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I had a den when I was a child and in my memory it is always May, the den lush with new growth and rich with green smells. I sat within stands (or flops) of cowparsley making flutes and, when I went home, took a branch of hawthorn, heavy with sweet, musky blossom as a present for my mother.

Cowparsley at Burgess Field

‘Take that stuff outside AT ONCE!’ she shouted. Why? It was so beautiful – why couldn’t it come into the house? She never said but from her vehemence it was obvious that May blossom was unlucky, possibly even fatally so. Hawthorns, clearly, meant death, but only indoors. My dear Mum – where did she get this knowledge from? For how many generations had it been passed down? She had no idea why May was unlucky, no idea that the taboo against bringing it into the house is rooted in hoary antiquity. Just don’t do it, that’s all. Why? Because, according to folklore,  illness and death will follow.

Some say that hawthorns smell of rotting meat and, indeed, the chemical trimethylamine, which is one of the first chemicals formed in dying animal tissue, has been found in the blossom. I was reflecting on this as I made my way to Burgess Field for the first time in seeming (teemng) months. Why would a tree smell of death if it didn’t help it to live? Does it attract flies? Do they pollinate it?

Once I was in the field, I stood by a hawthorn tree for awhile, just watching, and soon I was rewarded with my first sight of a fly, a common blowfly, but soon more came, nameless creatures I had never seen before, but flies nonetheless, alighting on blossom and, the longer I stood, the more that came and soon began to dance in the air like midges.

Spot the flies

Having learnt on Saturday’s foraging walk that May blossom and leaves are good for the heart and blood pressure, I picked some on Sunday and made a tea. Yesterday I had to go and see the nurse, who said she might as well take my blood pressure while I was there. I usually mediate while they puff up my arm to bursting point, because I am a great believer in mind over matter, and completely sceptical when it comes to statins. So I WILL the meter to go down, and it usually complies, but this time it slipped right down to that magic figure of 140 over 80 which is normal.

I’ve just had another hawthorn tea while writing this, and I’ve bought a drier so that I can store the blossom for the rest of the year and take it regularly.

So Mum was right and she was wrong. Clearly you don’t want hawthorn in your house if it means a house full of flies, but it won’t kill you. Indeed, drink it and it will massage your heart and sweeten your temper. But she never told me not to bring buttercups into the house. She held them under my chin to see if I liked butter but never said, ‘chew on this, sweetie, and you’re history’. Perhaps some knowledge doesn’t need repeating but, like the cows, it just never occurs to us to taste it.  Ranunculus repens – completely toxic.

Buttercups on Wolvercote Common

Under this lot on the Southend Road, Wickford, is my cowparsley and hawthorn den of the 1950s.

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As I write, the house is being buffeted by gales, windows rattle, things in the garden crash, seagulls tumble through the air along with trees and recycling bins. ‘This weather has a moral quality,’ says my friend Jeremy, a very morose gardener right now. So, we deserve it do we? Probably.

I do believe it was the day after the hosepipe ban came in that the rain began and we haven’t had a day without it since. At first it was gentle, ‘female rain’ as the Navajo Indians call it. Now it is male and in need of a course in anger management. It lashes, it squalls and it ruins everyone’s plans.

There was so much on offer this weekend we could hardly choose. The Wolvercote Plant Sale, which resembles Chelsea Flower Show at closing time, with people struggling home burdened by great lolling plants; a foraging walk along the canal; Blackbird Leys Choir singing Vivaldi’s Gloria in the local church; today a foraging picnic contending with the Community Orchard pre-May Day picnic with songs and stories (we’re a bit pagan in the village). Most of these things were cancelled; what wasn’t, we didn’t get to, because it’s a duvet weekend with spag bol and Britain’s Got Talent.

