Going on holiday just as some of the flowers in our garden are starting to bloom

It’s been a few weeks since my last post.

We were counting down to our summer holiday and it was all a mad rush to get work completed before we left. In the past I have managed to juggle posting with trying to clear the decks, but it is taking all of my time to manage work activities so the blog has become secondary at the moment.

There should be a word for that period pre-holiday where you are trying to clear everything but somehow things keep popping up. It is a combination of stress, rushing and desperation to finish – maybe strushing or possibly fressing.  

It is the most frustrating time of the year because you know that everything you leave will be there when you return, only worse. We go on holiday each year at about this time and it never really changes.

The feeling of relief when you reach the final task and turn your PC off for the last time is huge. But with modern technology, and the different ways that you can be notified that someone is trying to contact you, means that you never truly get away. Your phone regularly reminds you that you have an update, and if you dare look at your tablet then there be dragons waiting.

Instead of being able to focus away from the day to day and onto something more pleasant, the day to day invites itself into your holiday and introduces itself to most of your time. There are ways to turn this all off and divorce yourself from the world, but it is a real faff messing about with lots of settings and notification pages.

I’m not complaining really, it is a consequence of the modern world that if you want to take advantage of technology to keep you informed, then you have to be prepared for technology to take advantage of you. Each application is vying with all the others for your attention and some even take such exception at being ignored, they pop up reminders that you have been quiet for a few days.

I once started writing an application to help me with the gardening, but then soon realised that having the plants trying to chase me to be watered or being notified that it was time to flower would only add to my interruptions and not really make life easier at all.

Can you remember a time when you travelled on public transport and actually looked out of the window to see where you were going? These days everyone is so wrapped up in their phones or laptops that they have no clue what the route looks like between start and destination. Add to that the concept of sat nav and most people don’t know where they are anyway, except “they have arrived at their destination”.

As it is a special year for my better half and I, we have a big holiday planned later in the year.

In an attempt to have a slightly less expensive break now, we decided to do something a bit more local and British and head to Norfolk.  

Apologies in advance if I bore you with pictures from various wildlife reserves and gardens, but there are many of them in the county and they are some of the best in the country.

There is a definite feeling of being at home in Norfolk as it has very few main roads and lots of flat lands.  It also has a thriving agricultural industry, all of which are not dissimilar from Somerset.

But there are many things I didn’t realise about Norfolk until we came here. For example;

• It used to be one of the wealthiest counties in the UK with many large estates and the real home of the current British Royal Family - Sandringham.
• It has the highest concentration of mediaeval churches in the world.
• It has the only east coast resort that faces west! – the Hunstanton coastal resort faces Lincolnshire. (A place that we discovered is really only remarkable for this fact).
• A previous King of England (George V), lived in a cottage in North Norfolk (York Cottage), with his family for 15 years while he was on the throne until his mother died and he was able to move into Sandringham as the family home. This home is apparently now being given to Harry and Meghan by the Queen as their wedding present.
• Great Yarmouth is home to the world’s first football stand – built in 1892.
• Horatio Nelson was born in Norfolk. Receiving the Freedom of Great Yarmouth after the Battle of the Nile, he put his left hand on the Bible. ‘Your right hand, my lord,’ said the clerk. ‘That,’ replied Nelson, ‘is in Tenerife’.
• Great Yarmouth used to be the hub of the herring industry. In one day in 1907 fishermen brought into port over 80 million herring!  No wonder there are none left!
• The only food not rationed in the second world war was fish and chips – because who’d want to fish in seas full of enemy mines and submarines and with fighter and bomber planes overhead! Our wonderful fish and chips heritage continues to this day, and they’re definitely best if you eat them by the seaside.

We booked a wooden cabin near Diss for a week and made this our base for exploring the county. It was fantastically positioned and had all the facilities one needs. The only drawback was that it was a bit like a metal hut which got rather hot during the day. Thankfully it also had air-conditioning that soon cooled it down when we arrived back in the evening.

As we arrived in the grounds we were greeted by a muntjac deer feeding in the long grass. He didn’t hang around long, but he returned each day to check on us.

Soon we met other locals, a resident pheasant, a family of great tits (including young ones still with clown mouth) and a beautiful song thrush that serenaded us each evening. This too felt just like home, although thankfully we have no deer in our garden.

We were surrounded  in our cabin by a natural garden / wood that provided shelter for all this wildlife and yet meant we were only 100 yards from other holiday cabins and civilisation.

If anyone wants the address – please say so in the comments.

Damselfly on pond iris

Over the last few weeks the good weather has encouraged everything to come early. We now have the best selection of flowers in bloom ever in our garden, alongside some of the trees that are still flowering. This probably doesn’t bode well for later in the summer when the garden will fade but it looks amazing now.

It has been crazy to go away for several days each week and return to find the garden has metamorphosed into something new.

The selection of pictures below gives you a flavour, I am sure this is not unlike most of your own gardens too.

With so much early bloom, it appears that the new young birds have started to come late, and are only just starting to hatch. In reality, this is probably the normal time for hatchlings, they usually just have less cover to hide in. Whilst cover helps them hide from the cats, it also helps the cats hide from them and their propensity to make lots of noise will probably not help them survive their first summer.

While we were away we asked our wonderful aunt to look after the house and cats, and sadly she was presented with several “presents”, mostly of squirrel form.

The quantity of insects is also very noticeable. I have never seen so many gnats over the pond or dragonflies on the leaves. The damselfly opposite is one of many that are hanging out by the pond. This does encourage the birds to stay longer and also brings bats in at night to feast on the fresh produce.

Margaret found an early mover in the bat world flattened on the grass so they are already here.

Bressingham Gardens

As one travels around the Norfolk countryside there are lots of local gardens in bloom. With there being so much agricultural land in Norfolk, the gardens generally seem quite small, but they can be really fantastic.

