The Best Of 2009

OK, it's time once again for my rather slapdash round-up of the year. There's nothing particularly structured about it, and I can't claim to have read very many of the year's 'big' releases, but here goes anyway.

Let's start with single collections. I don't think I bought a great deal by big-name poets, but Hugo Williams' West End Final and John Burnside's The Hunt In The Forest were both fine, although competent retreads of what they've done better before, I think, rather than anything particularly new.

That left the way clear for some less well-known names, though. Mark Goodwin's Else (I think it was actually released in 2008) was terrific, effortlessly straddling the mainstream/alternative and urban/rural divides. Siriol Troup's Beneath The Rime used form, character and narrative to very good effect, and Carrie Etter's poised, extremely mature The Tethers thoroughly deserved the attention it got. She's been pretty prolific, too, so I'll be looking to catch up with her other work in the New Year.

That tendency to slip across the perceived divides of the poetry world was also evident in a number of the other collections I read, including Peter Carpenter's enjoyable, thought-provoking After The Goldrush, perhaps a sign that those divides aren't so obvious once you get into the world of the smaller presses. Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite Of Cabbage was another book which fell into that category, using whatever styles or subjects were needed to create a very entertaining and satisfying whole. Sian Hughes' The Missing was a fine book, too, and one which I expected to receive greater recognition in the prize shortlists. Accessible, yet also utterly serious, it's an excellent collection. Tim Wells' Rougher Yet might have been titled Best Yet - it built on the considerable strengths of the London poet's previous collections and added several new layers of resonance, while Tom Chivers' How To Build A City was a hugely promising debut, rich with historical depth alongside linguistic invention.

There are also quite a few collections I've only just finished, or am still in the middle of reading. Pam Thompson's The Japan Quiz (from 2008) and Michael McKimm's Still This Need (also 2008, I think) are both worthy of much greater attention, once I've re-read them a couple of times, so I'll come back to review them at length later. But two collections made a late run for the top spots. One, George Ttoouli's Static Exile, shouldn't really have come as a surprise to anyone who's seen him read, but maybe it was the fact that he combines satire and the sort of political sensibility that's rare in modern poetry while being laugh-out-loud funny at times that was really so refreshing. Damian Walford Davies' Suit Of Lights was another little gem - it's got one or two stylistic tics that might start to annoy, but it was always unafraid to try new things, within a very readable, entertaining style.

So, to my top three. Well, Matt Nunn's Sounds In The Grass struck a superb balance between the furious and the hilarious - it's the sort of book you'll want to reading bits aloud from to whoever happens to be in the room. Claire Crowther's The Clockwork Gift was another collection that made rather a nonsense of categorisation - it's subtly innovative, thought-provoking, and it sent me back to check out her first collection, Stretch Of Closures. Finally, there's Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box, a debut collection that built on his fine HappenStance pamphlets and finally soared way beyond them - technically assured, quietly inventive, very moving, and suffused with unexpected flashes of light.

I read a lot of chapbooks, of which the highlights were Tom Chivers' The Terrors (a great idea, brilliantly executed), David Morley's The Night Of The Day, Jane Holland's The Lament Of The Wanderer (maybe that was 2008, but it was a fine new version of the great Anglo-Saxon poem), and Frances Corkey Thompson's lovely The Long Acre (again, maybe 2008, but I only read it this year).

Favourite retrospectives were John James Collected Poems (still not finished this, but it's superb) and Jeremy Hooker's The Cut Of The Light. The latter is another of those poets who rather defies categorisation, but I particularly enjoyed his landscape poems. I finished Geoffrey Holloway's Collected Poems, too - again, someone who's been rather overlooked simply because he doesn't fit a convenient pigeonhole. I also finally plugged the Michael Donaghy-shaped hole in my poetry knowledge by reading his Collected Poems, and was left in two minds. When I liked it, I absolutely loved it, but when I didn't, I absolutely didn't.

I loved Not The Full Story, six interviews between Lee Harwood and Kelvin Corcoran, and that's about it. I don't seem to have read much else in the way of prose all year, so maybe that's a resolution to make.

But anyway, a very Happy New Year to all readers of Polyolbion, and here's hoping 2010 makes it just as hard for me to pick a best of.

In brief...