I can bear all these losses, just, but two are those yet to come and I shall find hard. May morning on Tuesday – forecast is heavy rain – and for my friend Jan, who’s only in Britain for a few months, it could be her one and only chance to experience the pagan underbelly of sedate Oxford. No, not the shenanigans that go on around Magdalen Tower, but the alternative May Morning that happens in North Oxford, when mature academics arise before dawn to put on flower-bedecked hats and salute the May Bull with a pagan hymn.

May Morning at the Anchor Inn, Oxford, 2011

Beltane! The date now is synonymous with May Day but properly, I believe, is determined by the moon and can happen any time in early May. I’ve been promising myself all year that I’d get up at 4am to do the 20 miles to Uffington White Horse, no, not to dowse or dance in a ring, but to test my theory about the relationship of sunrise to the Horse at Beltane. Another year, perhaps.

But what really upsets me is that the rising waters on the meadow are cutting off easy access to my little local sacred site, Burgess Field, erstwhile waste tip now become a Thing of Beauty, and especially at the beginning of May. Am I going to miss the hawthorn blossom this year? Not if I can help it, even if I have to take a long detour and walk an extra hour in wellington boots, I’ll get there.

The water meadow is filling up fast. The line of trees on the horizon mark Burgess Field, which may soon be cut off.

Only Man is daunted by weather. Spiders still hatch, and spin webs from the word go.

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Dog-walkers huddle into anoraks and shrug their shoulders up round their ears; one swan and two geese stand stunned. The hail is coming down like truck loads of frozen peas, rattling against the window and bouncing off the sills. Two minutes later, it is quiet again – the walkers unshrug and the birds get back to their territorial dispute.

Soon the sun will be out sending rainbows flashing across Port Meadow, turning the greens and blues into stained-glass colours.

I sit here wondering whether to go out or not. Each time you get one of those iridescent moments calling for the camera and a picture to celebrate Earth Day, a big black cloud comes across the sun, warning you to stay in. Those colours and the richness of the damp, fertile ground are like bog cotton, tempting you into the marsh. Best to stay in, keep warm and dry, but oh!, right now it’s all changing…

Back in a mo.

The meadow in best livery

Two mallard drakes go chest-to-chest in a push off. It’s all sex, ducks and rock’n'roll on the pond these days.

She awaits the victor.

Cloudscapes

HAPPY EARTH (AND WATER) DAY

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When I was a child, the limit of my area was the railway bridge. Running beside the railway was Waterhouse Lane, where I did natural history projects for school, like collecting autumn leaves, nuts and berries. Sometimes I would go up the embankment on wobbly stone steps – you could do that, then, go near the line. Children of my generation were unlikely to throw themselves under trains, or even fall under them as they thundered past trailing stinky smoke. We went up the embankment, I suppose, to feel the rush of the train as it marked the boundary between our small town called Wickford and the village of Shotgate. I don’t remember the trains. What I remember is that under the third step from the top lived the King of the Slow Worms, and that we had to pay him obeisance at that place. I’ve no idea what word a seven-year-old used to mean obeisance, or how many generations of seven-year-olds had passed the knowledge of the Slow Worm on. Presumably they did not predate the railways, unlike crying ‘fenance!’ when you wished to give up in some mock battle – that had been carried across from jousting by children since the fourteenth century.

So that was the edge of my childish life in which I possessed all bits of woodland or scrub between our house and the stone of the Slow Worm King. I had dens up roadside banks, between fields, on undeveloped land – anywhere where plants just grew all by themselves. They were my secret world of inviolable privacy where I used to sit and think up stories or make whistles out of cowparsley stems.

These days we keep children away from railway lines. A year or so ago, Network Rail put up a horrid aluminium fence along the eastern edge of the Common. Since then, I’ve been willing the trees on the far side to push through and hide the fence, which is an eyesore. They’ve been doing well but yesterday they were all felled. No, ‘felled’ is too good a word. It speaks of woodland management – a kind of kosher tree-killing. This was not felling, it was grubbing.

