Meet the neighbours

Warning: Nothing to do with boats or canals but interesting(I hope) all the same.  After all, it does concern a fox cohabiting with a privy councillor.

Well it's been a lovely afternoon so I thought I'd drop in to see how the neighbours were doing.  Despite our home being a humble modernish semi, we do have some very illustrious neighbours, among them an editor of The Times newspaper, a couple of baronets, a famous polar explorer, a couple of privy councillors, and a  former federal Secretary of the Federal Malay States.  They must have been gutted when rabble like us  moved in next door, but they clung on to their patch and they are still there. It wasn't hard to maintain social distancing because they are all at least six feet under.

Here, let me introduce you to a couple:

A not very legible tombstone of John Thadeus Delane,  Editor of The Times for 36 years in the 19th century,  Apparently after a tip off by Lord Aberdeen he was the first person to leak the information that the government was planning to repeal the corn laws thus setting a very large cat amongst the pigeons.  Delane was also a great supporter of Florence Nightingale and was influential in helping her to raise money for her work.  I'm happy to have him as a neighbour.  If he was alive today, he might have been campaigning for more PPE for nurses.

Here's the Rt Hon Sir William Goodenough Hayter  Bart, MP. Privy councillor etc.  - Good enough for me anyway, and he was twice Liberal Government Chief Whip.  Amazingly I discovered today that you can get his portrait as a jigsaw puzzle, so he's persona grata I guess.

 I don't think I'll bother to buy one though at £23 plus postage.

Our favourite neighbour, and only ten feet or so beyond our garden hedge is Major Frederick George Jackson, the celebrated polar explorer who like most of the others has his own Wikipedia page.



What a sweetie.  Who wouldn't want him as a neighbour? Here's his stone -

and he has a nice little footnote, well a note at his feet at any rate:

Isn't that nice?

Undoing a couple of panel screws in our garden fence and ducking under a bush brings us out here.

right at the back of the picture by that furthest gravestone, and there's Jackson's  grave nicely picked out in the sunlight.

It's a lovely extension to our back garden,  the first thing we see when emerging is this

I get a view of that path from where I'm sitting in the spare bedroom now, here, look,

 you can see the bit of fence where we sneak through (screwed down tight when we're not here) and of course the neighbours are very quiet.

Now here's a thing - what do you reckon is going on here?

That hole under the tombstone of The Right Hon Lord Arthur W Hill - MP for County Down, privy councillor and prominent Orangeman.



 (What the hell is he doing buried in Berkshire?  I don't like the cut of his jib somehow. He looks typical Orangeman of the worst kind) Anyway back to the hole under the stone. Could that be where our fox has been living?  At first I thought it would be distressing to have your grave shared with a fox, but on second thoughts I rather like the idea.  Lucky Lord Arthur.

It's a bit of a surprise to have so many VIPs in such a small churchyard, but there are one or two old mansions within the parish, so I guess that's it.  These days the mansions belong to institutions of one sort or another.

The graveyard no longer accepts new occupants ( a pity really because when I pop my clogs, the family could just chuck me over the hedge) and is maintained as a small nature reserve now.  At the moment there are a lot of bluebells out there.  Now I'm used to seeing a few white ones among the blue, but here we also have pink ones.  I can't recall seeing them before.

Well that's another lock down afternoon wasted.  I hope you are wasting yours in equally pleasant ways.

Take care.