Tags
All Saints church, autumn leaf colour, barn owl, bryony berries, field views, guelder rose, hawthorn berries, Lowestoft, muddy lanes, Remembrance Day, spindle berries, St Margaret South Elmham, St Nicholas South Elmham church, stress, stress management, walking
Stressed!
Yesterday evening E and I went to Lowestoft to attend a stress management course. Stress in all it manifestations was described, its causes and what keeps it going. We were told how it affects our thoughts, actions and body and why it affects people in different ways. We have been given a relaxation CD and a little homework to do for next week. This is a rolling course; as soon as this one finishes it starts all over again with a different set of people. There is a day-time course running at the same time as this in Great Yarmouth on a Thursday morning. There are courses like this being run all over the country all the time. The room we were in was full of people of different ages – a few had brought companions like me – but most of us there were sufferers from stress of one type or another. Research done a few years ago states that in this country 4 out of 10 people suffer from stress. This figure is already out of date – anxiety and stress are on the rise.
Lowestoft is affected, like most British seaside towns, by high unemployment especially in the winter. The recent down-turn in the economy has made a bad situation worse. Shops have had to shut and the buildings are still empty or ‘pound shops’ and pawn shops have replaced them. However, it looks better cared-for than Great Yarmouth and a lot has been done recently to brighten it up and improve the road system. As well as being a traditional seaside resort Lowestoft developed firstly as a fishing port, mainly herrings, and when that declined it became, with Great Yarmouth, the base of the oil and gas exploitation industry in the southern North Sea. This has now declined too but Lowestoft has begun to develop as the centre of the renewable energy industry within Eastern England. Parts of the North Town are very attractive and the old Scores are still there – the steep narrow lanes with steps up from the beach that were used by fishermen and smugglers. The Scores are now the site of an annual race which raises money for charity.
Lowestoft is the most easterly point in Great Britain and is on the edge of the Broads which is a series of connected rivers and lakes and Britain’s largest protected wetland and 3rd largest inland waterway. Some of the earliest evidence of settlement in Britain has been found in the town – flint tools dating back 700,000 years. I will try to make a post about Lowestoft at a future date.
As sunset is now about 4 o’clock in the afternoon we drove there and back in the dark. We parked on the sea front and, returning to the car at 7.30 pm we could hear the waves crashing on the beach – the tide must have been in. I was glad to see on our drive back along the Front, with its rows of hotels, bed-and-breakfast establishments and restaurants, that the Beau Thai Restaurant is still open. I’ve never been in there, but a place with such a terrible name deserves to survive!
Remembrance Day
I looked out of a bedroom window this morning at dawn (about 7.00 am) and saw one of our local Barn Owls flying round the field behind the house. It perched for a while on a fence post but the photograph I took of it there never came out. However, I have included the following picture which I took at the same time, strange as it is, as a record of the owl’s presence.

Why this happened I have no idea! I was looking westward and it was fairly bright and cloudy. No pink anywhere! The sun hadn’t risen yet and would be on the other side of the house anyway.
At 11.00 am this morning I listened on the radio to Big Ben striking the hour and I kept the two minutes silence, praying for all those who have lost their lives in war and for those who have been damaged and injured by war and also for their loved ones. I am finding this more and more affecting as the years go by.
An Afternoon Walk
We have had so much rain recently that the garden and fields are sodden. R and I were in need of a little exercise and fresh air on Sunday afternoon so we decided to do our circuit walk round the lanes, which were less muddy and wet than the footpaths.

View from the lane across the field to All Saints church, just visible sticking out of the group of trees in the distance.

There is a natural pond full of fish just to the right of these bollards. It is so full that it is close to overflowing onto the road.

Farmers round here cannot bear to get rid of old implements, tools and scrap metal. I think it gives them a sense of pride to survey this old stuff. ‘It may come in handy some day! It’s worth a lot of money, scrap metal is!’

St Nicholas church was demolished many hundreds of years ago. This is the site where it once stood – the cross is in a garden.

Just beyond the low pink barn in the distance is the largest tower of straw bales I have seen so far this year. Not a good picture I’m afraid – the light was already fading.

There is still a lot of green about. Many of the leaves have dropped from the trees while still green.