It sounded like a strimmer when I went out to go to the post office in the upper village, but as I crossed over the railway bridge I saw what was happening. A mechanical digger was clawing up the trees and feeding them into a shredder. It was about five seconds from living plant to woodchips. This is April. Those trees and shrubs were full of nesting birds. Voles, slow worms and grass snakes lived in the litter where Jack in the Hedge, cleavers and cowparsley were just pushing through, making a fresh green carpet between the Common and the railway track.

The trees had survived a harsh winter and were just coming into leaf. I went down again in the evening, after the workmen had gone, to pick up budded twigs and willow catkins to put in a vase, and to collect hardwood cuttings to plant somewhere surreptitiously sometime. Most of the debris had been cleared by the shredder, leaving the orange stumps of very old, large willows showing their wounds to the sky. Some branches hung over the fence like soldiers on barbed war in the First World War. The fresh sappy green of new hawthorn had gone, leaving a mass of wilting, lusterless new leaf. Catkins hung limp and lifeless. This was Avatar in our own backyard.

I collected my twigs and, finding my way back blocked by curious horses looking for something to nibble, had to negotiate my way home. I felt like hugging everything.

The ground is being cleared to make way for extra railway track. We’d heard they’re wanting to raise bridges to allow for double-decker containers, but no-one mentioned new track. Why April? Why not February?

The trains run past now bald on the horizon, nothing masking the view. As I sit here at my desk at night, I can see the upper village and its lights very clearly. Everything has changed. They say the new track will be laid from here to Trap Grounds. That means they will be clearing ‘scrub’ right along the eastern edge of the Common. That means my blackthorn is next in the line of fire.

I first met it round about this time last year, when the full moon was in perigree (see the post ‘Green thoughts in a greening shade’, March 20, 2011). I was at a neighbour’s house, on their balcony, to see the event, and the moon took a long time rising – time in which to enjoy the dusky view. The darker it got, the more ghostly a tree of early blossom standing out on the boundary. ‘Blackthorn,’ I was told, ‘is the first to flower.’ I’ve since learnt, in this year of waking up again to what’s around me, that sloes grow on blackthorns. Keen to try a recipe for sloe and marrow jam, I’ve been out and about noting where the blackthorns are. This one, above which the full moon in perigree eventually rose , I went to commune with when its flowers came out a month ago. I stood beneath it and let it rain down blossom on my face. Tomorrow it will be dead. All I can do is to go out early and get a cutting before the machines come.

Reading last year’s post, I’m reminded that blackthorn makes good wands for witches. Perhaps I’ll magic it all back again with my hardwood cutting.

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I hadn’t been to Burgess Field for about a month, before bud-burst. Now much of it is in new leaf. The path through the little wood is lined with cherry trees and their blossom falls in showers. The woodland floor has new grass, wild garlic, ground ivy, all pushing though last year’s litter, and now this confetti of petals falls in silent ceremony.

Cherry trees on Good Friday

Blackthorn is still in blossom and I’m noting its position to collect sloes next autumn, for I’ve just come across a recipe for sloe and melon jam.

Blackthorn noted

The roe deer are losing their shyness and do well at staring me out. Neither side won: we both got bored and went our ways.

Mr and Mrs Roe

Thanks to what I’ve learnt on a couple of foraging walks recently, I picked jack-in-the-hedge and hawthorn tips to make a ‘mint’ sauce for Sunday lunch, as well as cleaver tips and wild chives.

Nibbles!

The great snowy symphony of hawthorn begins with tiny buds. By the end of the month we shall be in the grand finale.

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I must be the only person who’s longing to be told she has a syndrome. Someone at the hospital spotted an anomaly on the adrenal gland and thinks it’s Cushing’s. If it is, it may be why I have diabetes and sarcoid. So a lot rests on the result of tests done last week.

Now my local surgery is famous and has even featured on Channel 4 Dispatches, with Jon Snow talking to camera outside my house without my knowledge (I pride myself on knowing everything that’s going on). Since the ignominious departure of the last incumbent, we’ve been under new management, a management known for its efficiency, but there are some spanners in the works.

