Ten Poems About Cricket

My poem, Two Orthodox Left-Armers, is included in this splendid chapbook anthology from Candlestick Press. Edited by John Lucas, whose own poem Still Going Strong is one of the highlights of the book for me, it includes work from Adrian Buckner, Joan Downar, Philip Hodgins, Brian Jones, Hubert Moore, Norman Nicholson, Kit Wright and John Arlott. Yes, that John Arlott. I couldn't be more delighted to be in such company.

The two-part poem concerns Yorkshire spin bowlers Wilfrid Rhodes, whose Test career incredibly spanned the years 1899-1930, and Hedley Verity, whose own international career was ended by World War Two.

Oh, and lovely to see that Adrian Buckner's contribution is Cricket At Thrumpton, not only because it's a fine poem, but because it's a ground I've played on a few times myself. It's a typical English village ground, with the added advantage (for me), of being just across the Trent from Attenborough Nature Reserve, so you could always scan the sky for passing raptors, terns and waders while you were standing at deep midwicket, waiting for something to happen.

Liek all Candlestick's chapbooks, it comes with an envelope and bookmark, and is designed to be sent instead of a greetings card. Buy it for the cricket-lover in your life.

Seeing double

This rather intriguing book (the above are the front and back covers, not two different volumes), arrived yesterday from Faber and Faber. It's a dual-authored poetry collection by American twin brothers, and the work deals with the loss of an elder sibling, through suicide.

I've only had a flick through it so far, but what comes across even in the first few poems from each is that they're very different poets, at times almost diametrically opposite in style, in fact. That should offer all sorts of contrasts and oppositions, even though they're dealing with the same subject matter.

I'll be posting a full review in due course - for now I'm just enjoying getting to know the work of two poets who I hadn't previously come across.

A Sky Full Of Birds reviewed in NFU Countryside

Here's the latest review of A Sky Full Of Birds, in the NFU's Countryside magazine. You can find out more about it, and how to buy it, if you're interested, here.

And back to Alderney

Taking a break from birds for a moment, these furry critters were everywhere along the clifftops in Alderney a couple of weeks back. They're the caterpillars of the Glanville Fritillary, a very rare butterfly in the UK (found only on the Isle of Wight), but which is doing well in Alderney. Those startlingly red eyes stay with you, don't they?

Sanderlings sur la plage

Another brief bulletin from Normandy – when we were there a couple of weeks back, there were good numbers of Sanderlings, Turnstones and Whimbrels passing through on the way to their northern breeding grounds. This little group were very approachable, taking a break from their frantic, clockwork wave-chasing.

A piece of England in Normandy

Well, not exactly. The above bird is a Kentish Plover, which despite its name is nowhere to be found in the garden of England. On the beaches of the Cotentin Peninsula, though, they're present in good numbers, scurrying among the shingle and making their nests there too (although one pair we were shown had sensibly tucked theirs under a grassy bank at the top of the beach, not only keeping it well out of sight but also protecting it from the elements).

As always when I see ground-nesting birds, I marvelled at how they could ever successfully raise a brood, out there in the open, but they seem to do OK, helped by the fact that the beaches are nothing like as busy as they would be in the UK.

Kentish Plovers are one of three species which have names relating to that particular county. Spotter's badge to the first person to correctly name the other two.

Readings from A Sky Full Of Birds

I’ve got a few readings from A Sky Full Of Birds coming up over the next few months. You’ll probably get heartily sick of me plugging them as time goes on, but here’s the programme as it stands:

May 21^st-22^nd: Norfolk Bird Fair, Mannington Hall – readings/signings on both days.

June 2^nd: Kenilworth Bookshop – I’m leading a nature walk, followed by a reading/signing.

June 25^th: Lowdham Book Festival, Nottingham – reading and signing.

July 13^th: Jazz and Prose, Nottingham – signing.

August 19^th-21^st: British Birdwatching Fair – reading and signing session in the main authors’ marquee.
August 27^th: Bournemouth Natural Science Society and Museum – reading and talk.

Amazon review of A Sky Full Of Birds

A customer has posted this lovely review of A Sky Full Of Birds on Amazon – you can of course by the book there in print or electronic editions.

An island of Wheatears

Wheatears are among my favourite British birds, but until my visit to Alderney, I'd seen relatively few this spring. I'm not sure if that's because passage has been slow because of the cool weather, or just that I haven't been in the right places at the right time. But anyway, Alderney more than made up for it. Longis Common regularly had 10 or more, including Greenland-race birds, while we kept coming across them elsewhere on the island.

Birders are always delighted to hear that the name has nothing to do with wheat, and actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hvit oers', literally 'white arse'. They were nothing if not observant, those Anglo-Saxons, and they didn't like to mince their words.

There's more on Wheatears (and one individual Wheatear in particular) in my book, A Sky Full Of Birds, available now.

More from Alderney

 

Alderney isn't just about Gannets and other birds. In the spring, it's just a very pleasant place to be, walking along the cliffs or beaches. The spot above, on the south coast of the island, is typical – if Peregrines drift over, that's a great bonus, and you can always watch the seabirds, but the scenery's worth it in its own right.

Throughout our stay, we were at the Braye Beach Hotel (below), which as well as being very comfortable and geared to birders and other wildlife-watchers, is nicely placed for early morning birding. Ringed Plovers and Whimbrels drop in on the beach itself.

