SUSIE MALLETT

My visitors today

Monday 16 August 2010

Buzz buzz buzz

" That was summer", July 2010
This week, in the eagerly awaited Guardian Weekly, Mark Cocker was writing his 'Nature Watch' from home.

His home and also mine.

This is actually why 'Nature Watch' is one of my first ports of call when I open my copy of the paper. I wait patiently, as the stories told alternate each week between Wenlock Edge and Claxton.

I was really pleased to see that we were back in Norfolk this week. I can see so clearly the images described. I view them in that cinema somewhere within my soul. I was going to write 'somewhere in my head' but I do not think that it is in a space in my head where I see my films about Norfolk, they are definitely saved in my soul.

I am transported to Mark Cocker’s world, my world too, even though it is now thirty-five years since I left it. This week I joined in the conversations with the bumble bees in the brambles. The bumble bees that I visualise, however ,in my Dad’s brambles and not Mr Cocker’s!

Mark Cocker watches things, anything and everything, just like I do. But he describes them magically, poetically, so much better than I ever could. He describes them so well that I can conjure up images that I could paint a picture from.

This week, as I said, it is bumble bees that we are looking at under the microscope. It is not only those gorgeous fat ones that buzz clumsily by, heavy with their loads of pollen. that he writes about. We are also told about several other members of the bee family, in a story of “Love, toil, comedy, betrayal, beauty and death”. Read it yourself at http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/ .

I hope to be watching my own brambles and my own bees in Norfolk soon. Another Indian-Summer holiday is perhaps on the cards. I hope that there will be the time to take a break during that quiet time when the new schoolterm starts. This is the time when children get used to new experiences, new schools, new classes, new Kindergartens, new teachers, new uniforms, new shoes, new hobbies and new groups, and the time when adults can take out-of-season holidays, me included.

Notes

Guardian weekly, 13-19 August 2010
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/

Arthur Askey
The Bee Song

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