Celestin Blanchet. That is the magic of ephemera. With it, we can revive him, this thriving barber, who could give you 'proper attention' and turn your scarecrow hair-do into a coiffure worthy of a careful dab of violet-scented brilliantine. We can re-imagine him beavering away with his scissors in Fenchurch Street over a period of twenty long years, snipping, snipping, snipping, enticing people into his Parisian Hair Saloon with each click of his scissors.

Today, in 2017, ten doors down from Blanchet's nineteenth century premises, at 141, Fenchurch St, there is a barber's called Bolatti - 'a fine gentleman's barbers in the heart of the City'. So it goes on, now as before, immigrant hairdressers plying their trade, grooming the fat cats and champagne guzzlers of the City of London. Long may it stay thus, say I.

Collectables 2: Carr's Ink Stoneware bottles

Daniel and I bought these two stoneware ink bottles in Risby at one of the monthly fairs held in the Village Hall. It is rare to find ink bottles like this with their labels intact, and even rarer to find two the same.

As the label proclaims, Carr's were based in New Southgate in London. So I thought I would do some digging and see if I could find anything out about them - and, sure enough, there they are, listed in the Post Office London Directory of 1914 as a blacking and leather polish manufacturer, still in business thirty years after they began production of our ink bottles.

Blacking was essentially shoe polish which came in either liquid or paste form and was first manufactured for exclusive use by the British army. It soon caught on amongst the general populace and blacking manufacturers proliferated, making products for use on saddles as well as shoes.

Charles Dickens, at the age of 12, worked in a blacking factory owned by two brothers, Thomas and Jonathan Warren, which they'd founded at the end of the eighteenth century. The factory was based in "a crazy, tumbledown house with rotten floors and a staircase” near Hungerford Stairs, close by the stinking Thames. For ten hours a day, six days a week, Dickens pasted labels onto the individual pots of blacking. In return for his efforts he received six shillings per week, about £12.50 in modern currency. This is how miserable he was:

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into the companionship of common men and boys..The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in…was passing away from me, never to be brought back, cannot be written.”

The Warren company's biggest competitor was Day and Martin of High Holborn and sometime in the 1830s they were taken over by them. (Dickens had left by now, escaping his drudgery soon after it began in 1824). Day and Martin was in turn bought out by Carr's, the makers of our bottles, in 1923.

So, in effect, Charles Dickens worked for the company that made our ink bottles! If only he'd continued hanging out with those 'common men and boys' instead of becoming a celebrated novelist it could have been him slapping on our labels...

It turns out that Carr Day and Martin are still active - as manufacturers of leather care products including saddle soap, polishes and oils. Or, more poetically, Canter Mane & Tail Conditioner, Gallop Shampoo and Vanner & Prest Hoof Oil. Here is their website:

http://www.carrdaymartin.co.uk/

It seems they no longer make ink now that they are catering to an important and, no doubt, lucrative equestrian niche - considering the downturn they must have experienced with the advent of the motor car in the early twentieth century it is rather encouraging that they have re-invented themselves in this way.

In the twenty-first century it is ink that has become redundant, along with the cart horse. Here am I, tapping away at my keyboard as opposed to scratching away with my quill or my Parker pen...

Carr's have another interesting link to Dickens. The protracted law case at the heart of Dickens's Bleak House was directly inspired by the blacking company he used to work for. Charles Day (of Day and Martin, now Carr Day and Martin) died in 1836 and the court examination of his will went on until 1854 - for nearly TWENTY years. Dickens refers to the case directly in his preface to the novel:

At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. 

There must have been some money in that blacking business...

The labels on Carr's ink bottles tell us that the ink initially appears bright blue but quickly darkens to a deep and permanent black. This seems quaintly exciting but also rather pointless.

As there are entire books written solely about Ink Bottles - which were often made of glass rather than stoneware - I won''t pretend to any great knowledge here except to say that these, I have learnt, are called master bottles. In other words, they are large rather than small. They date from around 1885.

Collectables 1: Black Forest Clothes Brush Holders (in the form of an owl).