Last night's reading at the Quaker Meeting House was a real pleasure - at about 11pm the previous night I'd been worried it wouldn't even take place, as the snow arrived in earnest. Amazingly, it was all gone by the morning.

But anyway, it was lovely to meet LouAnn Muhm and her partner, Steve, and to show them a bit of Leicester beforehand, and the reading itself was excellent. Jane Commane's Bronte-inspired poems were superb, and I always enjoy her love poem to the Ordnance Survey. Pam Thompson was excellent as always (I'll be posting some reviews of her book, The Japan Quiz, and pamphlet, Hologram, on here soon), and I read half a dozen poems (Prelude for Glass Harmonica, High Lonesome, January, Hares In December, Another and Happiness).

LouAnn's reading was the real highlight - I've been enjoying her book ever since it came out, but it was great to hear the poems out loud, and to understand more about the stories behind some of them. All in all, just what was needed in between Christmas and New Year.

Birds, Culture and Conservation

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the Birds, Culture and Conservation Symposium at Oxford, which aimed to bring together poets, writers, artists and others with an interest in using the arts to raise the profile of conservation issues.

I don’t think any of us really knew what to expect, but as it turned out it was enjoyable, extremely thought-provoking, and far too short.

Helen Macdonald’s talk on urban Peregrines was excellent, along with John Barlow’s on haiku, but the highlight for me was probably Tim Birkhead’s stint during the afternoon, which managed to cram an astonishing amount into 20 minutes. But there were no real disappointments – I’ve spent the last fortnight following up on all sorts of things that came up.

Hopefully, this is just the start of something – at the very least, there’ll be another symposium, with a view to creating a bigger, more inclusive event in the future. In the meantime, it's intended to keep the blog going, so take a look…

Breaking The Glass, by LouAnn Muhm

Loonfeather Press, $11.95, www.loonfeatherpress.com

I first came across LouAnn Muhm’s poems in her fine pamphlet Dear Immovable, and the graceful lyrics in this first full-length collection build on its considerable strengths.

So, there’s the same economical, hard-won language, alongside the same willingness to allow real emotion and vulnerability to seep through. It’s a hard balance to strike, but it’s to LouAnn’s credit that she very rarely allows a poem to topple over in either direction.

Instead, she makes a virtue of brevity and understatement, extracting quiet significance from everyday moments by her very refusal to flag up that significance. A poem like Shoveling Out presents a seemingly straightforward domestic situation, but you’re left to draw your own conclusions as to whether a sudden snowfall is indeed “a gift, / a day / maybe two if you’re lucky, / of clean white forgetting”, or the “terrible weight” it has become by the last line.

This pared-down, almost Zen-like style (and spirituality is another concern here) is used to present a loose emotional and narrative arc, in which the above-mentioned forgetting (or the impossibility and undesirability of doing so) is a key theme. The poems gather in life in all its complexity, with the whole journey ultimately assuming more importance than the destination, so there’s no attempt to jettison any part of the past. It works wonderfully in poems such as Waitress, where the effect is ultimately uplifting, joyous even.

The longer collection also allows her to spread her wings further. The final section, Archetypal, steps outside the narrative arc somewhat, although the concerns are the same. For example:

"The Lady of Shalott / could not weave the world / and live in it, / just as I can not write a thing / that is here."

That reiteration of absence as a major theme is interesting, because it’s only here that it’s made explicit. Elsewhere, it’s implied and inferred, but none the less affecting for all that.

This is a fine first collection, far more than just a ‘best so far’, and what comes next will be well worth looking out for.

Another reminder...

...as if you needed it, that US poet LouAnn Muhm will be reading at the Friends Meeting House, Queen's Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm on December 30th, along with Pam Thompson, Jane Commane and myself.

There'll also be a few open mic slots, plus mince pies and other festive fare, so come along and enjoy the evening. LouAnn, I should add, hails from Minnesota, so will be utterly undaunted by the sprinkling of snow we've had.

This is just to say...

...that occasionally you read a poem that really blows you away. I've been enjoying John James' Collected Poems a great deal in general, and I've been reading it in chronological order, but earlier I skipped ahead a little and, picking up again at random, read a poem called The Conversation. Amazing, exhilirating, and genuinely uplifting. Read it, even if you read nothing else by James (although you really should!)

Current browsing

Wandering aimlessly around the backwaters of the internet earlier today, I came across this rather intriguing site. It looks like a great idea, although I can’t get everything to work properly on the browser here at work. I’ll try again tonight at home.

