Sometime last year a rather surprising, printed bill-board appeared by the cross-roads with the traffic lights on the main southerly approach into Saxmundham (the old A12 before the by-pass was built). The notice was attached to the post carrying the town’s coat of arms. Its somewhat unusual message was that people walked in the road ahead i.e. the main street through this small town, so would you please drive carefully. Unfortunately, I cannot provide the text verbatim since I did not photograph it, though I often thought I should because the message seemed odd; it was at least a change from the usual instruction to pedestrians to keep off the road, or at the very least to warn them of dangerous, moving traffic. In its rather quaint little way, the reversal of roles, warning drivers of pedestrians, was very ‘Suffolk’.

But then disaster struck: either a vehicle clipped the road-side half of the board and snapped it off or, as I suspect happened, a person, perhaps a driver, annoyed by its rather fatuous message, snapped it off manually. ‘I really must photograph it in this state’, I said to myself but of course when I next returned to Sax with camera at the ready, the other half of the board had disappeared too. That must have been the result of deliberate breakage. All I could do was photograph the narrow middle strip of the board which was directly attached to the post. It is still there. It contains various letters and bits of letters but I have so far failed to reconstruct the full message in all its glory (photograph to be downloaded idc). And of course I don’t have a record of the original message: I wonder if anyone else has?

Meanwhile, off the market place on the side road approaching the railway station, a new poster has appeared. In the same black type-face on yellow background as the original it exhorts you to ‘DRIVE SLOWLY PEOPLE WALKING IN ROAD.’ In other words, it delivers the same message as the original but in fewer than half the words.

My guess would be that the original was the result of a well-intentioned initiative by an elderly persons’ organisation but that there were many objections to its odd wording, perhaps even from the police. So it was taken down, recomposed briefly, reprinted and put up again, though off the main street, where it can neither offend nor do much good. The odd thing is that It has never seemed to me, as a frequent motorist in Sax, that people walking in the road here is any worse than in other towns. Indeed, so characteristically unpeopled is the high street, with scarcely anyone on the pavements never mind in the road, that we have often made ‘dead as a dodo’-type remarks about the streetscape as we drive through. Funny place, Sax: it seems to have failed to solve a problem which doesn’t exist.

I did not send any cards for the Xmas just gone; though I phoned or e-mailed many friends and acquaintances on my card list, but not all. A result is that, by New Year’s Day, I have received a few enquiries from people I did not contact – enquiries in some cases delicately phrased – regarding the state of my health. As a friend said on the phone last evening, it can be significant when one does not receive a card from a regular sender.

I therefore wish to make it quite clear to anyone who wants to know, and who just might read this blog, that I remain of this world. This may or may not be glad tidings to those who did not know, I appreciate that; I would also add that, as far as I recall from my cricketing days, I was never out in the ’80s and always went on to a century. I am 86 in the year just starting today, so keep your diary clear for 14 June 2036.

This is my first attempt to put a little video on my web page. The video itself was assembled automatically by the computer: it has just strung several watery images together and garnished them with some rythymic ‘music’.

Let’s see if it works. The scenes, all in Suffolk bar one, are respectively of the upper Alde estuary down river from Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh beach and sea defences towards the Martello tower to the south, two exhibits in an exhibition on Cley beach, north Norfolk, and looking north up Stony Ditch which divides the marshes from the shingle on Orford Ness.

No, I have not just sat down on a drawing pin.

‘Eyke’ is the name of a village through which I often drive. The word is genuine: it is a real-life word meaning ‘oak tree’ in Old Scandinavian. But nobody seems to live there. I never see anyone standing up there or walking along the village street: the place is apparently lifeless. It had a shop until last year, a shop so dark that I don’t know what it sold; but that suddenly closed as if there were no customers.

Perhaps the inhabitants have all been driven away by plague or even killed by traffic not obeying its electronic 30 mph sign; but as with most deserted settlements it is unlikely that one explanation alone conveys the truth. Indeed, perhaps it is not a deserted village at all in that it has never been occupied i.e. it was built but people never moved in so it has always been empty.

Curious.

PS Of course it was bound to happen. The first time I drove through Eyke a few days after writing the above, I saw a man standing at the bus stop. He was somewhat portly, in his fifties and dressed all in black.