In every room of The Pink Pig Farm, including the larder but excepting the understairs log cupboard, there is a brush holder in the form of an owl. Daniel began this 'project' shortly after we moved in and, within six months or so, owls were everywhere. Now, guests can play 'find the owl', downstairs and up.

Each owl is almost identical except for its colouring so they were obviously mass produced, probably in the 1930s. Daniel has always had a penchant for Black Forest carving and these have to be the most basic example of that art there is. Unfortunately,  good Black Forest objects from the nineteenth century and early twentieth - bear chairs and coat stands, stag heads, clocks - are now extremely sought after and vastly expensive. We did contemplate a bear bench once, a snip at £8,000. An owl clothes brush holder on the other hand ranges between four and ten pounds on ebay...
 

 Some of the owls no longer have their clothes brush tucked inside so I have stuffed them with feathers: pheasant feathers from our garden, barn owl feathers from a corpse I found balanced on a fence near the graveyard in Freckenham, and tawny frogmouth feathers I picked up on a walk in Sydney six years or so ago, again plucked from a rather fresh-looking corpse. I also used to collect feathers as a child and I still have a box of everything my family and I found on our walks so have brought some out from their thirty-five year reign of obscurity. I remember imploring zoo keepers to go into cages at Whipsnade and London Zoo to pick up feathers that lay on enclosure floors and have parrot, flamingo and stork feathers as a result of their efforts.

Others are serving as candle holders...

The odd thing about Black Forest carvings is that they have nothing to do with the Black Forest of Germany. Rather they are made in Switzerland where the tradition began in the town of Brienz, situated slap bang in the middle of the country. Perched by a lake at the foot of a mountain, Brienz is beyond picturesque - archetypally Swiss. As a tourist hotspot in the early nineteenth century it began to cater to visitors' insatiable demand for souvenirs and thus, the Black Forest carving industry was born.  By 1910 there were 1,300 carvers beavering away at their craft - and presumably one or two of them, no doubt apprentices, specialised in owl clothes brush holders...

 Even within the limits of the very basic carving of the owls, some are decidedly better than others. Their individual characterisation relies on the shading of colour and when this is done badly they fail to come alive at all. But as I lie in bed of a night listening to the shrieks of barn owls and the twit twoos of tawny owls (actually only the males twit twoo) I can see the outline of an owl on the top of our bookcase and sometimes, just sometimes, I'm almost convinced its real...

The Walk

Sunday afternoon. About three in the afternoon. Sniff and I drive over to a nearby village, Chippenham, park the car on its outskirts, and then head along a footpath out into the fields. The air is very still and, once the sound of churning water created by a small dam recedes, it is silent.

Too silent.

I was just thinking of complaining out loud to Sniff that there was no wildlife to be seen - what was the world coming to when, abroad in the wilds, there is nothing wild to be seen - when a hare ran out of the woods, across our path and into the field on our left, its enormous feet pounding down on the young seedlings as it jagged across the earth. Immediately, another sprang up from a hidden runnel and chased the other hare across the field, heading for shelter, escaping the strange two-legged monster and the white and brown beast-thing which could be dangerous. (Hardly. Sniff completely ignored them and tootled along as per usual, sniffing away. Not exactly living up to terrier status).

Only a couple of minutes later and I hear a cuckoo calling from the trees on our right. Then another. Two cuckoos, their calls similar but nevertheless distinct. After which a lapwing's cry peals out from the middle of the crop followed by the bird itself, rising into the air out of the field, flying straight over our heads, away into the blue.

Further down the track and silence reigns again. In the distance some cows munch away at the grass, placid and calm, despite a sign warning that "Cows with calves can be dangerous." Another sign beseeches me to keep my dog under control. Sniff ignores the sign and crawls under the fence into the field containing said dangerous cows in order to sniff a particularly interesting tussock. The cows, far away, fail to stampede us en masse, but continue to chew away and to whisk their tails from side to side, blinking slow blinks.