Summertown Health Centre used to be just that; now it covers Wolvercote and Cutteslowe as well, so its doctors and nurses are circulating when they used to be static and the computer system has to show where everybody is at any time. Although used to travelling doctors and nurses, the Wolvercote and Cutteslowe receptionists seem unable to cope. After all, they’ve gone from one doctor and one nurse to about six of each. Twelve people all over the place.

I’ve been having to make lots of appointments and a couple of weeks ago they began to fail. I’d booked in to see the diabetes nurse at 8.30. After the third patient went in before me, I interrupted to see if I was expected. I wasn’t, the nurse said, but she’d see me anyway. How kind. When I got in and looked at the screen myself, I could see I was down for 10.45. She didn’t apologise, not even for not having the meter I’d come for – I had to go to Cutteslowe to see her again in the afternoon. A day lost, more or less. Just as well she didn’t want to take my blood pressure.

Other incidents began to occur which were beginning to make me nervous. I won’t go into all details, but when the registrar at Endrocrinology described the tests I was going to have to do I quailed, because I was going to need the surgery’s help. While I was talking to the registrar, her secretary was beetling about trying to find out how come I was registered with the NHS under two names. She came back to report that it had happened at my surgery.

The next day I phoned the surgery to see when my favourite receptionist (we’ll call her No. 1), was next at Wolvercote and found it was that very afternoon. I went to the surgery and was met by receptionist No. 2.

With No. 2 and my diary, we worked out the best day to do the fearsome 24 hour urine collection. For some reason the lab wants your ENTIRE production, so there was no going out that day. We decided on Monday, because there’d be a collection on Tuesday. I hope there was, and that my bottles were duly collected, because I really, really don’t want to be that conscious of my bladder again for awhile.

Then we worked out the next task, which was an appointment for a blood test at 9am precisely. I had to take a pill at midnight the day before which would stop all steroid production. 9am it had to be. She hummed and hawed in front of the computer. You can see it’s a problem by the rapid eye movement it entails on the user. Her orbs are all over the place. She finally decides that the only day it could be done was Friday, that the doctor would do it himself, but not until 9.10.

So eager am I to have Cushing’s, I didn’t want to leave it until another week. So nervous am I of mistakes by now that the next day, when I delivered the litre bottles, I got No. 2 to repeat back to me my appointment, which she did. By Thursday my fears had returned. I went to the surgery. Did I have an appointment at 9.10 with the doctor the following morning? It was No. 2, again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We don’t open until the afternoons at Wolvercote.’

While I try not to sink to the floor in despair, her eyes keep travelling over the screen.  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you’re down for 9.10 – at Cutteslowe.’

What’s the flaming point of having a local surgery? It didn’t have to be Friday. I could have come another day when they were open. Anyway. Stop moaning. Go back to Cutteslowe.

On Friday morning, DD came with me because I was still nervous. No 3 was at reception. Was the doctor in? Yes, yes, he’d arrived and was in. But I wasn’t down to see him. My softly-spoken husband can move mountains when he raises his voice. Now he is booming in the background, something about a formal complaint if someone doesn’t draw blood from his wife at 9.10 precisely.

I’d checked with a chemist that 9.10 would be alright; she said it would be, but no later. The hand on the surgery clock moved to 9.10 and, just as I’d feared,  I was sitting there without a steroid in me (actually, I was feeling better than I had done for a long time) and no prospect of a blood test.

Suddenly people are running, including one  nurse who I hadn’t met before, and at 9.11 she’s jabbing in a needle without waiting to find a vein and miraculously is drawing blood. At 9.20 I get to see the doctor, who I didn’t now need to see. I had nothing to say but a) complain and b) sing the praises of the NHS, for finding that little anomaly which might, just might, give me a new lease of life.

