Daffodils and Honey

There are more birds every day, it seems. Buzzards, ravens, rooks, garden birds. I have become obsessed with rooks after reading Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country' and wonder where they go when they fly over; from feeding to roost, to preparing the rookery again? Amazing that a book can shift your perception of the natural world. A robin ventured into the kitchen as we were talking in the garden, looking for crumbs.

In the last of the light we drove over the hill to Pembridge, the nearest of the half-timbered 'black and white villages' for which Herefordshire is famous. This side of the hill is less glamorous, more workaday; the black and white is buried beneath Victorian brick. On the way we drove past a grubbed-up orchard, a strange sight in this apple-growing area; the trees lay flattened, as if astonished. It was rare to see such violence, but the trees must have been diseased. We love the trees, the wildlife, the sense of space, but every inch of this countryside has to turn a profit.

Pembridge has some very old buildings. The New Inn was built in the 1300s and many of the houses on the long main street were built between the 1300s and the 1500s, and a dendrochronology team from Sheffield University was able to not only date house construction to the year but also to the season; the late summer of 1490, the spring of 1535. But what I like about Pembridge is that it is not pretty; the houses are black and white, but they bulge into the street, overpowering the pavement, leaning against each other, with a mad unstable roofline making an uneven terrace of black beams and white walls a mile long. And at one time all cities in the country looked like this. We were in Pembridge to go shopping, as I buy my honey from the last cottage in the village. The bees are kept in the field behind the house and the honey is marketed through a collective of beekeepers. It is very good honey and I like buying locally and from a cottage which has a proper ding-dong bell on a handle, a glimpsed living room around an old fireplace, comfortable and homely.

Home through the lanes to Stansbatch on the other side of the hill from us, where there is a tiny plant nursery which has a stall on the road; an old market barrow with wooden wheels and a striped awning, selling bunches of flowers and tiny things in pots. Today they had bunches of daffodils for 50p, grown on site, so the kitchen has vases of opening daffodils all over the place.