I keep hoping for an adder to slither past. Or for some skylarks to do their scribbling in the sky as Henry Williamson describes so well. Or for a hedgehog. Please let there be a hedgehog. But for the rest of the walk the only excitement is a pair of wood pigeons - and they are so ubiquitous these days as to be a pest. In fact, early last Summer they ate all the gooseberries on my garden bushes. This year I've learned my lesson and have covered said bushes with netting. (All of which reminds me of a book I'd like to share: here's a man with an appropriate name....)

Back to the walk. Obviously the sound (not the sight) of cuckoos is going to be deemed enough excitement for one day. Too much nature would be, these days, unnatural. Here I am in the countryside with nary a human in sight - no cars, no tractors, no noise, no nearby roads. Just a man and his dog. Alone.

Where are the beasts and the fowl? Where the reptiles? Where, even, the worms?

It is rather depressing. We turn back towards the car and, for the next forty minutes, see nothing at all. Not even a wood pigeon. It's hardly the stuff of a Gerald Durrell book.

But I'll keep looking. Looking, looking....

Daytrippers

Living in the Pink Pig Farm means easy access to the coast, something that we have distinctly failed to take advantage of. But when better to go to the seaside than in these early bracing weeks of January? The rain has temporarily ceased, the skies are blue - its time to take off. Sniff in tow, we pile into the car, plug in the (un)trusty Satnav and head off for the North Norfolk coast - to Cromer.

I used to visit Cromer occasionally as a child - my father was from Norwich where his parents still lived, and I think there might have been relatives in Cromer itself. I remember grey skies and a stony beach. I remember Dad eating cockles out of a paper cup, prising gelatinous corpses out of shells with a pin. Was there a pier? If there was, any memory of it has been lost in the mists of time...

We have to drive through the outskirts of Norwich before we can get to Cromer and the only thing I recognise is the name of one of the roads - Unthank Road. What a marvellous name. To unthank. Should be a verb. Asda supermarkets, tower blocks and out-of-town car dealerships are obviously all new since I was last here and it is only once we have left Norwich behind and are driving through a small forest of pines that anything remotely resembles the landscape of my youth. The Satnav takes us off the main signposted route to Cromer for no apparent reason and sends us (we're blindly obedient) down some narrow, deserted country lanes, criss-crossing farmland, turning left and right in seemingly random fashion. We reach the entrance to a Zoo where we get held up at a temporary traffic light before plunging down a hill and reaching, suddenly, unexpectedly, Cromer itself.

It takes a mere minute to orientate ourselves and find the sea. It's simply obvious in which direction it is going to be. We find a deserted car park right on the sea-front, unattended, park and have to go to a nearby Ford garage to pay our four pounds entry fee. The man in the garage seems somewhat surprised to see us. Perhaps the good citizens of Cromer don't normally bother to pay.

Having placed a scrap of a ticket on the dashboard we grab Sniff and head for the sea. It's immediately devastatingly clear that the entire beach has been cordoned off - they are rebuilding the groynes and doing repair work before the summer season begins. Numerous cranes are dotted about the sands (for the beach is both pebbly and sandy) and from up here, on the Upper Promenade, the workers look like wasps in their high-visibility yellow jackets and black trousers. Tractors and lorries buzz back and forth - it is veritable hive of activity; all of which is preventing us from reaching the beach.

In the distance though we can see people walking the length of a pier - so there is one, and it's open. We eagerly head down the Promenade towards its finger of promise.

Before we reach the pier we are distracted by a secondhand bookshop - a rather good secondhand bookshop. Its contents are extremely well organised, its shelves neat and tidy. Daniel buys a pile of books about music (including a biography of David Bowie, may he rest in peace); not because he has suddenly taken an interest in the subject, but because he has started a bookstore at his Arts Centre and he can re-sell them there (only books about the arts are allowed). I buy a pile of Georgette Heyer books - really lurid 70s editions, published by Pan; only a pound each - because I am sick of reading reviews by respectable critics explaining how exceptionally good she is but never daring to read her because they look like terrible tawdry romances. I figure that if I am going to plough ahead and plunge into her torrid world, I should read them in the tawdriest editions possible. And as they say, never judge a book by its cover.