While writing this, I’m thinking of course of Lynne and Loo who lost their jobs blowing the whistle on the last doctor. I hope life has been kind and taken new, unexpected and rewarding turns for you. For you and your like are the blood in the veins of the NHS, what makes it work, the human spirit in the machine. And when we speak of ‘the NHS’ that’s who we’re speaking about: the people who make it work. It doesn’t need reform. It needs help.

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Sometime yesterday, I’m not sure when – perhaps in the middle of Oxford market – I entered the State of KY. After two days locked into re-building my website, two nasty days weather-wise, I’d ventured out to go and do some reading at the Sackler Library. I didn’t walk very far, just from the bus to the library; but afterwards, I did trudge round the weekly market. I’ve joined that band of humanity which is old-lady-with-bag-on-wheels, the kind which can be seen at any market, tripping people up. I’m not as big-bosomed as the stereotype but, boy, I have the hips. To complete the look I shall have to get myself a headscarf.

So I trudged and got some bargains. Indeed I filled my bag on wheels to groaning point for a mere ten pounds, plus three pounds for the very ripe brie I had to put in the front pocket.

Then off to the covered market to get organic meat from Feller and Daughter. There she stood, blood-soaked as usual, Feller’s daughter, trying to tell me that the scrawny chicken she was holding up was ‘one of the best’. I suppose I have been gulled by supermarkets into thinking that chickens should be plump and creamy-white. This one looks a complete joke: a dead chicken as created by Nick Parks in plasticine. ‘Tell me next week what you think!’ she called cheerily as I left. I’d also got some venison because it was Burn’s Night and I have Scottish blood. Long slow casserole with juniper berries, neeps and tatties… nice.

So it was a bit of a walk. Then, when I got home, I found a long overdue cheque had arrived, quite a big one, almost as big as the debt, so there was nothing for it but a walk to the post office to pay it in.

That used to be a long walk. When they closed our local post office I thought I’d never make it to the next one without gouging a great hole in the day. I was never going to drive there – not an option. I’m saving the planet and myself in one go.

Yesterday I noticed that I’ve got speedier. OK, there wasn’t a queue at the post office counter and I didn’t get distracted by the wools, but even so I got there and back in twenty minutes. Aware  that I was walking faster than usual, I checked the pedometer and found I’d clocked up quite a few aerobic steps. What I wasn’t aware of was that I had just entered Kentucky.

It was about a year ago I started walking across the USA, virtually. The idea is to walk in your own locality, record the miles and log in daily to the website where you are given your weekly total, your position on the map and a photo from Google Earth showing where you are. I started off with two others but early on they were abducted by aliens around Charlottesville and their sad blobs have remained static on the map ever since.

The only American I've met on route, and he half naked.

Logging in almost daily, I’ve only once, ONCE, seen a person in the picture; apart from that, America is deserted. I did see a map of the USA recently which had the eastern and western seaboards marked as ‘America’ and the rest as ‘Dumb****istan’.

I’d hoped Virginia would have been a little more interesting than it is. To be fair, the road I’m on sometimes bypasses towns. Even so, even so… It did get exciting when I got into the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I noticed with a sinking feeling last week that my road seemed to be going downhill now. And then, as I was logging in last night, I received an email saying that I’d walked 555 miles and ‘you have entered the State of KY’. As I understand it, KY is boring compared to VA – I don’t hold out much hope. From now on the trek will be rhythmic and trance-like as I enter the plains of middle America.

But wait a moment, a quick google reveals that this is the Bluegrass State, famous for its horse, deer, turkey and elk. The banner of the site for Kentucky tourism says ‘everything you need to know to enjoy Kentucky’s unbridled spirit’ – although I did notice that the largest entry in its tag cloud was BOURBON.

Five hundred and fifty five miles! The length of Great Britain is ‘just under six hundred miles’ (but Land’s End to John o’ Groats is over eight hundred). So that’s what I’ve walked in a year. So you will understand and forgive when I tell you that, while speaking to a friend and hearing his views on NHS reform, and how fat people should be made to pay for treatment because we’re self-indulgent and can’t control ourselves, I found that I could control myself – just – from an overwhelming desire to punch him on the nose. Hard. Because after all that mileage I have to report that I have not lost a single pound.