Meanwhile, there are loads of interesting posts over at the Birds, Culture and Conservation blog, including poetry, art, prose pieces, photos and films. It promises to be a very interesting day tomorrow, and I'll report back sometime soon.

Armchair birding again

I did a fair bit of birding over the weekend, as the rain generally held off long enough to make some long hikes possible. Not a huge amount to report - plenty of Golden Plovers and Lapwings around Wanlip Meadows, plus a scattering of Goosanders around Watermead Country Park. The males of the latter are subtly beautiful birds, and seem to lift any murky winter afternoon. I missed the Black Redstart in Bradgate Park, though if it hangs around I may well go and see it.

Last night, though, I was sitting watching the Australia vs West Indies test match from Adelaide. Now village cricket grounds can be great for birds, but international matches less so. Nevertheless, for years I've kept an eye out to see what's flitting around in the background, and occasionally, usually in matches from the subcontinent, there's something worth seeing. In Britain, it's just Starlings, Feral Pigeons, and the odd Pied Wagtail.

Adelaide's a venue that usually gets plenty of Silver Gulls on the outfield, though, and last night, it went one better. A Magpie-lark (pictured) was strutting around at backward point, narrowly escaping being dismembered when a Chris Gayle square-cut flew its way. It flew off into the crowd, and Gayle continued on his merry way.

Bird poetry anthologies

I was going to review these two new books today, but I think I'll leave that until a bit nearer Christmas. In the meantime, it's just worth saying that both these books make great Christmas presents for anyone with an interest in poetry and/or birds.

The Poetry Of Birds, edited by Tim Dee and Simon Armitage, is a chunky hardback from Viking, and lists the poems by bird species, imitating the layout of the average field guide. There's a good notes section at the back, too, offering a little background on some of the poems, and some of the birds for that matter.

Now some of the selections surprised and pleased me, such as Colin Simms, Helen Macdonald and Peter Reading (always glad to see his work - he seems to have slipped off the radar in recent years), but I do have one or two criticisms. One is that there still seems to be far too much of the usual suspects. It's not that I don't enjoy John Clare, or Ted Hughes, say (any regular readers here will know that I'm a big fan of both), it's just that I suspect a lot of potential readers will have the poems featured already, in other anthologies if not in collections of the individual poets' work. I'd have liked a bit more from outside the UK and the USA, and a few more surprises, I suppose.

Don't get me wrong, though - it's great for a bit of browsing, and a very nice complement to the Collins Field Guide and Birds Britannica in any home library.

Bright Wings is an illustrated anthology from the USA, edited by Billy Collins and with paintings by David Allen Sibley. A lot of the poets here were fairly unfamiliar to me, although that's in part because I've not read anything like enough US poetry, but quite apart from anything else it's a really nicely produced book, with the illustrations setting off the poems very well.

It's sent me off following up quite a few leads in terms of reading more by the poets involved, and as that's what I generally want most from an anthology, it's done its job very well.

Anyway, I will come back to these very soon, but check them out on Amazon if you think they sound up your street.

LouAnn Muhm

If you're in or around Leicester on December 30th, there's the chance to hear the fine US poet LouAnn Muhm reading at the Friends Meeting House, Queen's Road, Leicester, starting at 7pm.

I've talked about LouAnn's pamphlet Dear Immovable and collection Breaking The Glass on here before, but it doesn't hurt to say once again that they're both really excellent, so come along and hear her read and buy a copy or two.

I hope to have Leicester poet Pam Thompson also reading, and there'll also be room for a few open mic slots.

It's all free, and there'll be mince pies a-plenty. Hope to see you there.

NB: I've just realised that I never actually posted the full review of Breaking The Glass - it's been staring me in the face on my hard drive for about the past year, and I've been subconsciously thinking I'd put it up here. I'll post it a bit nearer Christmas, as a taster for the reading.

Crash, bang, wallop

I still have no doubt that Viv Richards is the best batsman I've ever seen (or am ever likely to see), and of current players worship the sublime genius of Sachin Tendulkar, but has there ever been a more exciting batsman than Virender Sehwag?

Even following his innings on Cricinfo's text commentary this morning has been exciting. I can hardly wait to see the highlights tonight.

