HERON FEGAWI BLUEBELLS: April 2024

Ahem, 

A few days after I had, with all due ceremony, carefully poured twenty bright and bushy-tailed goldfish from a large transparent plastic bag into our rejuvenated pond, aware that the fish would be in temporary shock and hiding behind pond foliage for a while, Alli and I slowly began, quite separately, to realise that the goldfish were not hiding because of shock or shyness. In fact, they weren’t hiding at all. They no longer existed. In less than a week our pond had lost nearly twenty goldfish to a marauding heron whose malign and predatory visits took place during the early dawn or late dusk. The silent killer had left no traces of struggle. It was a mystery heron, like Eliot’s cat Macavity, although we have seen the elegant monster perched haughtily on the rooves opposite. This was all very salutary; we were just starting to think of those goldfish as pets. We ordered a bag of twenty more and a life-like model of a heron for the pond’s edge. But the carnage didn’t end there. There is more than circumstantial evidence that the terror continued regardless. Finally, we put a net across the top and carried on looking for goldfish, chanting a few Hail Marys in our shame. Miraculously, Alli has found some survivors, including some we did not think we had even put in. I just hope that the water of the pond has no memory, still less the surviving goldfish (one of which is suddenly very big, which raises some sinister issues).

I spent a few days in Brighton dog-sitting Jaxon the Staffie, while his parents Jessie and Jurrat went on their delayed five-star honeymoon tour of Japan. While I was in Brighton I saw Starsailor at the Concorde 2 on the Brighton beach-side with Ella (a prescient present from Jessie and Jurrat). Starsailor’s set summoned wistful but excellent memories, thanks to their extraordinarily powerful songs, many from their first album, which I enjoyed more than 20 years ago.

I went with our Kuvasz Max to Worth to meet my short-haired friend Paul and his long-haired Jack Russell, Rua, at Three Bridges Station, still surrounded by its monstrous car park. We walked to the 10^th century St Nicholas’s Church in Worth, a place of Christian worship for over 1000 years. We also tried to find the much-publicised Worth lime tree, hundreds of years old, but a very large and deteriorating stump suspiciously close to where Google claimed it was inferred that it had fallen short.

The climax of the month came with the London marathon. This was Ella’s fifth since she started marathon running nearly ten years ago. Sam, his father and friends, together with Gwen and I, came to track Ella and her fast-paced future mother-in-law Lynn as they separately ran through London. I managed to see Ella at the Embankment on 25 miles (she looked less tired than I, who had just walked from Victoria via the Cask and Glass) and then afterwards in celebratory fashion at the Two Chairmen, another memory-lane Westminster pub.

Ella ran a time of 249 minutes, a huge 23-minute improvement on her previous personal best. Exhausted and triumphant, she was showered with due praise. The amazing Lynn was even quicker. But, speaking as a non-runner, it’s not about the timings. Walking in London that day was once again a special experience as runners, trackers, staff, and supporters are always in such good humour. Everyone behaves as if the nation had just won a decisive war with its demons.

However, I couldn’t help noticing that while the 50,000 runners ran, more or less, in the same direction, everyone else (the 250,000) were going round in circles, their attention fixed on their mobile phone maps or the Marathon app instead of the pavement in front, risking repeated pedestrian head-on crashes as they argued with someone somewhere else about the route they took, where they were now, and where they should have met. It was another memorable mass meeting of the Fegawi tribe.

While the weather has not improved much since last month, and the dogs are now far slower and less energetic, I have found attractive new walks at Buxted Park, Lake Wood, Plashet Park, and Hempstead Woods, notable for swathes of bluebells, anemone, and wild garlic. The dogs’ local walk roster is starting to become as varied as the one we left in Burgess Hill. Alli has been expertly furnishing the garden with plants aplenty and wishing we had a bigger garden. Our daughters and their partners came over for lunch on the last Sunday of the month. It was a profound pleasure to welcome them all, for which we lengthened our table, sharpened our wits, and dusted off our best wine and victuals.

We went to see a couple who have recently settled near Uckfield after 25 years in France to compare notes (finding a strong common interest in fine dining) and I attended and contributed to the local book club’s discussion of a recent popular and well-promoted book, The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey, which, sadly, I found awkward and wispy. My own would-be bestseller grinds its way forward like a glacier in winter but at least I am now working on it more intensively in my increasingly comfortable attic.

Yours aloft,

Lionel