Creating a buzz

I was having a little snooze on the trampoline (as you do – well, as I do sometimes) when I became aware of a buzzing in my ears.

Last year, regular blog readers may recall, we planted half our field with seed designed to attract birds and insects. For a good long while it appeared that all we had managed to achieve was to feed the wood pigeons. But slowly it became clear that the half of the field we had seeded looked very different from the half we had not, and so we concluded that the pigeons had left us something to be going on with.

This all died back in winter, but this spring the planted half has exploded with colour, which positively hums with the sound of insects going about their business. The cats, who have taken full advantage of the cover the foliage provides to stock up on small, hapless mammals, return every evening covered in a fine coating of pollen grains. And I and the dog have been sneezing a great deal.

But it is a small price to pay for all this glorious abundance, which looks beautiful, smells wonderful and is clearly offering a feast to an array of insect life. These in turn are attracting house martins, who swoop and gorge in an amazing aerobatic display every evening, watched silently and malevolently by two pairs of green eyes.

Amid all this bounty, however, I can't help feeling concerned about the lack of honey bees. There are lots of bumble bees, a variety of really weird-looking wasp things, and we can't move for horse flies – literally sometimes, they bite, you know.

Our seed mix is aimed at farmers to plant on the edges of fields and is specifically developed to attract honey bees. It contains, incidentally, an assortment of seeds with fabulous names from a different age – creeping red fescue, cocksfoot, early English winter vetch, and my favourite, black medick – surely something they used to pound up and mix with cow dung and goats' urine to make a cure for baldness or dropsy.

I would therefore have expected our field to be teeming with bees, especially given that there are hives in the village, but there are surprisingly few.

Before we bought our field we spent years working out a system that would provide an income sufficient to keep a family of five, and assorted animal hangers on, but would also give back to the land more than it took as well as creating its own eco system and provide a wider benefit for local flora and fauna. One of the first headings we wrote on our grand scheme was 'Bees' - after which we pondered how we could attract and incorporate them into our system.

Perhaps the sad fact is that there are just not so many to attract. Bee numbers in the UK have declined by 50% in the last 25 years. The cause is open to debate but fingers tend to point at a combination of pesticides, parasites – such as the varroa mite, and destruction of the flower-rich habitats on which bees feed.

Recently new research, published in Science, found a close correlation between pesticides containing neonicotinoids and the ability of bees to navigate back to their colony and produce new queens. Neonicotinoids are widely used in agriculture in this country as an insecticide and are chemically related to nicotine, which I used to pay good money to inhale.

Pesticide manufacturers deny they cause any lasting damage to bees, but as Mandy Rice-Davies put it – 'they would, wouldn't they?'. The UK government also stands by neonicotinoids, and appears unmoved by the latest research. A number of European countries, however, including France and Germany have stopped using certain insecticides on the evidence so far.

Bees pollinate a third of the food we eat, so if they are in trouble it matters in a huge sort of way. Apart from anything else, I don't want my black medick to be wasted on horse flies.

Anyone need a cure for baldness?

Lost for a spell

I've been feeling like a hick from the sticks this weekend on account of spending much of it being lost and befuddled in the big city.

It started badly when I took a different exit off the Victoria line at King's Cross and found myself wandering round a part of it I never knew existed. This has been happening a lot of late at the station, which has been massively revamped over recent years - first to accommodate the Eurostar at St Pancras and now with a swanky and rather beautiful new domestic departure hall. Perhaps it says something about King's Cross that one departs in style, but still arrives in the old grimy bit.

Anyway, all this revamping has led to miles of labyrinthine tunnels that all look the same and can end in a myriad of assorted exits. This lends an air of unexpectedness to journeys through King's Cross - even though I have been negotiating it regularly for many years.

King's Cross St Pancras            Hogwarts School of Wizardry

As I walked in surprise down a new tunnel, I found myself thinking  how many similarities King's Cross has with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - moving staircases, for instance, animated pictures on the wall – and endless corridors. Hogwarts is so complex, that even its headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, professes it remains a mystery to him happening once upon 'a beautifully proportioned room ... containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots'.

