Devonshire's East Devon digital magazine November December 2018

In association with the HOME DESIGN YEARBOOK
A point of view!
Nelson’s Column
by JOHN FISHER
kicking our way through drifts of leaves
in reds, yellows, oranges, golds and browns
this autumn instead we seem to enjoying
a surplus of, well - a surplus of just plain,
common or garden browns.
And it’s all down to our
deciduous trees and
shrubs having been
seriously dehydrated
this summer, the RHS
tells us. That lack of
moisture has starved
leaves of a number
of essential sugars
because trees have
been unable to build
up their reservoirs of these sugars that are
needed to trigger colour changes.
“Autumn is a second Spring
when every leaf becomes a flower!”
BEAUTIFULLY PUT, by one Albert Camus*,
the French philosopher, author, and Nobel
Prize Winner for Literature, who clearly
had never experienced the kind of hot, dry
summer we experienced in Devon this year.
Whilst we could normally expect to be
*Not to put the poet in Albert Camus down,
we should add in his defence that he was
born, raised and studied in Algiers and may
not have experienced an Autumn amongst
deciduous trees until he lived in Paris in his
early 20s and came up with that very pleasing
line in our headline.
A storm named Kevin?
EVERY STORM NOW HAS A NAME - and no
bad thing because it increases our awareness
of these weather extremes the Met Office
informs us. But some sound stormier than
others, do they not?
A storm called Ragnar for example (we made
that one up) sounds much more threatening,
surely, than one called Kevin, which we did
not make up.
The complete list of storm names for 2018-
2019 issued jointly by the Met Office and Met
Eirean reads as follows: Ali, Bronagh, Callum,
Deirdre, Erik, Freya, Gareth, Hannah, Idris,
Jane, Kevin (we told you), Lily, Max, Niamh,
Oliver, Peggy, Ross, Saoirse, Tristan, Violet
and Wyn.
If some of those names sound a tad unfamiliar
(or even unpronounceable) it is because the
list has been compiled from suggestions by
members of the public, with the weather
experts selecting the names “that reflect
the nations’ culture and diversity of both
the UK and Eire”.
To save you looking it up, Saoirse is
pronounced, Seer-sha or Ser-sha.
All our yesterdays
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND is the title of a
new book written by Rivers Carew, the last of
the Carew baronets to have lived at Haccombe,
the family seat in East Devon and spanning
some 30 generations from 1086-1945.
And if that sounds like some kind of history
book that might be a little musty after one
thousand years in the telling, think on.
The book will have wide appeal, especially
to Devonians, old and new, because it also
reflects the rich social history of county life
as it does this remarkable family. how they
lived, loved and died.
Sir George Carew went down with his ship,
The Mary Rose and Thomas Carew was a
famed Cavalier poet and the family even has
links to Christopher Columbus.
Footprints in the sand
ISBN 978-1-9998074-4-3
is published by DuBois
Publishing, Cambridge in
hardback and paperback.
An e-book version is also
available on Amazon
Kindle .
Author, poet, journalist, broadcaster,
historian and storyteller, Sir Rivers Carew.
by JOHN FISHER
75