But man, I’m walking faster, breathing better, and waiting on a phone call from the doctor about a recent bloodtest which may reveal, may just reveal that the reason I have sarcoidosis is because I’m getting too much sun.

The link to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab site for the virtual walk is http://exercise.lbl.gov/index.html

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This is personal. I’m quite tempted not to do it, but while every news stream in the world is re-running tsunamis, nuclear meltdown, bankrupt nations, the ignominious deaths of dictators and riots in the streets, just for my own pleasure I want to note this as the year we got new windows.

View uncluttered by window frames

Pshaw! What a petty detail in the flow of time and event, new windows at no. 60, but these new windows could only have appeared in 2011 and sometimes such detail is a portal on to the life of ordinary mortals.

As banks wobbled our savings were under threat. As the interest rates stagnate, our savings evaporate. I’d already lost my pension thanks to the fund being with that blue chip, gilt-edged company, Equitable Life. The demise of Equitable Life, brought down by greedy shareholders with no thought to the common good, was one of the first rumbles of the coming storm.  So all we have in the bank is the balance between the sale of the last house and this one.

We started to spend it this time last year, when VAT was set to go up to 20%, and we had quite a spree but it was on fripperies such as Apple Macs, although we also bought a new boiler. In the spring our neighbour across the street moved away. She told us her house was on the market for £465K. Now she had an extension which we do not, but the house was full of problems with electrics, unfinished tiling, a front door that doesn’t open, so all in all we reckoned our house is worth much the same. It was then that we decided to spend our savings on house improvements.

The idea is that we increase its value for that time in the future when we have to leave (the stairs are too step to imagine living here into a ripe old age). Meanwhile, we get to enjoy the improvements. That part of the equation has certainly been proved right.

Front of house suffers trauma, but not for long

In this year we’ve put in a new fence in the back garden, turned the living room window into french doors, put new windows in the bedroom and bought an Everhot cooker. OK, the latter isn’t an investment in the future, unless we eventually sell the cooker with the house, but it sure has improved the quality of our lives. And we’re still working on the new kitchen that Her Ladyship demands. It’s mostly a refurb, but we’re tiling the floor and the walls and putting in a ceramic sink, and we still have some money left.

Our domestic goddess, Hestia, the warm heart of the house.

So that’s been our year, a year of renewal after the spate of deaths in 2009, a year in which in our own quiet way we meet the horror of the times by being happy and hopeful. It sometimes seems a queer contrast, but it’s not an untrue one. If any micro-historian is trawling the Cloud fifty years hence and wants to know what life was like for the individual, I hope this helps. Are we average? I don’t know. We live frugally in that we don’t have holidays and hardly use the car, we grow a large proportion of our own food and our spending is more considered these days, but we live in luxury. I feel very conscious of our great good fortune, not only in comparison with the Third World or Middle East, but also compared with the likely future of our children. Without doubt, we were born at the right time, and we are benefiting from it.

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Everyone at Wolvercote and Kendall Crescent surgeries received a letter recently advising us that last night’s edition of Dispatches on Channel 4, Can you trust your doctor?, would feature our  ex-GP, Mark Huckstep. As ever with a letter from NHS Oxfordshire (Primary Care Trust), you have to interpret the meaning. It seemed that the programme was not going to show them in a good light, and it didn’t.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/4od#3236726

(last third of the programme).

Not that Mark Huckstep is innocent. Let’s get that one straight. When we joined Wolvercote surgery in 2001, we had to get used to this doctor who had the most disarming manner and smile; each time we met him, all our background grumbling dissolved. He was just so nice. OK, so you had to wait up to an hour in the surgery for him to actually arrive, let alone see the people in front of you (not that there were many: the practice was hemorrhaging patients). You had to accommodate administrative inefficiency and not lose your temper when your results never came back or the repeat prescription was not waiting for collection, or was but hadn’t been signed.