Thinking about this sighting afterwards, I began to have doubts. I did not see him move: he was just standing there, static. Could he possibly have been just a dummy, put there perhaps by someone who had read my controversial note about Eyke? Furthermore, I doubted whether Eyke still had a bus service, so my suspicions increased.

All was clarified on my return journey three hours later. By pure chance, as I approached Eyke I had to join a line of traffic which had accumulated behind a dark red double-decker bus. It was a 65, the service which runs between Ipswich and Aldeburgh; I did not know that it ran through Eyke. It pulled into the roadside outside the boarded-up shop and stopped – and guess who got off! Yes, it was the man dressed in black; so he was not a dummy.

But that the man dressed in black waited at the Eyke bus-stop and then dismounted from a 65 bus there on the other side of the road three hours later does not prove that he is an Eyke resident. I need much stronger evidence than that to undermine my contention that Eyke is empty.

On January 3, 2022, I saw a man in Eyke being taken for a walk by a small dog. There was no evidence, however, that either was a resident.

Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast is a 10-mile long spit of shingle divided from the land by the River Alde at Aldeburgh and the River Ore at Orford. It ends to the south at Shingle Street, but its ‘end’ at the mouth of the Ore is constantly changing as pebbles from the north continue to be deposited there. Shingle Street is in fact a continuation of the same deposition.

The Ness is both a National Nature Reserve, for its geomorphological and botanical interests, and a property of the National Trust, essentially for its historical interest in that it was the site of military experiments and developments from the first World War until the end of the Cold War. I had the privilege of being involved in its acquisition by the NT c1990, not the most obvious of potential Trust properties since it had no endowment, was certainly not beautiful and at first sight appeared to be nothing more than a derelict military establishment. Yet for better or worse significant aspects of the history of 20th century warfare, from research on airborne bombing to the development of radar and the atom bomb, are represented in the archaeology of this place and, some 30 years after its acquisition,  few would now question its appropriateness as a Trust property conserved in the national interest. The best book about it is Most Secret. The Hidden History of Orford Ness by Paddy Heazell.

Managing the site is difficult. It usually floods in winter; there is still a danger of unexploded ordnance off the cleared tracks and paths; public exploration of the Ness is further limited by its widespread use by ground-nesting birds; and existing structures are fragile and often unsafe. Access is by ferry from Orford quay which, like so much else in our Covid world nowadays, has to be booked in advance. A key agent in the site’s management is a flock of c150 native and rare breed sheep whose carefully manipulated grazing helps keep the vegetation under control. One of my great pleasures in geriatric life is being a volunteer helping to look after this flock, but I have never worked with them on the Ness. My role is to keep an eye on them when they come off the Ness to spend the winter on the mainland while the Ness floods.

I took a party of 23 people over the other day on what proved to be in terms of weather a stunning, no-cloud-in-the-sky early autumn day. The light was brilliant and, out of season, we had the place to ourselves. We coincided with a classy art exhibition which allowed us to visit buildings normally out of bounds. I will write more on this, with illustrations, later.

Meetings with curious sheep, all serendipidous and unplanned; but were they really sheep?

These two sheep were browsing under woodland up the Tarset valley in north west Northumberland, almost in Scotland. They clearly showed the effects of the local weather but whether they were wethers is unknown.

Not all that far away we encountered a lovely-looking flock of 6-month-old lambs in valley pasture. It was a bit disconcerting to see a double-headed lamb half looking at us, as it were, but it did not appear to be in any discomfort. Perhaps it will grow up to be twice as brainy as a normal sheep.

And back to Suffolk for another ovine looking at us, this time downwards; but definitely not a real sheep. I know this edges perilously near to religious devotees who see the Blessed Virgin in a soup bowl and Jesus in some spilt milk but surely it is not my imagination alone which can see a large sheep’s head, probably of a White-faced Woodland,, looking domineeringly down from out of the clouds: the ears, the furrowed brow, two eyes, a noble nose and, in the distance, lips merging with the darker clouds. The image had disintegrated a minute later but what does it Mean? Did it indeed ever exist? Is, one has to ponder, God a sheep?