I was up with the lark this morning, taking Lyra on a walk to the river.
Turtle Bridge over the River Welland is a favourite spot and our early rise was rewarded with a golden sunrise.
Chaffinch, song thrush and a cuckoo, the first I’ve heard this year, heralded our wander down the old way into the valley.
By the bridge Lyra sniffed around the stone footings as I watched sunlight sparkle on the water, projecting shimmering reflections onto the underside of the arches.
There’s been a bridge here since at least the 14th century. The crushed cans of Stella Artois and discarded Greggs paper bag probably date to last night. Lyra sniffs a half-eaten pasty, thinks about it, then trots on.
When the weather warms up, we’re drawn to water.
We have a few preferred places along the Welland. The bridge between Wakerley and Barrowden was a regular picnic spot when the children were smaller.
On summer days we’d come and spend the afternoon on the wide grassy bank, the children paddling, poking around with rockpool nets and swimming in the river where it was deep enough. We’d tell them not to put their heads under the surface.
I would quite happily just sit in the river, up to my shoulders in water, feeling the soft current brush around outstretched arms.
A mile or two downstream there’s a secret spot, a place of Arcadian day dreams, just off the footpath.
We picnicked there once, one long summer evening. Mrs F and daughter spent their time drawing and painting, I read a book, while the boys waded waste deep looking for fish. Overhanging trees cooled us from the intense heat.
As the world continues to warm – the last eight years have been the warmest on record – and extreme weather events intensify, the critical importance of water will become ever more evident. Wars will be fought over it and water will be weaponised. Think Ukraine.
The irony of living in Rutland, England’s smallest county, is that we have the nation’s largest reservoir. Small county, big pond, you might say. There’s plenty of water.
But are we good custodians of this precious resource? Absolutely not.
Through appalling policy decisions and a lack of government oversight, we have allowed private water companies to spill sewage into our rivers and wreak environmental catastrophe.
Last year, there were more than 800 sewage spills a day in the UK.
Only 16% of waterways reach the benchmark of “good ecological status” in this country.
Now, the private water companies have apologised and say they will spend an extra £10 billion over the next seven years to reduce pollution.
You’d think that investment would come from the highly profitable companies themselves. Apparently not. We’re told we, the “customer”, will be paying for this.
Is this because the cash has dried up, after all the dividends flowed overseas?
Unlike virtually every other nation of the world, we don’t own our own water because we privatised the system. England, Wales, Chile and a few cities in the United States have the only fully privatised water systems in the world.
Here in Rutland, Anglian Water is ‘our’ water company. Except that it is 85% overseas owned, including a significant stake held by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
According to a report in The Times (May 18, 2023), Anglian Water is the worst performing water company when it comes to serious incidents, 14 in 2021. It is ranked 2-star in the EPA performance rank, meaning it is a “below average company”.
Earlier this year it was fined £560,000 after discharging six million litres of raw sewage for 23 hours into a river in neighbouring Northamptonshire killing 5,000 fish.
According to The Times and its Clean It Up campaign, Anglian Water has annual revenues of £1.3 billion. Its CEO, Peter Simpson, has a pay package worth £1.3 million (The Times, February 12, 2023).
How on earth can that be right?
The answer is, it’s not.
Of course, the water companies want us to think they are good environmental custodians.
Type in ‘Anglian Water Pollution’ into Google and you’ll find that thanks to some clever digital marketing there are lots of links to the company’s website about all the good things they are doing. Negative news stories appear to have been pressure-washed away.
Let’s hope the water companies really do clean up their act – and our rivers.
In an already nature-depleted country, we cannot afford to damage our source of life.
Pond Life
We have a small pond in our garden, but it’s remarkable what an important resource it is, especially for the birds.
Yesterday, we watched a female blackbird drinking and bathing on the rocks at the water’s edge for two or three minutes. I wondered if it was one of the pair that is nesting in the wisteria below my bedroom window and who are flying in and out constantly to feed their chicks.
She looked so content, splashing water over herself, bathing, cleaning, a few precious minutes away from the kids.
A flock of 10 goldfinches were also drinking and messing around yesterday afternoon, scattering into the apple tree when I inadvertently disturbed them. What a lovely chattering-chirruping sound they make.
Earlier in the week, I watched a song thrush smashing snail shells on the rocks. A garden soprano, head banging to rock music, I thought to myself.
It’s a hub of activity, our little pond.
The Gospel of the Eels
Thinking about the Welland, the river flows east from Rutland to Stamford, Lincolnshire, and then beyond into the Fens, draining into The Wash on the east coast of England.
In the curious flatlands of the Fens, marshland drained in the 17th century by Dutch engineers, eel was a ubiquitous source of food for centuries.
Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, set in the Fens, employs the eel as a motif throughout this remarkable, wide-sweeping story.
Not only is eel hardly eaten these days, it is no longer common in our rivers.
This week I’ve read The Gospel of the Eels: A Father, a Son and the World's Most Enigmatic Fish by Patrik Svensson.
Part memoir, part natural history, it is an extraordinary, engrossing book.
Set against the backdrop of Svensson’s childhood catching eels with his father in a stream by their home in southern Sweden, it tells the story of the eel and how scientists have struggled to understand its migration and lifecycle. Svensson writes:
“The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even today. What we do know is that it's born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the coasts of Europe - a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It lives a solitary life, hiding from both light and science, for ten, twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn, morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.
“And yet ... There is still so much we don't know about eels. No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the eel's metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And now the eel is disappearing, and we don't know exactly why.”
It’s fair to say, you don’t have to have an interest in eels to find this philosophical book utterly fascinating.
River Man