At that time, my mother was still living in her own home but things were beginning to deteriorate and soon she was ping-ponging in and out of hospital and in and out of recuperation (short stays in care homes while social services wade through their workload). It was in these care homes that we began to see the name ‘Mark Huckstep’ up on boards. We also spotted his name at Nuffield Physio Dept., and he was the GP at Witney Hospital; all this on top of running two surgeries alone apart from locums.

Why? Why did he take on so much? Was it simple greed? Academic pride? Christian principles? He’s certainly an overt Christian and an enthusiastic evangelical. He’s also a great reader and thinker, and too many times we forgot to discuss the reason for my visit when we got into a rap on current reading. Once, in one of these chats, he told me that ‘they’ were out to get him, that he wouldn’t be around for much longer. The reason? He didn’t believe in abortion and wouldn’t refer young single girls on.

So when he did leave suddenly in the summer of 2010, we presumed we knew why, whatever the PCT said (or didn’t say) about it. The PCT offered us no good reason for his suspension from their Performers List and gossip was rife in the village, for instance how he had told one terminally ill patient that all she could do was pray and other such stories to show what a cuckoo Huckstep was. I found it all intriguing that, at the time we were losing our MP, Dr Evan Harris, known as Doctor Death round Westminster for his support of very late termination in abortions, we were losing our GP who was anti-abortion. The only thing connecting these two, apart from losing their jobs, was that they believed in something.

A couple more words about Mark Huckstep. Yes, his treatment of my mother in her last months was awful. Each time we called him, he either took anything up to 7 hours to arrive, or sent an ambulance in his stead. If the latter, then we lost Mum into the machinery of the hospital, and believe me, the situation in hospitals is FAR WORSE than anything GPs dole out. At the end, when one of the carers saw me in a frozen state because we needed help but I didn’t dare call the doctor, she pointed out that it was after hours. Sure enough, we happened upon an agency doctor who could deal with the dying and who was a tremendous support to us during the last week.

And then there was Huckstep’s treatment of me. I knew what I had, recognised the symptoms, took to the surgery all that was required and, after ten minutes gently guiding him towards the right diagnosis, he pronounced me diabetic. I helped him do the blood glucose test, because ‘I am inept with these things and leave it to the nurse’, whereas I was well practised having tested Mum regularly. So there we were, late December and my blood count pushing 30. He jumped on the phone to a consultant at the Radcliffe and wanted to know what he could do to treat me at home so that I didn’t have to go into hospital over Christmas.

He really looked after me. He took radical decisions with the medication – which has horrible side effects – which worked. I was really, really impressed. Yes, he was butterfly-minded but had a good heart.

And so to the programme, and the truth. What really happened was that Nurse Blackburn started work at the surgery and was so appalled by what she found that she reported Huckstep to the PCT. She was told that Huckstep had been on their radar for ten years. A locum doctor, Dr Slova, seconded to surgery was asked to write a report. She found three hundred unactioned abnormal blood test results. She worried at the PCT, requesting permission to inform the patients, but was told she could not. These two women are referred to as ‘whistleblowers’. What they said was that Dr Huckstep had far too big a workload and spread himself too thinly.

And that was the truth as we knew it, not as we had speculated. Despite these complaints, the PCT did not act but were ‘secretive and non-co-operative’. The women persisted that all those patients who had not received the results of blood tests should be contacted. They were not. Instead, these two women, who put truth before their own good, are now out of work.

Why does this society put the tag ‘whistleblower’ on someone who speaks the truth? In all my years I have never understood that, and I still don’t. Is it the old boy mentality that says one is loyal to one’s own and to hell with the rest?

What the PCT did (wrong) was seek to avoid ‘unnecessary anxiety’. OK. Fair enough. With any luck they recognise their mistake. But what they should be doing now is lauding those two women as heroes and taking steps to end their persecution.