We press onwards to the pier and pass the hotel where Oscar Wilde once stayed (presumably for a dirty weekend with Bosie) pictured here perched high on the West Cliffs:

We are beginning to get cold and are pleased to discover that not only does the pier have a cafe but it has a cafe that welcomes dogs. We head indoors and have a cup of tea. Now it feels like a proper seaside holiday. We're on a pier, we're looking out at a very, very brown sea, we're sheltering from a bitter wind. An oyster-catcher ambles past the window, joining the smokers outside. Sniff eats some treats, Daniel eats a chocolate covered shortbread and I eat a Norfolk shortbread (it seems you simply add lard to a normal shortbread). There's a theatre behind the café at the end of the pier and the programme is on our table. Plenty of cover bands, the odd bunch of drag queens and a trail of awful-sounding and looking comedians. Plus the Vienna Festival Ballet doing Swan Lake to bring the tone up a bit. Come Summer though and it boasts "the only end-of-the-pier show in the whole of Europe: a true live variety show". Perhaps we could train Sniff up a bit to appear in it. At the moment, he's only interested in finding shortbread crumbs to hoover up from the café's floor. Time to go.

For the next hour or so we amble through town. We find three antique shops, none of them particularly good, one particularly dire. There's an impressive deli, a great-looking butchers, an old-fashioned fruit-and-veg shop and a proper bakers, so relocation, if you were contemplating such a thing, wouldn't be impossible. Cromer Parish church is open and we're the only visitors. Many of the original stained glass windows were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and there are some rather ugly modern replacements but, as many of the windows were replaced with clear glass, the church is surprisingly light and airy.

The bookseller, under questioning, informed us that The Red Lion was good for lunch - just behind the Parish Church - and that dogs were welcome. As our feet were rapidly becoming blocks of ice once more we headed there as the town clock struck one and were soon ordering fishfinger sandwiches (Sniff does love a bit of cod), eaten whilst watching the greyish-brown sea through the large windows, lapping the shore, lapping the shore, and lapping the shore again. A young couple came in with a large be-muzzled Alsatian and sat down rather too close for comfort. The barman offered them a bowl of water for their dog and it drank noisily, sounding much like a herd of elephants having a bath. Most of the water ended up on the floor. I realised that Sniff, although he has his faults, is quite a tidy little drinker...

Replete with fishfinger, we head out into the bitter sea air and finally find a part of the beach that is still, in the depths of winter, open to the public. Our feet hit sand. It feels like an achievement. We can go home, our heads held high. Paddling, a pint of cockles and a haul of dressed Cromer crabs will all have to wait until Summer but Cromer in January certainly has a certain icy charm all its own.

Twitching Again

The last time I went on an organised bird-watch I was around ten years old and an avid member of the RSPB's youth programme. It must have been around about 1974, certainly before the word twitching was in common parlance. I remember my father dropping me off at Sandy - the RSPB's headquarters, not far from our home in St Albans - where the day was to begin. I was clutching my RSPB membership magazine but didn't have a pair of binoculars. I can't recall much about the bird-watch itself but do remember that, shortly afterwards, enthused by some sightings of ducks at Sandy, I persuaded a relative to adopt a Shoveler for me for my eleventh birthday - a duck that was ringed and whose adoption papers came with the promise that I would be told of its migratory progress through the ensuing years. Unfortunately, I never heard another word about that Shoveler and its photograph soon languished in the bottom of a drawer alongside those rather pathetic adoption papers.

Here I am, it's over forty years later, and I've decided to book myself into a day's bird-watching, led by experts, at Lackford Lakes, a mere twenty minute drive away from the Pink Pig Farm. I book months in advance and as the day, a Sunday, looms nearer, the enthusiasm that made me book has completely disappeared. The idea of watching birds for six hours on a cold Winter's day now isn't appealing at all. I start to worry about the size of my binoculars and whether my shoes fit the brief we've been sent (sensible and warm? I don't own anything that's sensible and warm). There's also the issue of making a packed lunch. I haven't made such a thing for decades and having to make one is making me very anxious. I remember the marmite and cheese sandwiches, Kit Kats and boxes of raisins from my youth but decide to make some feta and red pepper cornbread and be damned as a ponce...

