Signs of spring: lambs, daffodils, frogs croaking and fires on the moors. Book swap places.

 This morning I saw lambs, the first ones I’ve seen this year. Over the next few weeks the fields around here will be full of them. I also heard frogs in one of the millponds, no doubt busily doing what frogs do at this time of the year.

And there are daffodils. Spring must be here!

Along with the spring there are fires on the moors. Or at any rate there have been over the last few days. For the last month we’ve had surprisingly little rain and the peat moors around here are very dry as a result. One outbreak was only a couple of miles up the road from our house. Strangely we didn’t smell the smoke but Granddaughter Number One, who lives a good five miles away in another part of Oldham said she could smell it strongly! 

Fire engines have been running about all over the place. I saw one again this morning but going at normal traffic speed, not racing along with the siren blaring. 

One newspaper report suggested that at least one of the fires was caused by a “controlled burn that got out of hand” but later reports said that the fire brigade had not confirmed that. It used to be a regular thing at this time of year for farmers to set fire to the stubble left behind. The resulting ash was supposedly good for the soil in preparation for new planting. The trouble is that “controlled” is bot always the best way to describe setting light to a field in a peat area.  I thought that practice had been discredited but sometimes people stick to old habits. 

We had rain in the night, not a lot but more is forecast. Hopefully it has extinguished all the fires. In peat areas though fires have a tendency to appear to be extinguished but in reality continue to smoulder underground. Fingers crossed!

Walking around here, you come across old red phone boxes - no longer in use. It’s odd when we think back to how they were an essential part of our communication networks. Nowadays it seems many people no longer even have landlines. We still have one but only a very small number of people ever call us on it. Some of the old phone boxes are equipped with defibrillators. Others are decorated. And there are some I have heard of which act as mini libraries. 

Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian recently lamenting the disappearance of an unofficial “book-swap” in her local tube station. You could drop off books at the entrance to the tube station and, presumably, help yourself to something interesting to read on the underground. Then the book-swap disappeared overnight - not just from that one tube station but lots of others with same system. One explanation is that since the King’s Cross fire, way back in 1987, it has been against fire-safety regulations to have combustible material in any part of a station. But that must have been forgotten if book-exchanges were re-introduced into underground stations. Forgotten no more! I’m tempted to blame my son as I know that he has been working on a project to make the stations safe and accessible to everyone! 

So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!