Today

The best thing about the English spring is the way it teases you. A few snowdrops here, a catkin there. A warm day, followed by 3 weeks of frost with a hint of snow. Today, after a beautiful day yesterday, we started with mist. It had that quality which made you think the sun was going to burst through. So I decided to do the big walk: the one all the way down Entry Hill. This despite the laryngitis. However, the mist resolved into a cloud layer and it was still quite chilly. And I hadn't got a coat.

The walk back up tonight was nice, though; there was some blue sky. I saw primroses, celandines, violets and cowslips, as well as the ubiquitous daffs. Cowslips are making a comeback, having been practically obliterated during the 70s and 80s.

In My Day

To my Mother spring meant the opportunity to get into the country and pick flowers. On some Sunday or other in March or April, armed with an Ordnance Survey map and picnic, she'd herd us all onto a bus going South. Eventually the London Country Bus (Green Line) would deposit us at whatever place she had decreed was the starting point and off we'd go, struggling over stiles and barbed wire, slipping in the mud. At some point we'd lose my father, who'd stop "to take pictures" which really meant having a snooze under a tree. Mamma would decide that it was time for the picnic so we'd sit on our coats, dealing with spiders, earwigs and unexpcted (at least to Mamma) drops of rain.

Then the trek back to a bus stop where, with luck, we'd catch the last bus back to Godstone or some such place. It wasn't for nothing that Daddy nicknamed Mamma the "never-get-there". Mamma, as a German, never got the hang of the vagaries of the English spring and we never picked any flowers: they were always either over or not started yet or didn't flower in that part of Britain.

Spring, though. It never really lets you down, does it?