Winter Birdwatch day dawns and the only good thing is that Daniel has to take Sniff for the day whilst I'm twitching. So although I'm up early I'm not up with a dog who hates going out in the cold and resents every step you make him take. After a frantic search for the right sort of tupperware I pack up my lunch (aforementioned cornbread, some pitta bread stuffed with cheese, salad and coleslaw, and an over-large packet of crisps which I intend to share with the 'experts' in order to ingratiate myself and get special twitching tips) and zip off in my filthy car, wearing shoes but probably the wrong shoes, down the A-something-or-other to Lackford Lakes.

The reserve is owned by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, an organisation that seems to be buying up much of Suffolk in a magnificent bid to help nature thrive in these desperate times. And these are desperate times for birds. Only a few weeks ago newspapers were announcing that another four British birds are in danger of extinction - the puffin, the turtledove, the Slavonian grebe and the pochard. Apart from that grebe, these are all everyday-sounding, previously common-as-muck creatures. So the twenty five pounds I have paid to twitch with the experts will hopefully go to help buy another quarter of an inch of fenland or heath or woodland upon which puffins and grebes and turtledoves and pochards can live and breed without fear.

As soon as I arrive at the Education Centre at Lackford Lakes, ten minutes early, I know that I am booked in with a group of real enthusiasts, all of whom seem to know each other already. I can tell immediately because I have the smallest binoculars by far and, despite the fact that I am ten minutes early, I am the last to arrive - these people are itching to twitch. The start time of ten o clock, early by my standards for a Sunday, is late for any proper twitcher and as soon as the big hand on the schoolroom clock reaches the twelve we're straight out the door, half drunk cups of tea willfully abandoned on the altar of ornithology.

The two elderly experts running the day are carrying the most enormous telescopes with which to espy our prey. These gigantic bits of kit and their attendant stands look far too hefty to lug around all day, but our experts are seasoned twitchers and the 'scopes' (as they're referred to constantly) are as essential to them as an arm or a leg. Whatever discomfort they endure will be endured with pride.

Our first destination - some bushes. We are on the hunt for small songbirds as it's the right time of day and we should get the hardest twitching done first, apparently. As I walk beside Expert One, I notice that his 'scope' (I'm catching up with the lingo) has the mark Swarovski on it. Conversationally I say something along the lines of "Oh, I thought Swarovski made crystals not telescopes" and that's it, I'm immediately fingered as a complete novice and a total twat, a role in which I am cast for the rest of the day. If I now point to a blackbird and say what's that, no-one, but no-one, will be remotely surprised.

There are about ten of us signed up to the Winter Birdwatch and I am definitely the youngest. Surprisingly, there are almost as many women as men - which doesn't stop Experts One and Two making many jokes throughout the course of the day about males having all the good plumage etc. etc. This seems to be a twitching thing because none of the women take offence - indeed, they cackle away along with the others. Everyone is very, very sensibly and quite drably dressed and some have elaborate clothing with straps and extra pockets and in-built water bottle carriers all of which helps them carry their heavy equipment and, more importantly, makes them look like experts too. Fortunately, I'd dug out a coat that used to belong to my father - a Karrimor, I think it's called - and I notice with satisfaction that at least three other people are wearing Karrimor too. So I got that right. My own paltry equipment, a small pair of binoculars, is slung round my neck but I keep getting the cord caught up in my scarf and often miss the sightings of x or y "over there, at eleven o clock" whilst struggling to disentangle myself. The shoes I'm wearing are definitely wrong. They were frowned upon in the Education Centre by Expert Two and deemed unsuitable but I explained it was all I had and that they would have to do...

