He’s Big, He’s Bad, He’s Very, Very, Bad

On March 28, 2023 By Mick CanningIn Fairy tales, poetry, Red Riding Hood, satire, wolf22 Comments

I wrote this four or five years ago, but having name-checked nursery rhymes, folk songs, folklore and the like over the past few weeks, now seemed like a good time to post it.

The BBW

or He’s big, he’s bad, he’s very, very, bad

That Big Bad Wolf – it now appears

We’ve had it wrong for all these years.

You know the way the story goes

He dresses up in grandma’s clothes

After he’s had her for his lunch

(they make much play of how he’d crunch

Her up and then he’d gulp her down,

Then put on sleeping cap and gown,

Get into bed, pretend to sleep,

I’m sure he never counted sheep!)

Then in comes young Red Riding Hood,

Who travels blithely through the wood,

So innocent – without a care,

Apparently, she’s not aware

It’s full of perils – hungry wolves

Who dress up in old women’s clothes

To name but one – there’s more, no doubt.

But any one would catch her out.

She’s pretty thick, it must be said,

She sees a big bad wolf in bed

Instead of being cross and furious

She stands there looking vaguely curious

Says ‘What big eyes you’ve got today.’

Is that all she can think to say?

Big eyes? Big eyes? Well, what about

The pointed ears, the great long snout,

Did she not have the slightest thought

This might not be the one who ought

To welcome her to Primrose cottage,

That frail old woman in her dotage?

And what about – ah yes, the teeth.

You knew we’d get around to teeth

Before too long – I think you’d say

About the pearlies on display

It would not take much of a guess

To know that they weren’t NHS.

And so back to that gormless youth

Who stands there staring at the wolf

With no great wonder or surprise

Except to say he had BIG EYES!

And now I wonder more and more

If she had seen her gran before.

Now, if it was left up to me

I’d let the wolf have her for tea.

Just eat her up and finish there.

Although that just might be unfair

Perhaps the girl had poor eyesight,

That’s why she never quite took flight.

I hear it now, a low voice quavers,

‘She should have gone to Specsavers!’

But let’s just leave all that for now,

I hinted some way back just how

This story has become perverted,

The happenings have been inverted.

The emphasis on Riding Hood

When actually I think it should

Be focused more upon the roles

The wolf was playing with the clothes.

We’ve never paid it much attention,

Because it only gets a mention

As a ploy to fool the brat.

I think there’s more to it than that.

The clues were there, before our eyes

It isn’t much of a surprise.

The women’s clothes, the wolf, the bed,

The things that story left unsaid.

The true events I’ll tell you now,

A charming little tale of how

A handsome wolf had searched worldwide

For love (or something on the side).

A simple tale in many ways

It tells how he had passed his days.

He’d been with several little pigs,

And tried some other casual gigs,

But nothing seemed to satisfy

He needed something else to try.

He heard how in the Big Wild Wood

The father of Red Riding Hood

A widowed man, still lithe and strong,

Was also searching for someone.

(The woodland folk had seen his chopper

And word was it was quite a whopper!)

His mind made up, he hatched a plan

To win this handsome, big strong man.

You know the rest, or at least some,

A perfumed letter asking him to come.

A rendezvous deep in the woods,

Where he could view some tempting goods

He might find pleasing. The next day

The wolf, now nervous, in bed lay.

He wondered should he have done more,

But then a knock upon the door.

He held his breath, the door swung wide,

The woodman slowly came inside.

Cue clapping hands and smiles and laughter –

They both lived happily ever after!

At The Hop

On March 24, 2023 By Mick CanningIn farming, hops, kent, tradition21 Comments

I was talking about hop pockets and pokes last week – and pigs, of course, which was how it all started, but forget the pigs for now. Let’s stick with the pokes and pockets. At the weekend we went for a walk through a part of Kent we hadn’t walked for a few years and part of the walk took us through this field:

This was a hop garden many years ago. Conveniently close to the oast houses so that as soon as the hops were picked they could be taken in and dried before there was any chance of them spoiling. Taken in bagged up in pokes, and once dried shipped out to the brewers in pockets. A word of explanation for those not familiar with these terms: hops are not grown in fields, they are grown in gardens. Not like your or my back garden, but like a field. But a field full of poles. Hop poles. With huge cable-like wires strung between them to support the hop bines as they grow.