The Pushcart Prize

I was delighted and not a little surprised to be informed, earlier this week, that my poem Stanislav Petrov is one of Umbrella's six Pushcart Prize nominations for this year.

I'm not entirely sure what the process is from here on in - I assume the Pushcart editors narrow the field down to a final selection, but I'm over the moon just to have got a nomination.

Lists, lists, lists

Good piece by Todd Swift over at Eyewear, talking about the usual glut of year-end book lists. I tend to agree with a lot of what Todd's saying, although it is fair to point out once again that I'm always a bit underwhelmed by Don Paterson. I bought Rain the other day, along with John Burnside's The Hunt In The Forest, and although I will take time to digest and re-read them, I'd have to say I prefer the latter. As usual with Paterson, I find myself thinking "it's good, but is it really that good?"

Meanwhile, Peony Moon is featuring mini-lists from a wide variety of poets. They make very interesting reading, and it's good to see Andrew Philip's wonderful The Ambulance Box and Clare Crowther's The Clockwork Gift cropping up with such regularity. I found it very difficult to narrow things down to three books, because I get the impression it's been a pretty strong year.

With that in mind, I'll be doing my usual round-up of favourite books some time after December 25th, but in the meantime, look out later this week for reviews of Simon Armitage and Tim Dee's anthology The Poetry Of Birds, and the similarly themed US anthology Bright Wings, edited by Billy Collins.

Current reading includes John James' Collected Poems, George Ttoouli's splendid Static Exile, and a selection from Francis Kilvert's diaries (I'd been looking for a cheap paperback of the latter for ages, and found one for £2 in Leicester on Friday).

Birds, Culture and Conservation

At the end of next week, I'm off to Oxford for the Birds, Culture and Conservation Symposium, which will look at ways of encouraging people into supporting conservation projects using the arts.

It will feature writers and poets such as Mark Cocker, Jeremy Mynott, Dominic Couzens and Helen Macdonald, plus visual artists, academics and more. I'm going to be there both in a work capacity and out of personal interest, and over the next couple of weeks, the blog I've linked to will include material on the subjects up for discussion.

Brief interlude

Still need a Christmas present for the (male) birdwatcher in your life? These should do the trick nicely!

Birdwatching goes mainstream?

Interesting article about birdwatching in The Observer, here, and nice to see my boss, Bird Watching editor Sheena Harvey, quoted. One of our columnists, David Lindo, makes some interesting comments, too, and another of our regular contributors, the tireless Ian Barthorpe, of Minsmere RSPB, gets a mention, too.

I'm not sure I agree with Tim Dee's comments, though, about men in particular being drawn to the hobby "as a way of organising the world". I daresay there is some of that, particularly from the more obsessive listers, but even for most of them, I would have thought, one of birdwatching's great appeals is quite the opposite - it's something we can't control, a reminder of the randomness and variousness of the world.

Poets on fire

Last night, it was straight down the A46 to Royal Leamington Spa for the launch of David Morley's The Night Of The Day, from Nine Arches Press.

A couple of hecklers, one of them particularly persistent and totally irrational, could have spoiled things, but David was unshaken and gave a very energetic, celebratory reading that was an absolute pleasure to hear. There was excellent support from Myra Connell, Matt Nunn, George Ttoouli and Simon Turner, too, and some good open mic-ers. I bought copies of David's pamphlet (a limited edition version, in fact) and of George's new collection, Static Exile (from Penned In The Margins), and both made me think about how much better poetry books look these days, even before you get to the contents. I feel a long blog post coming on, but it will have to wait until another day.

Today, the new issue of Sphinx arrived, and a real cracker it is too. So far I've only had chance to read the interview with Tony Frazer of Shearsman, which is worth the cover price alone. Shearsman have being going from strength to strength these last few years, and there are quite a few of their books that I'd number among those volumes I always like to have to hand, so it's great to hear just how Tony has managed such a prolific, and high quality, output.

Also today, a woodcock flushed almost from beneath my feet in Cademan Woods, another flying across the road at Copt Oak, and owls, owls, owls at Cossington.

Edward Woodward

Sad news that Edward Woodward has died, aged 79. I'd guess that, in the UK at least, all the talk will be of Callan, The Wicker Man and The Equaliser, but here he's pictured in what, for my money, was his finest moment, Breaker Morant.