Bird watching often seems to be about lists. So here's mine: Goldcrest, Redwing, Redpoll, Siskin, Bullfinch, Sparrowhawk, Buzzard, Barn Owl, Widgeon, Teal, Pochard, Shoveler (do you think it was my adoptee?), Gooseander, Gadwall, Kingfisher, Cormorant, Little Egret, Heron, Lesser Black Backed Gull, Greater Black Backed Gull, Herring Gull, Common Gull, Long Tailed Duck, Reed Bunting, Long Tailed Tit, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Treecreeper, Nuthatch, Snipe, Tufted Duck, Goldeneye, Marsh Tit.

I saw them all, folks. In one Winter Birdwatch day.

Some of these birds - the Goldcrest, Redwing, Redpoll - are fairly common but nevertheless are birds I haven't knowingly seen before. My inner twitcher trilled and thrilled to watch them properly. I was also amazed by everyone's dedication to the most ordinary of birds. Remembering that Expert One and Expert Two have been doing this twitching lark for almost fifty years; week in, week out - they travel the country chasing after rare visitors; together they visit the same local reserves time after time after time; they ring and count and watch and wait and they've led countless different expeditions and walks, in the UK and abroad, and yet when, half-way through the day, they find a solitary male bullfinch half-hidden in a bush, managing to train both their 'scopes' on it for a perfect view, they act like proud parents showing off their first child. It was most touching. Bullfinches, after all, are a common as muck garden bird. They must have seen thousands. Yet, this one still excited them and, enthusiasm being catching, us.

Their greatest enthusiasm of the day was not mine. Any expert, One, Two or otherwise, scanning the list above will know immediately that it includes one bird that is unusual for the UK, especially for Lackford Lakes and Suffolk. In fact, there is one bird in that list which hasn't been seen at Lackford Lakes for over twenty years...

It is the Long-Tailed Duck.

It was post-lunch (I'd managed to eat my cornbread without anyone making any adverse comments, chiefly because the other Winter Birdwatch participants were busy watching a kingfisher dive in and out of the pond visible through the Education Centre's windows; there's no time to eat when nature's displaying) and we were ambling alongside one of the lakes. On the other side of the path, beyond the confines of the reserve, was a golf course. Three women were lugging their clubs across the well-kept grass to resume play at the next hole. I wondered whether, if one were to draw a Venn diagram, there would ever be a cross-section between those who play golf (and therefore, in effect, help to destroy the countryside) and those who watch birds. The outfits the golfers wore looked similarly sensible to those the birders were wearing, for instance. Unfortunately, I wondered this all out loud in conversation with a fellow Winter Birdwatcher who simply couldn't disguise his face registering the fact that he thought I was mad and who pointedly got away from me as soon as possible.

My own opinion is that not many people who play golf twitch although I'm happy to be disproved.

I digress.

We stopped by the side of the afore-mentioned lake. Expert One and Two obviously had something special up their sleeves, they were almost hopping from side to side with excitement whilst setting up their scopes. After a few minutes of levering and training and focusing they stepped back from their magnificent equipment. "There it is", they said simultaneously, a few seconds later. We all, all ten of us, looked across the lake. Nothing. "Oh, it's gone," they said. Forty seconds later. "There it is. Further to the right." "Where, where?" we chorused. "No, it's gone," they said.

It was like a Christmas pantomime.

We had to virtually plead with them to tell us what we were supposed to be looking at, they seemed too excited to explain properly. But eventually, after we'd all had a quick glimpse at whatever it was, Expert One explained that what we were looking at was a Long-Tailed Duck. And Long-Tailed Ducks have not graced Lackford Lakes for over twenty years. This, in twitching terms, was an EVENT. And we, lucky amateurs, could witness it.

And sure enough, every forty seconds or so, at a place quite distant from its last appearance (making the training of scopes quite tricky), up would pop said Long Tailed Duck again. It would look about for five seconds or less and then disappear once more leaving us guessing as to its next destination. This was all happening quite a distance away, towards the furthest shore of the lake - really you would never have noticed a thing but for the guidance of Experts One and Two. To complicate matters further for anyone but Experts One and Two, this particular Long Tailed Duck was a female and therefore didn't have a long tail. In fact, as males have all the fun and the plumage and ha ha ha, cue joke, it was quite a dowdy-looking thing.