And what about that other wildlife? Well, up on the cliffs, Alderney has a good population of Glanville Fritillaries, a butterfly otherwise found only on the Isle of Wight in the British Isles. It was too early for them while we were there, but their caterpillars are great – black, hairy and with vivid red eyes.

Gannets on Alderney

Last week, I was co-leading a Bird Watching Magazine/Avian Adventures readers' holiday to Alderney and Normandy, with Martin Batt, whose work with the Living Islands project on Alderney has done an awful lot to put it on the birding map.

It's a great place to try your first birdwatching outside the UK mainland, because it's small and manageable (you could easily do it all on foot or by bike if you wanted to), but also gets a good variety of birds.

These can include overshooting migrants that would otherwise only be seen on the French mainland, and large numbers of other migrants on their way north to Britain (and beyond).

And then there's the seabirds. Puffins breed on Burhou, just offshore, as do Storm-petrels, and there are good colonies of Razorbills, Guillemots and Shags. But best of all, at Les Etacs, you can view one of the most accessible Gannet colonies in the British Isles.

Thousands of these glorious birds – we have a large proportion of the world's population of them – crowd onto the rocky cliffs, and there's a constant coming and going as they fish the surrounding seas, although they range as far afield as Cornwall and the Thames Estuary.

I'll be posting more from Alderney and northern France over the next few weeks, but you can also read more about the island's Gannets, and those around the coast of Britain, in my book A Sky Full Of Birds, available now.

Quiz time

One for you birders out there - what species is this chap?

I photographed it during a recent trip to Alderney, where a new bird observatory and ringing station has been set up. Among the remarkable ringing records they had even during the few days we were there, this was one of the oddest.

Answer to follow soon, along with more on the trip.

An announcement

I owe my interest in football, and my love of it, to my dad. He was a cultured midfielder of no mean ability himself, in his youth, and I can't remember a time when I didn't want to either kick a ball around, or watch someone else do the same.

He's a lifelong Grimsby supporter, so the first game I ever went to was Peterborough against the Mariners, in the 1976-77 season. Grimsby lost 3-1, but by that time I was already a confirmed Leicester City fan. If my dad was disappointed, he's never let it show, and he follows Leicester as enthusiastically as I follow Grimsby. In 1998, we even saw the Mariners win twice at Wembley in one season, but that's a story for another day.

At primary school, there were a lot of Man Utd bags (those cheap, rectangular holdalls that you bought on the market) to be seen, and surprisingly few Liverpool, given that they were just entering their golden era. I'd never heard of Forest at that stage (Clough's own miracle was just about to happen), although Derby and Leeds also had their playground adherents. And there was a group of us steadfast in our support of Leicester, although we were just entering one of our frequent low periods, getting relegated under the management of former City playing legend Frank McLintock. The kit at that time, from city firm Admiral, was horrible too, although I didn't think so then.

My first experience of Filbert Street was a 4-1 thrashing by Birmingham City (featuring a young Trevor Francis) in 1977-78, as we went down to the old Second Division. And then followed 37 years of ups and downs, mainly the latter. Oh, there was the pleasure of being Liverpool's early 80s bogey side, of seeing a raw, pacy youngster called Gary Lineker mature into a world-class finisher, of a play-off final win over Derby, and of the Martin O'Neill years of the late 90s, with two League Cup wins and four consecutive top 10 finishes in the Premier League. But it says something about how success-starved we've been at Leicester that we were inordinately proud of our record of never having been outside the top two divisions, until that disappeared in 2008. A few years earlier, we nearly went out of business, with Lineker and other ex-players among those stepping in to save us.

All of which is a long preamble to saying that the events of this season, culminating last night, are beyond my wildest dreams. I mean it. If what's really happened had occurred on-screen while playing Football Manager, I'd have dismissed the game as having become hopelessly unrealistic. I'd have closed it down in embarrassment, and gone and done something more constructive instead. I have, in idle moments, thought we might one day win the FA Cup, but that's about it.

You know the details by now. Jamie Vardy's record-breaking scoring streak. Riyad Mahrez's artistry. Huth and Morgan's rock-solid defending. N'Golo Kante's discovery of the secret of perpetual motion. And of course, Claudio Ranieri's leadership, combining great tactical shrewdness with expert man management, and a charming, media-friendly way of deflecting pressure from his players. If he's not the greatest Italian ever to set foot in Leicester, it's only because the city might not exist had some first century civil servant not suggested building a fort on the boggy banks of the Soar.

But back to my dad. When I was born, he set out to register the birth. My parents had agreed on the first names Matthew and James, just because they liked them, although my mum might have been pleased that James was also her maiden name, and my dad certainly liked the fact that they gave a little nod to two of his football heroes, Sir Matt Busby and Jimmy Greaves. When he got to the register office, though, he decided to add a third name, Robert, after his favourite footballer, Bobby Charlton. My mum was not best pleased.

Neither was I, once I was old enough to know. It wasn't that I had anything against the name Robert, really, or the 1966 World Cup winner, more that I didn't like having three first names.

Until now. A few weeks back, when everything was still very much in the balance, I promised that, were we to win the title, I'd change the Robert to Ranieri. Well, I'm a man of my word. I'm filling in the forms, and it's all in motion. You know, just in case I forget what's happened these last nine months.