Mole is looking forward to Spring

January was wet and sometimes cold but not as severe as has been known. The little Mole, who everybody had thought was still snoozing by his fire had been out of his house and very busy judging by the large number of molehills on Lower Green. In the old days villagers would have been out to take the wonderful soft soil from these little aerated mountains. One can be sure there is not a harmful bug inside and the crumbly earth is ideal for refreshing house plants and for vegetable seedlings.

In the fields the pheasants celebrated the end of the shooting season by coming out in droves and strutting around the lanes with a myopic disdain for oncoming traffic and a patrician sense of ownership of roads and hedgerows. Single hare too seemed to think it was already March and were apt to bound across roads and leap to the safety of the fields on the other side. Soon we will be seeing the famous boxing matches and their sudden leaps, darts and scuttles as Spring takes over their senses.

However, early Spring harbingers, such as the first snow drops, could be seen clinging to the banks of local lanes as if aware that winds were soon to approach. These delicate and earliest of the Spring flowers seem the least likely to push through frozen earth and take on the tough misfortunes of this seasons weather and yet they they surprise us every year.

In the wider village there has been much discussion over the arrival at a very big and venerable white house of a close friend of Mr Toad and he is apparently creating chaos. Newspapers are full of cartoons, disrespectful remarks and the like and the world seems to be going through a period of change in which the disintegration of democracy is coming about as predicted by Plato centuries ago.

Here in the village this does not seem to be having much impact. Those who go about take pleasure in the arrival of the long tailed tits at their feeding stations and the promising shoots of early bulbs. In the supermarkets there is much wringing of hands over the lack of spinach, aubergines and lettuce because of severe weather conditions in southern Spain. Those remembering the War simply shrug and say “Get on with it”. We remember a time when food came only in its season and roses from Ecuador and Kenya, asparagus from South Africa and oranges from Israel had been neither thought of nor required. Our local fields are either green or muddy brown but we can already see the shoots of winter wheat and the burgeoning rapeseed plants that will soon be framing our views. It would be nice if local farmers planted a little flax just for the watery effect on the view but, of course, that would be dismissed as the romantic notion it is. While the watery sun, when it comes, lacks strength and the winds, when they come seem to have added to their own strength, we remain inside and it is a time to keep perusing the garden catalogues, dreaming of clumps of peonies and new climbing roses and anticipating the cowslips to come in the hedgerows. However glum the news there is still so much to look forward to.