Christmas 2011

A somewhat different Christmas holiday experience from the past few years -- having previously spent the holiday on our own, this time we're visiting sister Lynn and her husband Chris in Derbyshire (both having recently taken early retirement from their formal jobs, the lucky sods, but carrying on with various bits of part-time, fill-in, "consultancy" and other work); joined by Mutti who would otherwise have spent the holiday on her own in Lyme Regis; and (briefly -- they arrived on Christmas Eve and departed earlier today) sister Gail, her husband Franck and their daughter Chanel.

This has meant that instead of seeing how many jigsaws the Wugster and I can do in four days, we've been walking Lynn's and Chris's dog Wesley in a nearby bit of the National Forest, a twenty-year-old project to create new woodlands on what was formerly rather degraded arable land across the three Midlands counties of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. As can be seen from the photographs attached to this post, the planting is a wee bit regimented: I daresay the theory is that some of the young trees will die young (disease, damage by animals or the wind, nutrient-poor soils) thus leaving room for the surviving trees to grow into the newly opened spaces and form a more natural-seeming woodland cover. (Either that or some army of the unemployed will be engaged in feats of heroic uprooting and replanting, which seems most unlikely.) Anyway, the attached photographs show, in order, two panoramas of the walking party passing through (or by) National Forest planatations; a stretch of newly planted land, the seedlings encased in plastic tubes to prevent them from being nibbled to death by rabbits and deer; the walking party passing through a patch of conifers (apparently only one of these trees has ever been cut down for use as a Christmas ornament); and a hilltop copse of the kind which existed here when the land was still used for arable agriculture (farmers traditionally left the hilltop copses alone because they always had -- some superstitious Tudor-era or earlier prohibition on disturbing the fairies, doubtless).