A little later, as we all trudged passed a solitary serious-looking bird-watcher (twitchers tend to move at a glacial pace when not actually twitching) - a man with the biggest binoculars yet - he kindly pointed out to us (I think this is required twitching etiquette) that the Long Tailed Duck was now preening and cleaning itself and therefore not disappearing every five seconds. Experts One and Two swung their scopes into action and, this time, we all got a good long look at rare duck event extraordinaire. In fact, if we didn't look through the scope for a sufficiently long period of time (step forward Mr Cooper) you were soundly told off for not taking full advantage of said rare duck event.

It was after Expert One told me off that I realised that I would never ever, truly, be a proper twitcher. A rare visitor from abroad (as the Long Tailed Duck is) just wasn't sending shivers down my spine in the way that a common but uncommon to me bird like the Goldcrest did earlier. I could never go chasing up and down the country simply because a Hoopoe has been blown off course and has landed in a puddle in Powys. The idea of getting up in the middle of the night in response to an alarm on my phone telling me that something unusual has been spotted two hundred miles away...well, it's simply not going to happen.

I remain defiantly dilettantish on the edges of the bird world. And I really don't care if I have to ask what anything is. I can now, after all, thanks to asking Experts One and Two, distinguish between five different gulls. Although, come next Winter, I will no doubt have forgotten exactly how to do this. I will remember that male Gadwalls have black behinds. For some reason, I think that fact is going to remain with me for ever.

Our day at Lackford Lakes was to end with a sighting of Gooseanders flying in to settle on one of the smaller lakes for the night. Promising anything in birding terms is rather foolish and, sure enough, the Gooseanders didn't appear as they were supposed to, at four o clock. Dusk was falling rapidly and visibility was decreasing minute by minute and still the Gooseanders didn't appear. Instead, we watched fifteen thousands gulls coming in to roost on another adjacent lake, something they do nightly throughout the Winter now that pig farms and rubbish tips all over Suffolk are providing enough sustenance for them to stay in the UK throughout the colder months. Occasionally something - a buzzard or sparrowhawk perhaps - would disturb the settling gulls and they would rise en masse into the air and circle each other: thousands and thousands of undulating birds over a single expanse of water, looking like a swarm of giant gnats. Slowly the gulls would all descend again and begin to settle on the water for a safe and secure good night's sleep courtesy of those excellent guardians, the  Wildlife Trust.

A call came from the bird hide overlooking the smaller lake. It was Expert Two. The Gooseanders, forty minutes behind schedule, had arrived. My cheap binoculars couldn't cope very well with the deepening gloom, but I'm fairly certain that I just managed to distinguish the dark head of a Gooseander amongst the few remaining Black Headed Gulls (stragglers all) along the far shore of the lake. At least, I assured Experts One and Two that I had and that the day, all in all, had been marvellous. Taking one last look at the thousands of snoozing gulls, I headed off down the track and off home to the Pink Pig Farm once more.

Warren Lodge

I ended the last post feeling like the only human in the world. To continue the theme of aloneness (as distinct from loneliness, an affliction I don't have - currently, at least - despite living in the middle of nowhere, far from friends) we are going to visit the warrener's world...

In Much Ado About Nothing (1598), Shakespeare has Benedick describe his friend Claudio's mood as being "as melancholy as a lodge in a warren." In the late nineteenth century illustrated edition of Shakespeare's plays that the husband found in some boxes of books he won at auction in Bury St Edmunds this phrase is explained thus:

"A 'lodge' was a small building or shed , erected in rabbit-warrens or fields that required watching during the season, and was abandoned afterwards; so that a 'lodge' early became a type of dreariness or desolation."

Close to the Pink Pig Farm, nestled in part of Thetford Forest, is just such a melancholy lodge, perched on top of a hill, isolated and drear. Except that this lodge is a much grander construction than usual. It was built as a permanent home for the local warrener in 1640, not long after Shakespeare wrote his play.
 
Yesterday I approached the lodge accompanied by Sniff, climbing a long constantly rising path flanked by tall pine trees banked with swathes of browning bracken, touched into gleams of gold by the rays of the sun.

