21 February 2021 News/Editorial
My “in bad taste, endlessly whatsapping” small (6ft 9”) cousin Peregrine recorded -17c at Old Greenlaw one night the week before last, and we had +14c here last week. Even in this country, a swing of over 30c within three or four days is unusual; Braemar would have been closer to a 40c swing.
My walks around the river were a joy; as ever the egrets (really “as ever”?/ global warming or what?), swans and geese were there, but now joined by those harbingers of spring, oystercatchers piping away and skylarks chirruping as they danced their way upwards into the sky. With the notable exception of six cormorants sitting on the lawn outside the Cornhill hut, wings extended to dry them out, all was well in my world.
No matter that the river was big... and got bigger. The Saharan wind brought wind and rain, but it was soft and welcoming, and all that snow has gone. Some young person (is “youth/ urchin” un-woke/ unprintable?) built a large snowman at the end of our view to the river; it annoyed me for three days, like a pimple on the face of the Mona Lisa, it was all your eye could see. I chuntered away about how much I wanted to knock its head off. Anger management issues were well to the fore. Finally, one evening, I snuck out and kicked it to the ground. Never has anything been more satisfying. My elder son says that since reaching 70, I have become a grumpy old man. It started way before that.
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Two 10ft floods at the end of the week were, hopefully, not big enough to be damaging to our juvenile salmon. I normally worry over 12ft, and 15ft is bad news, so with any luck those resilient little mites in the headwaters will have been able to find refuge somewhere.
Nobody even thought about fishing, and with more wind and rain forecast for this coming midweek, February, even absent Covid, has been a non event. The score will struggle to beat double figures, and this after February 2020 was similarly flood ridden. From being the coldest and driest month statistically, February seems to be taking on a more sodden hue.
You will recall that after a drenching early spring in 2020, April and May produced ne’er a drop and that the sun shone ceaselessly out of a clear blue sky, even more than Barcelona or Faro. If averages tell us anything, it is that things tend to balance out and that after raining/snowing for most of December, January and February, it will stop raining sometime.
Those glass half empty types (who me?) will think that there will be a drought just as all the fish come in from April onwards, and we all want to be “up and at ‘em”. Now, now, positive thinking, please, we will have rises of water at least once every 10 days right through the summer and early autumn, just as the doctor ordered. Conditions will be routinely perfect.
Of course, what else?
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There is a very obviously ancient sign at the entrance to the Lees stables which reads “Any vagrants or beggars passing through these gates will be taken to the Constables in Coldstream”. How great is that? And yet, said sign has never been vandalised, no graffiti, in stark contrast to some of the signs we have put up saying “PRIVATE” to dissuade walkers from strolling straight past our house. Some of those have ended up in the river. Which got me thinking. If I produced a distressed, olde worlde writing sign saying “If anyone leaves a dog poo bag hanging on a tree, they will be taken to Coldstream Square to have their fingernails removed one by one”, would I get away with it?
There is no point threatening the Constables in Coldstream; there are none.
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If predictions of more flooding are correct, there will be plenty of this rubbish again next week. Maybe after that there will be some fish/ fishing to discuss? If the above clearly finds me in mid season form, it is because both Jane and I have been jabbed (or “jagged” in Scotland, why do they always have to be different?) and for the first time for months, it is hard, even for an old curmudgeon, not to feel that things are on the up. We have just come back from playing golf for the first time this year, with our dogs Puppsie (Lancashire Heeler) and The Rocket (Broken Coated Jack Russell, how grand is that?).
They enjoyed it.
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