Batcombe

REP & DISTRIBUTOR: Johnny Gibbs jg@intramar.co.uk 83187

Batcombe church in snow

Photo: J Gibbs

Batcombe Church

When the snow came, the church looked at its best framed against the snowy landscape. We have not been able to hold any services so far this calendar year due to the lockdown, but we are hoping for some encouragement on services as the vaccination programme gallops ahead.

Fantastic load of rubbish

We had our annual litter pick in the village. Fifteen of us were organised with martial precision so that we kept socially distanced and we covered the whole village and the road along Batcombe Down from the Hilfield Nature Reserve almost to the Clay Pigeon Raceway – march divided and fight concentrated! The village areas were not too bad now that our serial bottle chucker has departed but there were still one or two bottles missed from last year. Batcombe Ridge road was much worse with a lot of rubbish but, at least, we were supported by grateful remarks from passers-by. In total we collected about 15 black bags of rubbish. The village looks sparklingly litter-free.

Max Brimble Photo: Carole Potter

Guest contribution Call of the wild – a Covid digression Awroight then?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the more that wild creatures associate with humans, the more over-familiar the former become. For example, take the (self-styled) Le Comte Phillipe de Batcombe. Whilst normally ghosting ethereally in the background, Phil does occasionally feel forced to point out that the self-service dining area at the bottom of the garden requires replenishing. Let’s face it, you have to be desperate to stop for refreshment at a motorway services at the peak of the holiday season with jam-packed roads, and this is why Phil chooses mid-mornings when the mass of sparrows which have descended like a football crowd at a semi-final, and the huge black ominous crows, have all departed, having hoovered up the avian first-serving. Either that or he just can’t get up in the mornings.

Such is the price for that overdressed, rather distant feathered breed, who go out of their way to show how elegant and splendid they are, with an air of aloof distraction like Wordsworth moving slowly over the Fells, beaks raised and pretending to ignore the mocking squirrels. They do have many human equivalents of course, but arguably the male pheasant is superior in its balletic grace and beautiful colours. A little food is more than adequate payment for the visual enjoyment they provide (although – vegans look away now – they can be delicious when served with a fine Chilean Malbec).

Phil’s other good points are his impeccable manners, waiting patiently in the background for private space, and not pushing even smaller birds out of the way. But like his ancestors known to me over the years, the saintly self-possessed image is inevitably shattered when Phil suddenly imagines he is in grave danger (the resident crazy collie being a major factor here) and he changes his slow elegant gait increasingly to a frantic sprint, body upright and legs cycling in a blur looking like a silent feathered Charlie Chaplin. This is when he apparently forgets that he has been given wings.

Many birds are scientifically proven to be intelligent, but I doubt that the pheasant is among them. Nature, always concerned with balance, perhaps herself decided that the male bird already had an excess of physical beauty compared to others, so attributes such as a clever brain or a harmonious singing voice (instead of a sound like a pile of junk metal being disturbed), were unnecessary. Moral: be grateful for what you’ve got.

Old Buzzard

Thought from the Rise of the Wriggle

“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” Franklin D Roosevelt