This is a field of oil-seed rape which is growing very well in our mild, wet autumn. Only a few weeks ago it seems, I was posting photographs of rolls of straw on these fields after the wheat harvest.

These are beautiful spindle berries. Only nature could make orange seeds emerge from shocking pink seed cases!

A dead oak tree. I am pleased that landowners are not in as much of a hurry as they used to be to remove dead wood from fields and hedgerows. A dead tree supports more life than a living one.
You’ve got some beautiful scenery there. Do you live close enough to the ocean to have your temperatures moderated by it? Our seashore is usually a good 10 degrees warmer in winter.
I like the shot of the owl. He looks like a snowy owl.
I also like the views across the fields and the churchyard path.
Farmers must be the same everywhere-ours do the same things.
I hope the stress management course goes well for your daughter. I’m not sure why life seems so much more stressful now than it did when I was a boy. Everything was so much slower and more restful then, it seems. I don’t remember anyone in my family being that stressed out, but of course they wouldn’t have told me if they were.
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Thank-you Allen. Yes, we live about 9 or 10 miles from the sea and it is much milder here in winter and cooler in summer than further inland. My husband works on the coast and he gets different weather to us at home. However, when the wind is from the east or north in winter the proximity of the sea counts for nothing it seems! The barn owl is smaller than a snowy owl which doesn’t come this far south. The barn owl has dark eyes as opposed to the snowy’s yellow ones. I will try to get a better photo as soon as I can. Barn Owls fly at dusk and dawn as well as at night. I agree that people are much more stressed than they used to be and of course nobody spoke about things like that then.
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The owl shot is a very happy accident. You have made the best of a very damp season with your photographs.
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Thank-you! I would still like to know how the photographic accident happened.
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The goat on the trampoline reminds me that even old goats are still kids at heart. 😉
I really liked all the berries, but even better were your photos of the countryside! I didn’t know that it was so undeveloped there, it must still look as it did one hundred years ago.
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Thank-you Jerry. I was really amused by the goat and wondered how much of the trampoline has been eaten by it. I think where I live hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years but it is intensively farmed and so therefore quite industrial. The local farmers are mainly quite wealthy though they all plead poverty and don’t give up an inch of their land unless they’ll profit by it. The look of it has not really changed because of that. We don’t have any motorways in East Anglia and the main road through the area from London was only metalled all the way along in the 40’s and 50’s. Where Mr Tootlepedal lives in the Scottish Borders is really unchanged because the land is not good enough to grow many crops on.
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Bolbitius titubans 🙂 Your Yellow fungi.
https://wordpress.com/read/post/id/62239464/9406/
Lovely pictures of Black Bryony and Spindle berries, ours are still going strong.
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Thank-you, Colin! I will now label my photograph properly. I would have spent more time looking at these toadstools but the sun had just set and husband wanted his tea and a hot drink!
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Sorry linked to you instead of me 🙂 Bolbitius titubans –
http://atrampinthewoods.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/bolbitius-titubans/
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I loved being on your walk with you. I so miss the countryside! The owl photograph is stunning.
I hope the stress management course is helping. Stress is very personal; one person can cope with some things that to another cause a lot of stress. I hope the strategies they teach really help.
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Thank-you, Rachel. The first meeting was mainly an introduction to what they intend doing over the next three weeks. We’ll see if it does any good. I have also got my daughter a therapist for one-to-one discussions which may also be what’s needed. Now that I live in the countryside I don’t think I could go back to the city to live – days out, yes!
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Dear Clare
Your photographs are stunning… You are lucky of being surrounded by great natural landscapes!. All the best to you. Aquileana 😀
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Thank-you so much my dear Aquileana! All the very best to you too. Clare x
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Beautiful surroundings for a walk, I love your shot of the spindle berries – it’s so contrasting it works! I hope things work out for your daughter 🙂 x
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Thank-you Becky. I love spindle! I don’t notice it for most of the year, its flowers are small and green and insignificant but come the autumn and it just glows! Thank-you too for your kind hope for my daughter. She is doing really well at the moment and working very hard to get over her anxiety and has been in to college every day for nearly five weeks now.
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