It's a great film, with Woodward in the title role well supported by the likes of Bryan Brown, and it's more relevant now than it's ever been, I'd have thought. Woodward is superb throughout, although my favourite scene is the one where some of the guards are offering him and his co-defendants a chance to escape. One tells him that he could take a horse, ride to Portuguese East Africa. Morant asks what he'd do then. "Get on a ship. See the world," comes the reply.

"I've seen it," says Morant, and Woodward's delivery of the line wrings maximum value out of three small words.

Friday night live

Despite the howling gales and the rain bucketing down (I found myself having a Cardiff flashback there and wanting to say tamping down, which sounds so much better), and despite both my headlight bulbs giving up the ghost during the course of the day, necessitating a last-minute dash to Halford's, last night's reading at Leicester Poetry Society was a success.

A good roomful (including HappenStancers DA Prince and Marilyn Ricci) had braved the storm, and a very attentive audience they were too.

We read in alphabetical order, which meant I went first. Always a good thing. It's not so much that I get nervous, but more for the same reason that I prefer to open the batting when playing cricket. If I've got too much time to think about the 7ft fast bowler/untested new poem (delete as appropriate), I get very tempted to start completely overhauling my technique/rewriting things on the hoof. Far better to get in there straight away and face the (chin) music.

It also means I enjoy the other poets' work more. Pam Thompson and Lydia Towsey were both excellent (I swapped books with Pam at the interval - her pamphlet Hologram has a fantastic hologram of David Bowie on the front) - confident and assured but in contrasting styles. I particularly enjoyed Lydia's snail poem and Pam's canal poems, but there was an awful lot to like.

Books were bought, sold and swapped, and a thoroughly good time was had by all. Oh, and my set-list was:

The Memory Of Water

Unquiet

Hutt River Province

The sea at Ashby de la Zouch

Knots

The Meeting Place

The American Version

Uchronie

Midstream

Whinchats

Under Cotopaxi

Worst Case Scenario

Happiness

Troy Town

Lullaby

A reminder

Just to mention again, I'll be reading with two other Leicester poets - Pam Thompson and Lydia Towsey - at the Friends Meeting House, 16 Queen's Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm tomorrow (Friday, November 13th).

It's a Leicester Poetry Society event, so come along and support poetry in the East Midlands. Books will be on sale. Hope to see you there...

Ouroboros Review Issue 4

The new issue (No.4) of Ouroboros Review is now live, and can be read in its entirety here. As always, it looks really wonderful, so you can buy a print version here if you want to actually get your hands on it or keep it for posterity.

There's plenty of excellent poetry in there (so far I've particularly enjoyed some of the work by John Walsh and Sophie Mayer), plus a good piece by Louisa Adjoa Parker on black and minority publishing in the UK, among other prose pieces.

I've got three poems - Corvo, Gossamer and Jubilee - in there. Hope you enjoy it all.

EDIT: I've had a proper look through now, and there's all sorts of good things in there. I really enjoyed the poems from Arlene Ang and Michelle McGrane, but there's plenty of other great stuff.

Buy one, get one free!

Christmas is coming, and, err, I’m getting fat. With that in mind, and before doing anything silly like eating less or exercising more. I’m trying to create more room in my cramped house my rationalising my bookshelves.

A while ago, I bought some books at the closing down of a bargain bookstore. They’d always sold a lot of remaindered poetry from the likes of Faber, Cape, Picador and Bloodaxe, and there were quite a few volumes worth having, but you basically had to buy a box at a time, for a fiver. So I did. Trouble is, there were also quite a few books in there that I already had, and a few more that I didn’t really want.

So, until Christmas, anyone buying a copy of Troy Town through this website (£9, including postage and packing) can also have one of the collections absolutely free - I'd like to think they were going to a good, poetry-reading home. I’ll send you the full list of what’s available when you enquire, but some of the poets include Don Paterson, Neil Rollinson, Jean Sprackland and Ruth Padel.

Email me at the link shown on the right, or just post a comment below. Oh, and don't worry if it takes me a while to get back to you - I'm going to be all over the place for the next couple of weeks.

Currently distracting me from work...

I've kept going back to this poem by Sharlene Teo, at Gists and Piths, in the course of this week. Very intriguing, very enjoyable.

Hometown reading

I'll be reading with two other Leicester poets - Pam Thompson and Lydia Towsey - at the Friends Meeting House, 16 Queen's Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm on Friday, November 13th.