When they are ready for harvesting, the bines are pulled down and the hops picked and put in pokes – large sacks (but you knew that, of course. You remembered it from last week). Then once dried they are shovelled into pockets – another size of sack.

And what are the hops for? Making beer, my friend. Lovely beer.

I don’t have a picture of the hop garden from back then, but late one cold, misty, autumn night about thirty years ago, I walked through it and the eeriness was instantly imprinted on me and once I was home I felt compelled to make an oil pastel painting of it (below).

Anyway, as I said I don’t have a photo of the hop garden in question, but this one from Pixabay illustrates very nicely the hop poles and wires with the growing hop bines growing up and across them:

Image by -Rita-👩‍🍳 und 📷 mit ❤ from Pixabay

The poles were supported by wires kept under tension, anchored into the ground around the edge of the garden. Quite a few of these are still in situ around the very edge of the field and just into the woodland and hedgerows bordering it.

In 1872, there were 72,000 acres of land in England growing hops, the majority of these being in Kent, employing over 100,000 seasonal workers at picking time. By 2003, the acreage in Kent was down to just over 1,000 and for the first time ever the county had been overtaken by Herefordshire, which now grew more, although the decline does at least appear to have halted for now. In 2011 there were a total of just over 2,500 acres under cultivation in England but it is such a small number there were fears the industry could die out. Although hops are still used in beer brewing, much of the requirement is imported, especially with a popular shift towards less bitter-tasting beers. But in much the same way that Kent has also lost a huge percentage of its apple orchards, a once rich and diverse farming landscape has become more and more homogenised, with endless huge fields of arable crops and sheep and cattle replacing the hop bines and apple trees.

I spent one autumn apple picking around thirty years ago and the farm I was working on had a large acreage of hop gardens (both apples and hops all sadly gone, now). It was an incredibly busy and bustling time, with our diverse group apple picking – a mixture of locals and Europeans come over for the work – and a traditional mix of workers in the hop gardens; as well as locals, there were a lot of gypsies and possibly still a few people down from London’s East End, which was a traditional way for those workers to make some extra money in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was busy, noisy, very hard work, and a lot of fun.

And, not surprisingly, there are a number of traditional songs about hop picking. So here is the wonderful Shirley Collins and the Albion Dance Band to perform ‘Hopping down in Kent’ especially for you.

Apocalypse Deferred Just A Tiny Little Bit

On July 6, 2021 By Mick CanningIn kent, sussex, walking, Weald37 Comments

Yesterday, I went for a walk around parts of Sussex and Kent. The sun shone – Hooray! I managed the whole walk without aching too much afterwards – Hooray again! I said good morning to some sheep and patted a very nice horse. I just knew it was going to be a Good Day.

At one point I went along a footpath I haven’t used for several years, and was delighted to see this:

And then another four miles or so later there was this:

The council have made this area a Designated Roadside Nature Reserve. Established for several years now, it has a rich variety of wildflowers and grasses, and is fairly humming with insect life.

Perhaps there is a little hope for us, after all.

Being Wistful: South Downs Way 4 – Amberley to Winchester

On April 16, 2020 By Mick CanningIn long distance footpaths, South Downs Way, walking19 Comments

Mmm…I was rather forgetting I said I’d post the last part of this…

Our room looked out over what is called Amberley Swamp. We slept with the curtains open, and were woken by the pre-dawn light, although the bluey greys and purples soon gave way to greens and yellows in the low morning sun.

109a

But once the sun was up, the mist contrived to linger for a while longer and the cool, still air was filled with the cries of unseen birds. Later, as we left Amberley and approached the first steep climb of the day, we saw a yellowhammer on a gatepost singing its traditional ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’ song.

113a

I tried to get a photo of the little perisher, though I wasn’t very successful.

This is all about the sheep, by the way.

085

Baaa!