Today in our lovely village (Jon Snow was filmed in front of the view  opposite our house – he and the camera team must have come and gone while I was in the kitchen) we have a surgery run very efficiently by Summertown Health Centre. My new doctor is sane, sweet, competent. Waiting time is minimal. Prescriptions are always ready and waiting.

Truth is, if it were not for those two women, now jobless, we would not have this wonderful new arrangement where we can all breathe a bit easier, and the surgery is filling up with patients again. What a sacrifice they made on our behalf!

I know from some Facebook exchanges last night that I’m not the only one in the village who wants to thank them for what they’ve done for us. This blog is the only way I know how. Perhaps someone will think of a better way.

Please leave your views if you were personally affected.

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We were asked to stop strimming on the allotment yesterday evening by a man who came over to say, ‘We’re filming.’ You immediately presume an episode of Lewis is going on, although it could equally have been the zoology department doing a video on rare snails.

We staggered home later with yet another barrow-load of harvest and slumped in front of the TV and this week’s episode of Lewis which, oddly enough, mentioned our village and featured our meadow. We prefer Lewis to Morse. The stories are better (sorry, Colin), and the characters more interesting (sorry, Endeavour). Sergeant Hathaway is a gem and has a moral and intellectual depth so much greater than his boss’s (although last night he encouraged Lewis to dump a mattress on a skip, which gives him a shadow side and makes him even more interesting).

We love the hallucinatory effect of the locations. Last week the villains went through the door of the Sackler Classics Library and entered a nightclub! We’re used to them running down a street in the north of the city to enter the centre from the south. The murderous academics  almost always live in the houses of multi-millionaires and last night’s opened on to Radcliffe Square!

Last week’s episode, written by Dave Pirie, was a knickerbocker glory of Inkling references and even included mention of Perennialist Titus Burkhardt. But for all its literariness and intellectualism, Lewis, like Morse, like most crime fiction, remains completely implausible and no less lovable because of it.

Although Kevin Whately is a Geordie, Lewis himself must surely be Welsh, which gives me the weakest possible link through to another topic. I’ve just finished reading A Dreaming for the Witches by Stephen Yeates. Great title, great blurb, but really only a book on archaeology with useless maps. I say ‘only’ because archaeologists, even more than other sciences, I think, have reduced their subject to a dead rat pinned out in a dissection tray with what made the animal interesting long gone.

Somehow, through a text that carefully avoids incriminating him as a man of imagination, Yeates implies that Wales once extended as far east as Gloucester and the Cotswolds, that the Dobunni tribe of that area, which became the Hwicce people in Anglo Saxon times, gave rise to the name ‘witch’ and that the Vale of Gloucester is the source of the Grail legends.

So careful is he not to say what he means that it’s a difficult read, but I did enjoy catching up with current thinking on the source of the English. Genetics, apparently, show that all the incomers, whether migrants or invaders such as Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Celts etc., each contribute less than 5% to the gene pool while a whopping 45% is contributed by the first people to arrive after the ice withdrew. We are the Bronze Age folk who built Stonehenge, unless they too were later incomers, in which case we did the work shifting stones, or rested on our hoes moaning about the changes to the landscape and saying the project will never work. But we’ve been here since the year dot and I find that pretty exciting. It leads on to all manner of thoughts about Englishness – and Welshness – best saved for another time.

Yeates is a hard read because academic discipline won’t allow him to say what he can’t substantiate, but I would love to have him round for dinner and hear what he has to say after a few glasses of wine.

There is fog on the meadow this morning and ‘the Spanish wild horses’ are grazing peacefully as only English domesticated horses can.  While Lewis makes hay with the facts, archaeologists reduce them into bone and dust: there must be something in between, some form of literature that is both truthful and imaginative. And so there is… Back to work then, after a short session of strimming if filming will allow it.

English tame horses on Wolvercote Common, our house in the background.