Some six hundred years ago, when the lodge was first occupied, much of this forest would still have been heathland, the perfect sandy habitat for thousands of rabbits. Warreners were rabbit-catchers and lived alone in the middle of Rabbitland, enabling them to simply fling open their front door and be surrounded by their quarry. Thousands of rabbits were slaughtered monthly and carted across England to London or York or Canterbury to satisfy the growing appetites of those swelling metropolises - meat for the table, fur for the back.

After a while tall pine trees give way to gorse bushes, still bearing some yellow flowers in late October, and the landscape opens out, with sandy pits on either side of the path. It is here, in these odd lunar depressions, that an extremely rare plant lives - the Breckland Mugwort. Once found at only one site in the whole of Britain, somewhere here in the Brecks (our Pink Pig Farm is firmly in the Brecks, of which more later), the Forestry Commission and the friends of Thetford Forest are busy trying to propagate Breckland Mugwort in more places - including here in warrener's world. I couldn't spot any today but did, I think, see some during the Summer...

Towards the top of the hill the land flattens out and becomes bare of vegetation. It's easy to imagine any Watership Down moment you care to think of (and, infuriatingly, Bright Eyes starts running through my mind, Art Garfunkel's fey tenor attempting to pull at my heartstrings. The only actual sounds are those made by the wind and the distant traffic on the A11 to Norwich.)

The lodge has been renovated on the outside but remains derelict inside with an old metal bedframe in one corner and some rotting pieces of wood strewn across the floor. The windows have all been bricked up but it is not hard to see that, in its heyday, it would have commanded quite a view. From the upper floor of the warren, the rabbit-catcher could look down onto the forest and see his rivals in rabbit-catching, goshawks and sparrowhawks, circling and swooping above the trees. Indeed, Helen Macdonald of recent H is for Hawk fame, came here to Thetford Forest to train her goshawk - she talks about the Brecks quite a lot in the book - and there is a wild population in evidence which, thrillingly, I do see on most visits. On a sign near to the Lodge, newly minted, there is an illustration of how the warrener might have lived...

There is also, on the same sign, the Shakespeare quote given above but they have Benedict talking about Cassio's mood. Now, I don't purport to be an expert in Shakespeare, but it doesn't take more than a quick glance at the list of dramatis personae of Much Ado, coming straight after the rather magnificent illustrated title page in my edition (note the mustachioed gentleman resolutely ignoring the swooning ladies), to realise that there is no-one called Cassio in Much Ado About Nothing. Nope. No-one. Nowhere. Put 'Cassio Shakespeare' into Google and you find him - as a gentleman soldier in Othello...

Never trust a sign.

Walking back past the other sign about Breckland Mugwort and the Mugwort depressions (obviously all totally made up) I notice that, despite the fact that it is almost November, there are still quite a few flowers in evidence. Cob nuts spatter the ground and colourful leaves whirl through the air. Red deer, roe deer and muntjac are all here, but remain invisible, hidden in the dappled depths of the forest. Once more there is no-one in evidence. Not a single other human being. I'm startled by the sudden darting of a squirrel and, mildly spooked, Sniff and I clamber back into the car and head for the Pink Pig Farm and home.

Postscript

If anyone feels the need to know more about rabbits, warreners and their special significance for East Anglia in the past, I've found a paper on-line called The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy by one Mark Bailey. His abstract is this:

The rabbit was a rare beast in medieval England, and much sought after for both its meat
and its fur. This investigation plots the early history of commercial rabbiting in East Anglia,
and its transition from a low output concern to a growth industry in the later Middle Ages.
The development of the rabbit-warren into a highly lucrative source of income is explained in
terms of the changing economic and social conditions after the Black Death, and the more
intensive management of warrens by landlords. The occupational spin-offs from rabbiting,
and the social implications of poaching in a region where resistance to the feudal order was
endemic, are also explored. Final consideration is given to the economic impact of the rabbit
on areas of poor soil, and its ability to compensate for their inherent disadvantages in grain
production.

Sometimes, but only sometimes, I love the internet.