The South Downs landscape as we know it today was largely formed by sheep. I don’t mean that large flocks of sheep sat down and planned it as a kind of Rural Development Project, but that for certainly more than a thousand years it was grazed by huge flocks of sheep whose dung helped improve the soil so that in places crops might also be grown. This led to the felling of virtually all tree cover (originally, the Downs were forested, as was most of Britain) and the establishment of the large grassland areas we associate with the Downs today.

Fans of Terry Pratchett will recall that the Mistress Weatherwax series was set in a part of Discworld that bears a large resemblance to the Chalk Downs of England. No coincidence, I am sure, as he hailed from the Wiltshire area which includes, of course, Salisbury Plain. When I read these books, I get the sense that in describing that area, he is writing of an area that is dear and special to him. There are rolling Downs and sheep and a witch who is also a shepherd living in a shepherd’s hut, which is a caravan but not as we know it, Jim.

Shepherd’s huts were the most basic of boxes on wheels, usually with a tiny shuttered glass-less window, a bunk bed, a small wood burning stove and pretty well not much else. The hut would be up on the downs (there’s an oxymoron that’s not an oxymoron for you) for most of the year, and the shepherd would live up there looking after the sheep. Probably no chance of a day off or a night out, month after month. It was a tough life, and not at all romantic. Even getting hold of water would be a problem, with the general lack of any water at all on top of the Downs, unless they parked up near a dew pond (see part 1).

There used to be one in the grounds of the Visitor’s Centre at Exceat, near Seaford, although I’ve no idea if it is still there now.

A number of companies now make shepherd’s huts for trendy well-off folks with a bit of garden to shove them in, and charge quite a lot of money, and they are frequently much larger than the originals would have been, and fitted out in some luxury – a far cry from how they would have been when built on the farm for the shepherd. Perhaps they need a new name for them: Mock Shepherd’s Huts, perhaps.

A quick look at what Professor Google comes up with when you enter ‘Shepherd’s hut’ into the search engine reveals an overabundance of words like ‘luxurious’, ‘style’ and ‘cool’ and ‘glamping’…you get the idea.

In the first post of this series, I mentioned I had once intended to start an outdoor adventure company, which never happened. Had I done so, it was to be called Red Kite Outdoors. I mention this, as we saw a number of Red Kites towards the end of our walk. Which gives me an opportunity to include a second poor quality photo of a bird in this post.

There, don’t say I never do anything for you.

141a

A Red Kite – just out of range of my camera.

As planned, on the last day we reached Winchester.

We cheated, incidentally. We were so tired after the penultimate day, we walked an easy path for 3 miles or so into the village / small town of West Meon, went for coffee there, had lunch, and then took the bus to Winchester.

We don’t care!

155a

An easy path

After finding our AirBnb guesthouse (pretty damn good, actually) we went and had a look in the cathedral. It is pretty close to the end (or start) point of the walk, after all.

166b

An arty farty reflective light shot of the cathedral that shows nothing of the cathedral

We stood around in the Cathedral as the choir went through their practice before Evensong. I do not know what piece they were singing, but it was a beautiful, haunting, ethereal piece. It was tempting to stay for Evensong, just to hear them sing again, but we had an appointment with a celebratory supper which I was reluctant to delay.

168a

What better way to celebrate our arrival in Winchester?

The Sussex Downs Murder – Not Really A Review

On November 27, 2019 By Mick CanningIn Fiction, Review, South Downs, sussex10 Comments

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For anyone who loves the English South Downs – and whodunnits – this book makes an interesting read.

On the one hand, it is a fairly average 1930’s detective murder mystery, although I have certainly read much worse, but on the other it provides some marvellous insights into the South Downs in the area specifically around Chanctonbury Ring in that time, which is really what took my interest.

Personally, I prefer murder mysteries involving ‘normal’ people, rather than the typical country house full of assorted Colonels and ladies and royalty and such-like, so popular at the time – other than the thought of bumping off the Upper Classes, of course! But this book delivers in that it is set on a downland farm, where the farmer goes missing, believed murdered. It even has, as a cover, an adaptation of one of the fabulous Leslie Carr railway posters of the 1930’s – what’s not to like?