Harry Potter readers will know he is referring to the Room of Requirement - and this set me off on a new avenue of thought of what I would require should I stumble upon just such a room in King's Cross. Having lately arrived off the 9.06 from Devon, travelled underground across London and walked around the station for some length of time, it will be of no surprise to you that I decided my room of requirement would contain a table laid out for tea, with a large pot, some ginger cake and lump sugar with tongs. (I still enjoy holding the sugar in the tea and trying to find the point where it will absorb the liquid and turn an orange/brown in the tongs. I really should get out more.)

No such room appeared however, so I eventually emerged into the light to discover a whole new station exit and then wandered vaguely round the back streets behind my office for a while before locating the entrance.

Later that night, on the way to my Friday stayover in Brighton, I managed to jump on two wrong trains and ended up spending a long 50 minutes on a platform. By this time I was feeling tired, stupid and fed up – I like to feel part of the purposeful moving mass in London, not dotty, lost and late. So if that room of requirement does appear, I am fervently hoping it has a younger, more dynamic brain in it.

An awning chasm

A sizeable portion of our living accommodation blew away last weekend.

I wasn't there at the time being at work in London, which was largely wind free despite the torrential rain. Thus I was blissfully unaware until I was alerted by a phone call on the train home and told the awning, which acts as entrance, depository and storage facility, was on top of the caravan and the polytunnel plastic roof that keeps us dry in our trailer was flapping its last.

I don't get much sleep on a Saturday night. I work into the small hours and catch the first train to Devon, so this news was unwelcome since I had been promising myself a little snooze after lunch. But my woes were nothing to those being experienced at home.

Trailer trashed

Gully had spent the entire night awake as the trailer was buffeted by the winds, finally falling into an exhausted sleep somewhere after dawn from which he was awoken by a small, excited child shouting 'coo, come and look'. Before him, lay a scene of devastation. The tent had been lifted off its poles but with a single long zip bizarrely clinging on to the frame. In the space where it had been was an upturned picnic bench, which had been lifted into the air and thrown several feet into the awning – and had probably been its nemesis. Our assorted chattels were scattered everywhere.

Inside the caravan, the dog too had spent a sleepless night. She was found trembling unhappily and refused to eat her breakfast. Oody, it should be said, is no highly strung, dainty thing; she is a considerable poundage of bull terrier/labrador cross – refusal of food is not in her genes and a sign that she is very, very pissed off.

The wind, as I alighted at Tiverton Parkway, was strong though not alarmingly so. But on arrival at the field a hundred or so metres higher, the weather was savage. It was difficult to stand upright and hail was coming down – sideways. Bending double, with what felt like freezing gravel being persistently flung in our faces, it was a miserable trudge across the field to the sanctuary of the caravan. But poor Oody hated it the most, she whined and walked backwards shaking her head. She plunged into the undergrowth hoping for refuge, but finding none crawled out and walked backwards again. It was a pitiful sight.

There was little we could do to deal with the havoc outside. So we made a nice cup of tea and listened while the roof on the trailer billowed and flapped and tore, threatening to rip completely any minute  exposing the porch Gully had built to the elements – and leaving the wooden trailer roof unprotected from the rain.

I packed a bag and we left for yet another emergency stay with my mother, who should be able to enjoy her well-ordered life and house without her flaky daughter habitually turning up. There we stayed in comfort, while poor Gully was left to put what he could to rights. It took two days for the storm to die down, during which time the trailer roof finally gave up the ghost. Then he had to find a new roofing solution and fix it in place – quickly.

After the best part of a week of TV, comfy chairs and dinners cooked in a proper oven, the children were less than enthusiastic about returning home. But none more so than the dog. Oody loves her nana and she particularly loves her nana's house. For a start there are soft carpets on which it pleases her to roll and wriggle. Then there's a large ginger cat three doors down to get excited about – and two to three regular walks a day, necessitated by the lack of lawn there but not crucial in a three-acre field. Best of all, the house doesn't move and bits of it fall off and crash about in the middle of the night.

Underwhelmed

Back in the caravan, the kettle was whistling and the children picked up where they had left off with their toys and activities. But the dog stopped short of the door and stood resolutely outside, alone and forlorn. She didn't say as much, but her expression definitely read: 'You have got to be bloody joking!'