We visited a local garden that really surprised us. Not only in the marvellous planting, but also in the size and scale. It was hidden away at the back of the Bressingham Steam and Gardens attraction. It looked like a bit of an add-on at first with a slightly weird entrance behind a railway line, but it opened out onto one of the best English gardens we have visited. It was full of different plants and has taken a massive amount of time and effort to put together.  The landscaping was a real pleasure to navigate and the whole garden flowed beautifully.

As much as we think we have a lot of work in looking after our own garden, this is nothing in comparison to the Bressingham garden. Every bed was beautifully manicured and weed-free. Each lawn edge was perfect and nothing was left to chance. It also flowed from one magnificent garden into a hidden garden that was a least as big again.

Once again there is a selection of pictures below from Bressingham.

It is really worth a visit if you are ever passing. It also has an attached garden centre which we thankfully didn’t have time to visit or we might have gone completely mad and filled the car.

In our newly adopted garden we had a few bird feeders. When we arrived we filled them up with sunflower seeds in an attempt to flush a few of the birds out.

At first nothing came.

But after a couple of days, the food source was discovered, partly by birds and partly by a squirrel – see the picture below. They slowly grew in numbers over the week. The wood pigeons are too fat to get the food directly but managed to knock over the coconut shell a couple of times and spill the seed.

The pheasant below worked out how to get seed dropped by the other birds.

We were eventually inundated by small birds.  It was incredible how quickly birds not only found a new food source, but also started to empty it. If you haven’t got a feeder in your garden try it out, they can never have enough food, especially in the cold weather where a lot of birds either froze or starved to death this year.

Disappointingly we found a collection of thrushes frozen against our house when the snows came. If we had known they could have come in for a warm!  We kept them fed, but food alone was not enough in this case.

Overnight my better half put out some extra food on the floor, and the next morning it had all been hoovered up leaving no trace. The nocturnal animals are hungry too!

Baby ducks abound

Further afield we have visited many reserves to see some of the birds we don’t get at home. It is great to get out into the fresh air and experience some surprises.

One such reserve presented us with an experience that cannot be repeated.

As we arrived at the site the resident warden was apologising to people at how the hobbies seemed to have gone away to breed leaving little else to see.

We set off for a walk anyway.

For the next 2 hours we stood in various places and watched a series of hobbies and other birds doing their best to entertain the watching public. Soaring, diving, swerving and swooping – the hobbies were quite astonishing. They were so impressive that we abandoned thoughts of walking around quickly to stand and observe.

Whilst trying to catch a glimpse of a speeding hobby in the camera we were surprised by a series of bearded tits trying to get to their nest that we were in the way of. They too move quickly so no pictures were possible, but they are beautiful. A sight to catch hold of if you ever get the chance.

These two gems were alongside the normal mixture of warblers, waders and ducks. What a day!

We saw 75 bird species in a week. Quite a total considering we weren’t making this the main focus of the holiday. Nature was just kind to us and we timed it well.

The picture opposite is one from a lot of attempts, (there will be more next week). Taking pictures of birds is probably as frustrating as it gets, and it doesn’t matter how big your lens is you can guarantee that the bird is just too far away to be recognisable.

As much as I love having a camera and scope there is always someone who comes into the hide with a better one. I have experimented with getting a 500mm zoom lens which weighs a tonne and takes some lugging around.

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is one of those stupidly long camera lenses that are completely impractical to transport and terribly difficult to hold still unless you have a tripod.

But as you settle down to focus on the latest shot, a monster catches your eye. Someone has a lens that looks more like a telescope and ripples like a machine gun as it photographs every bead of water on the feathers of some distant subject.

You reset your camera to make sure that the zoom is fully extended in case anyone is interested, but no the behemoth next door is dwarfing my lens and casting a shadow over everything about it. I wonder how they can possibly afford such a beast. Even with a reasonable job, I can’t really comprehend spending the price of a small car on a few pieces of expertly cut glass held together by a few bits of metal.

I know photography is like a religion but you don’t usually have to re-mortgage your house to join the local church.

In reality, I am just a little envious and wish I too had such a beast. But I think paying the mortgage off might just sneak ahead of having a super duper lens. But when the mortgage is done – just wait to see what I will post on here J

In the meantime, you will have to suffer distant shots of beautiful coloured birds that you can look up on the internet if you really want to see a close up.

Jones The Butchers

With so many pictures on the blog this week, I feel there is really only one piece of music to post here. This was a tune that accompanied a TV show in the 70’s which I must have watched regularly as the tune stuck in my mind, but I don’t remember much about the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCHRW8G9yY

If you access this link from another page you can listen to it and look at the pictures at the same time.

If you really want to reminisce then here is a 25 minute montage of the character that followed on from this programme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUJRx-dSxQ

While visiting the Bressingham Gardens we also managed to enter the world of Dad’s Army.

This TV show has been kicking around for the whole of my lifetime but I never knew that there was an exhibition of the village and memorabilia in Norfolk.

It has every shop from the show and a good number of items such as clothes, vehicles etc.

I only really have a faint interest, but it is good to see that such a popular show endures for so long and still draws crowds. This is in contrast to the Generation Game that recently made a come-back only to be canned after 2 programmes. Sometimes past glories are better left just that way.

Whilst driving around Norfolk we always have a song that seems to become associated with the holiday. This time it was the following. Don’t ask me why I picked this, but it is not one you hear often.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr_qN-Bk6VM

Finally, while we have been away we have discovered “The Crown”. As we have visited Sandringham and various of the locations from the programme it has been very interesting to understand the context of some of the big events from the past 100 years.

I hope our holiday snaps haven't been too boring!

Have a great weekend!

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