Welcome to 2022! Traditionally, the first or second post of any year is my Christmas Adventure With Tom, depending on whether I have time to finish it in time for the first post of the New Year, and this year here it is up first – with some changes.
Of course there are changes. We’re still living in a plague! So we had to go in two separate cars, instead of me picking Tom up like I always used to, which means a reduction in the wine that’s a key part of the day. We did lateral flow tests before we went – there’s no guarantee that makes us safe but it’s better than blind faith. We took packed lunches instead of going to a cafe. It’s always outside so that bit wasn’t different – we go to the seaside and we usually have the wine sitting outside anyway. But the biggest change this year was that we had a third person, or as a blog might call her, a special guest.
Catherine! I’ve known Tom since our two schools combined when we started secondary school in year 7 and we’ve known Catherine since her school joined us in year 9. We had our usual Christmas get-together-at-the-pub on Zoom this year and although we miss the pub and are looking forward to maybe getting back to it in 2022, Catherine thought the sea and wine with the two of us was more her thing than going to the pub with the Old Gang.
So here we are, taking our annual selfie – our socially distanced selfie with three people in it. In fact, it was taken by Catherine.
We went to RSPB Arne, a nature reserve on the edge of Poole Harbour. I don’t think Tom’s ever been there, I’ve only discovered it in the last sixteen or so months and Catherine spent a reasonable amount of her childhood there, which made her the guide for the day.
Entrance to Arne is technically free but they’re currently charging £7 per car for parking. It was £5 last time I went there and the signs dotted around still say £5, so I don’t know if this is a temporary thing for Christmas or if it’s £7 for the foreseeable future now. However, if you’re an RSPB member, you can leave your membership card in the front of your car and park for free, and at this point it’s definitely something I’m considering. It starts at £5 a month, so if I go to Arne nine times in a year, I’m saving money. Hmm. Worth considering, anyway.
Once we’d gone back to cars for parking tickets and lunches and everyone had enough warm and waterproof clothes on, we were finally ready to go. We were heading for Shipstal Point, which is the short stretch of beach because the sea is a key element of these Christmas adventures. Catherine had had the sense to wear wellies – my walking boots were perfectly adequate for paths through the woods but not waterproof enough to paddle.
We were also having something of a nature lesson – Tom is interested in learning to forage for mushrooms but doesn’t yet know enough to try it unsupervised and I started learning about trees way back in the spring, so Catherine tested me on recognising them without leaves in winter – I must admit, it didn’t go so well. She was also looking out for antlers. Arne has a good little population of sika deer and at this time of year, they tend to lose their antlers, usually in the undergrowth – allegedly, just to be difficult! It might be interesting to have a little piece of antler to try to make a tiny spoon from but we didn’t spot any lost antlers.
Standing at Shipstal Beach, you can look out over Poole Harbour. Depending on the tide, Long Island is only two hundred metres away. Forget swimming it, I could walk that. I don’t, because Long Island is privately owned and although Poole Harbour only has an average depth of 48cm, I bet that tiny stretch is deeper than it looks. Brownsea Island looks close enough to swim but actually, it’s more than a mile and a half and that’s assuming I can keep swimming in an absolute straight line for over an hour and not get hit by a jetski or speedboat or windsurfer on the way. Catherine likes wild swimming and she’s going to take me out for a swim when the weather heats up a bit – got to get brave enough to do my FSRT sometime this year!
From the beach, we ambled up to the viewpoint. 360° views of heathland, marsh and Poole Harbour from up here. My nice picture of harbour and water got interrupted by a… well, delightful photo of Tom and I also caught Catherine trying to spot deer, although the result is “the most disapproving eyebrows ever”.
Next we went down into the woods towards the hide. Tom has been making plans to invest in suitable outdoors walking boots or something of that kind for at least a year but hasn’t actually done it yet so he found it a little muddier than we did. It’s not exactly nice clean pavement but it’s only a thin layer of slime on a fairly solid path. You don’t want long jeans that’ll drag along the ground, put it that way.
We decided, given the plague, that it was probably best not to go inside the hide but there are benches and a slot to look out directly over the harbour. I have a good zoom on my camera – there, too much plague, the urge to put a capital Z on zoom! – and Catherine knows her birds and is good at spotting them, so between us we got photos of Eurasian spoonbills, which I didn’t know we had in this country, and curlews, which I would never have noticed, while Tom took photos of the serious birdwatching business. It’s a three-person job, you know. Obviously I knew spoonbills have spoon-shaped bills but I’d never imagined them being pure white. I assumed I was taking photos of egrets or geese until I zoomed in on my photos and Catherine saw the spoons. They were extinct in this country in the 70s but a couple of breeding pairs have got them back up to a reasonable healthy population again. The two British birds with the most ridiculous beaks, Catherine called them.
Then we ambled back through the woods, looking at mushrooms and trees and deciding whether to have our lunch on the bench or go back to the cafe. The cafe won – it has a sort of open-fronted tent thing so you can sit under cover but definitely still in the safe fresh air, which was just what we wanted because it began to rain a minute or two after we arrived.
Now the Serious Walking Business was over, we could catch up for a while over a picnic. Catherine had to depart after an hour or so to get back to the children but Tom and I stayed there until we were too cold to hobble back to the cars. Well, I was, anyway. It had been warm while we walked around and I’d have taken my coat off if I wasn’t using my pockets for all the stuff I wanted close at hand, but when you’re sitting still, you start to feel the cold much more quickly. In fact, even at home writing this 48 hours later, I’m a bit chilly. I have a Netflix log fire open on my other screen and it’s really weird to watch it without feeling the warmth from it, and yet to have my brain expecting that warmth. December has been quite mild and I’ve become very unaccustomed to being outside and shivering.
I’m glad we managed to get the adventure in. It’s a tradition that’s gone unbroken since 2014, despite the plague and despite awaiting Boris’s announcement on Monday evening. All the messages included “Boris permitting” “if we can” and so on, and I don’t think I really believed it wasn’t going to get kicked out from underneath us until I was standing in the car park watching Tom arrive in the new car I hadn’t seen yet and waiting for Catherine, who I knew from a phone call along the way, was five minutes behind me. How long has it been since we’ve all been in the same place at the same time? Catherine doesn’t always make it to the pub on the 23rd and I don’t keep attendance records but we haven’t been since 2019, so at least two years. And there was no wine but there’s always next year. I can live without going to Iceland for a few years