Tag: yellow rattle

Praying for Everton’s survival among the wildflowers ⚽

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Amberley, West Sussex, May 2023

I am aware that most of the people who read my posts are likely to have a natural aversion to football. But really I’m not sure this blog would be here without the football side of my life. I’m someone who is able to say I’ve had words printed in national newspapers having written (unpaid, of course!) short articles about Everton Football Club as a student for the Observer newspaper. As a child I learned to love the outdoors from playing football with my dad and then my friends in the park, and chasing the irregular bounce of a ball over uneven grazing land in Ireland on summer holidays.

As a masters student I dreampt up articles and essays about the psychological landscape of football pitches and the sheer absurdity of the rules of the game. I wanted to deconstruct football, to make it make sense. The ball crosses a line and people’s lives are changed, while billions of pounds change hands. It has become something so unpleasant in many ways nowadays, but its heritage is old and significant. My family have probably supported Everton since the late 1800s when the club was invented.

On Sunday 28th May I forced myself, though tired, to go for a walk in the Arun valley in the South Downs. The aim was to try and distract myself from Everton’s final day game against Bournemouth, where my team could be relegated from the top division of English football for the first time in 69 years.

Formed in 1878, Everton were relegated in 1951 but came back in 1954 and promptly won the league. My dad passed away just short of his 72nd birthday. As an Evertonian from the age of 5, he had never known his team to be anything other than in the top flight. I can say they have won the league in my lifetime, in 1987, in the year of my birth, 1985, as well as picking up the FA Cup against the odds in 1995. It’s not something Newcastle and Spurs fans my age or younger can say!

The stress of these final day relegation cliffhangers is extreme, but I couldn’t tell you why. In 1994 Everton were on the brink, 0-2 down to Wimbledon (RIP) on the final day, but managed to win 3-2 and stay up. In 1998 I put my face in the grass and pleaded with a god I didn’t really know, to save Everton from relegation again. They survived yet again.

Back on my present day distraction walk I passed through Amberley village and popped into the churchyard. It was a beautiful sight, with intelligent mowing having taken place to allow the chalk downland of the churchyard to grow into a rich and healthy sward. #NoMowMay indeed. One unlikely advocate of this excellent initiative is the former footballer and now pundit, Chris Sutton. Sutton regularly makes the case for bee conservation while barracking his co-host Robbie Savage on BBC Radio 5Live’s football phone-in. Well in, lad.

Back in the churchyard, the grasslands were full with oxeye daisies and that downland favourite, yellow rattle.

I entered into the church and took a break from the sun. I love the cool air and quiet of churches, of which the South Downs is spoilt in terms of the sheer number of them. Now, I am not a practicing religious person of any recognised faith, my cathedrals are usually either tree or hill-shaped, but I did ask for my pathetic football team to be spared while sitting on the pew (I also donated to support the church’s eye-watering running costs).

Some hours later, having hammered out 6 miles on the Downs and rushed back to catch the train to listen to the second half at home, Everton survived.

1994, 1998, 2023. Please, just not next year.

Thanks for reading.

The South Downs

Photography: Evening meadows

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Evening meadows

Evening meadows, Farthing Downs, London, June 2015

It’s that time of year when the meadows are reaching their height. Here you can see the yellow rattle in flower, soon field scabious will appear to be fed on by burnet moths and bumblebees.

Please click through for more of my pictures of Farthing Downs on Flickr

The dead and the living are mingling on the Downs

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Thistle

– Farthing Downs and New Hill, London, September 2012

The living and the dead mingle on the Downs this morning. Meadow brown butterflies kick up from the ruins of grassy tussocks and rusting bramble. They are as shed leaves moved by an autumnal breeze. Brown and orange, one white dot in their black eyespots, they sit in the tops of young, dwarfish oaks, or else are lost to the souring land. Workers have opened up more grassland with chainsaws and fire, stumps of ash are torn and splintered – a battle has taken place here. Jackdaws survey the new clearings, and the old ones, too, a strange officialdom about them, their calls back and forth, scathing blue-grey eye – are they coroners or corvids? This is their work, the image fits.

The yellow rattle has mostly turned, the wind pushing across the road and down the slope. But there isn’t the sound this parasitic plant is named for. There’s the drone of a biplane, probably from Kenley, there’s the teasing whir of a bicycle passing along the cutting, the sound of aging leaves stirring, sycamore yellowed by the changing season. Scabiouses and hawk’s-bits add punctuations of colour to the mushroom-drab Downs, the grey Sunday sky burnt by sun, puddles of blue appearing. In the long grass crickets click like a machine shutting down, the dead and the living mingling on the Downs.