It's a Leicester Poetry Society event, so if you can, come along and support poetry in the East Midlands. If you're a regular reader here, you know more than enough about me, but here's a bit more background on my fellow readers...

Pam Thompson has been writing and performing poetry in the East Midlands for a number of years. She is part of the steering-group of and was artistic producer of the Lyric Lounge week at The Y Theatre, Leicester, in July 2009. Pam is widely published in magazines and pamphlets. Her first full collection is The Japan Quiz, published by Redbeck Press in 2008

Lydia Towsey comperes and coordinates WORD! and in 2009 has been the Artistic Director of The Lyric Lounge (www.lyriclounge.co.uk). She has performed alongside John Hegley and Jean 'Binta' Breeze and is soon to be published in POM, an anthology of new voices, co-edited by Michael Horovitz, John Hegley and Melanie Abrahams.

Books will, of course, be on sale. Hope to see you there...

Early morning

There's a superb piece of nature writing here - as someone says in the comments box, well worth the long wait.

Here in the Midlands, we're at that time of year when birds should be on the move everywhere. And they are, but I've been far too lazy at chasing after them just lately. I’m not good at getting up early, you see. Never have been. I made the effort this morning, though, after Dave Gray had reported a couple of Short-eared Owls hunting at Cossington Meadows last night. They’re not a bird we see locally very often, so I was there by just after 5.30 to see what I could find.

It was still pretty much dark then, and SEOs hunt in half-light or even full daylight, but I wanted to be in place well ahead of time. It helped that it’s very warm at the moment, so standing around in the dark wasn’t the freezing experience it usually is in the UK in October (well, in pretty much any month, for that matter), and I stood there looking out across the meadows, straining my eyes for any sign of life.

Of course, it’s in such situations that your hearing becomes your most vital sense, and once I’d learned to filter out the occasional sounds of movement from the cattle moving around in the next field, I started to pick up bird songs and calls from all directions.

Robins are never shy of making themselves heard, even in the middle of the night, and sure enough one soon started up from the nearby bushes, quickly followed by a more distant Blackbird and finally, as the sky started to grow light, by Greenfinches and Goldfinches passing up and down the hedgerows. Birdsong has a pretty uplifting effect at any time, but first thing in the morning that’s amplified. The birds are announcing their survival of the cold and dark – to their mates, to the other birds of their flock, to themselves, and to anyone else who cares to listen.

There was still only the faintest glimmer of dawn in the east at this stage, but something was moving out there. First one, then two Barn Owls faded into view somewhere near the centre of the meadow, ghostly against the murk as they quartered the grass with buoyant wingbeats. As I mentioned last week, they often seem to become so engrossed in their hunting that they’re oblivious to humans, and while I stayed statue-still, one came to within 10 yards, only finally lifting his intent gaze from the ground to notice me, and veering sharply but easily away. I watched them for another 15 minutes or so, until the increasing light and the arrival of some dog-walkers persuaded them to head for home.

Barn Owls are (not surprisingly) one of those sights guaranteed to draw hushed, awed tones from birdwatchers of all types. Wigeon, on the other hand, are one of those underrated, and largely understated, pleasures of the British winter. They’re lovely-looking ducks, for starters, but the male’s wheee-oooooo whistle is both evocative and exhilarating, and by now tight little groups of them were whizzing over from the pools towards the lakes nearer Leicester. A few Shoveler, too, with their oversized bills a dead giveaway in silhouette.

Finally, just as I began to give up hope, another shape started moving above the now recognisably green meadow. A Short-eared Owl, without doubt, with the orangey areas on the primaries visible, but I'd hardly had time to get the scope on it before it dropped into a fold in the ground, presumably having found a vole. Good news for the owl, bad news for the rodent and me. I hung around as long as I could, but it didn't reappear before I had to leave for work.

In all likelihood these birds are just passing through on the way from their upland breeding areas to the coastal marshes where they spend the winter, but some do occasionally hang around. Some of the former opencast mines near here I live have attracted them in the past, as in the early stages of their restoration they tend to have wide expanses of grassland, plus small conifers for roosting in. There's also a site in eastern Leicestershire, near Eyebrook Reservoir, that tends to get them every winter, so maybe we'll be lucky and these will stay.