The introduction mentions its ‘sense of place’, and the writing seems to me especially good at conveying an accurate feel of the landscape. One thing that comes over very strongly is the emptiness of the countryside at that time. The Downs have been sparsely inhabited since Roman times; before then, much of the population chose to live on the higher, drier, lands of the chalklands of South and South East England, away from the forested and frequently marshy lower areas where travel was difficult and clearance very hard work. After the arrival of the Romans, however, all this changed, and since then the chalklands have been left largely to a small population living mainly by farming sheep.

We now have many people visiting for leisure purposes and on fine days popular routes such as the walk to Birling Gap from Eastbourne (or from convenient car parks much closer!) may easily see hundreds of visitors striding along the footpaths and hanging off the edge of the cliffs taking selfies (other stupid ways to kill oneself are available). On the same day, though, nearby footpaths may see no visitors at all. It is still a sparsely populated area.

John Bude evokes this sense of emptiness well. His descriptions of the roads and paths on and around the area really allow the reader to feel this. His characters walk the lanes and roads of the downs frequently without meeting anyone else on their journeys. Farms and houses are ‘isolated’, and even at a time when most people would travel by public transport to cover any distance, the population is so small that when questioned by the detective on the case, a bus conductor can remember who was on his bus several weeks before.

There are four lime kilns near Washington, on the edge of the area described in the story, which I suspect were the inspiration for the lime kiln featured on the farm in the book. No spoilers, but you might well guess their relevance to a murder mystery.

But it is the descriptions of the roads and paths that particularly take my interest, roads and paths virtually empty of footfall or traffic even during the day, emphasising how lightly populated the area was, and still is today, to a degree. Other than popular footpaths such as the long distance South Downs Way, and those footpaths running between popular tourist spots, it is still easy to find solitude in this quiet area of the otherwise heavily populated South East England.

South Downs Way 4 – Amberley to Winchester

On August 16, 2018August 16, 2018 By Mick CanningIn long distance footpaths, South Downs Way, walking23 Comments

109a

113a

I tried to get a photo of the little perisher, though I wasn’t very successful.

This is all about the sheep, by the way.

085

Baaa!

There used to be one in the grounds of the Visitor’s Centre at Exceat, near Seaford, although I’ve no idea if it is still there now.

There, don’t say I never do anything for you.

141a

A Red Kite – just out of range of my camera.

As planned, on the last day we reached Winchester.

We don’t care!

155a

An easy path

After finding our AirBnb guesthouse (pretty damn good, actually) we went and had a look in the cathedral. It is pretty close to the end (or start) point of the walk, after all.

166b

An arty farty reflective light shot of the cathedral that shows nothing of the cathedral

168a

What better way to celebrate our arrival in Winchester?

Annapurna Circuit, Nepal – 4

On March 27, 2018 By Mick CanningIn Annapurna, Himalaya, mountains, Nepal, travel40 Comments

Part Four – from 30 years ago.

On the western side of Thorung La, the climate is much drier and in places the scenery is very much that of a desert landscape.

As you descend, though, you soon come across settled areas where meltwater from the snows and glaciers higher up enable vegetation to grow.

Mani stones plus a fine set of argali horns on top of a wall in Kagbeni. The argali are the wild sheep of the Himalaya.

In Tukuche, at 2590m – less than half the altitude of Thorung la, which we had crossed just two days before.

It was in places like this, that we really felt we could be in another century. Buildings of stone and beautifully carved wood, ponies for transport, no wheeled vehicles, and the two fellows to the right of the picture are busy crushing lengths of bamboo to a fibrous pulp, ready to make into paper.

It was in places like these, actually, that I felt I could just leave the world behind and spend the rest of my life. Yes, totally impractical, I know, but…

We came for the high peaks, but the mountains lower down have a breathtaking beauty of their own.

Sunrise on Poon Hill is a treat most trekkers ensure they don’t miss. Unrivalled mountain views, and in the spring the massed flowers of the rhododendron forests.