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Perspective

The First Snow Drops- My True Love 

By Ida Bridgeman

I saw the first signs of spring one week, snow drops had opened. In the quiet of the early morning, glowing sky, and the river running strong with February rain, I walked past them on the banks – had they opened earlier? Had I not noticed? Some glimmer of hope and joy sparked inside of me, not that I wasn’t joyous before I saw them, but in that way your heart skips when you notice some small details of the beauty of the world. A Moldovan legend recalls a battle between Lady Spring and Winter Witch; Lady Spring pricked her finger and the snow beneath it melted and created a gentle snowdrop flower. This announced her reign over the world. People don’t plant snow drops in the way a rose garden is cultivated and shown off for the brightest colours, this is an unexpected and unprepared beauty. There are, of course, other flowers that bloom in winter but these are sturdy, and shrub like and dull the senses as we huddle down the path turning our face from wind and rain. These white drops form out of the scruff of a woodland floor and on road sides, they placed themselves into my sight at exactly the time they felt like it, prompted by some unknown feeling in the air that it was time for an introduction to spring.   

 It’s easy not to notice something has been absent until it appears again, a year after they were last here, so quiet and delicate aside the rushing of the river. The symbolism is blatant – new beginnings, hope, rebirth, perhaps the intricacy of creation and the delicacy of life. Plants have all sorts of funny meanings. Rosemary is for remembrance, buttercups can read your likes and dislikes and OH, the roses on Valentines. When did flowers become a symbol of love? Is it depressing that they die or a reminder of the fleeting nature of the everyday and the necessity to take in the colours and the scent whilst they are there? As for love, we look back to Greek mythology where the Goddess Aphrodite’s beauty was so great that red roses sprang up wherever she walked and became a symbol of love and desire, given in romantic gestures. 14 February involves less Greek Goddesses and more hopeful gents, on every turn of a Durham street, bouquet in hand ready to profess their admiration to their current sweetheart – same one as last year? Does it matter? Sorry, I’m not a sceptic of the validity of valentine’s love, I am merely pointing out the inevitability that each year, whilst the snow drops appearance is joyously unpredictable, the market square Tesco’s flower delivery on 13th Feb is reassuringly inevitable. Much like Xanthe’s ‘three different types of cookie dough spread’ found on one shelf before pancake day. (‘A MODERN DAY LENT’, published Feb 22)  

There’s this desire in our human psyche to know, name and order everything. When I was young, my mother spent much of her gardening time returning to the house to quiz us on the colourful, sneeze inducing (ironic that a love of flowers is accompanied by hay fever) blossoms and buds. When we went away to school and university this game moved online until my brother discovered the ‘Picture This’ plant identifier app and the integrity of the quiz was at a loss. We were then expected to insert the appropriate ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and ‘how lovely’ at pictures of colourful plants. I hope we can still appreciate them as much without knowing the Latin conjugations of a tulip.  

 I’ve spent summers days happiest filling my hair with flowers and sliding one through a button hole of anyone around me that will stay still for a patient second, whilst Van Gogh painted his Irises in the Saint- Rémy psychiatric hospital as an outlet, his way to avoid going mad. I think what gets me about February’s first snow drops is their delicacy. In most folk narratives their appearance has strong notions of death, the white petals like a corpse’s shroud, their drooping head sombre. They grow close to the ground, where the dead sleep, and they thrive in quite graveyards. Yet in the story of Persephone, the goddess of both underworld and of vegetation, she carries snowdrops to earth when she is allowed from Hades in spring. The flowers may have an appearance that nods towards death, but they bring the first signs of life to a wintry earth, a spark of warmth and excitement, a feeling somewhat like love itself, on that February morning.

By the time I am publishing this, however, time has moved on, as it so inevitably does in this fleeting space; no matter what moment, or which season you prefer, none can last long. The snow drops are passing, the door has been opened for the bluebells and daffodils, the real flowers of spring that grace Easter time in their bright yellow glory. That small moment of joy at Persephone’s bringing of spring has dissipated now, overtaken by other beauties in the world. I am sure I shall find the first snow drops in some other place, at another time next year, I hope.

Categories
Culture

‘Eat my rust’ – 4 boys plan to take on the world’s greatest road rally adventure

By Ida Bridgeman.

‘A third of the way around the planet in a vehicle you swapped for a bag of crisps…Welcome to the World’s Greatest Road Trip.’ This is how the Mongol Rally introduces itself. I spent a snowy March evening nestled away in the corner of the Swan and Three Cygnets pub, hearing about the plans of four young men with a serious mission ahead of them. They plan to take on the Mongol Rally 2023, a road race from England to Mongolia in which they are given next to no guidance or help. The organisers of this event say that their ‘only job is to tell you where the finish line is and wait for you to turn up a battered but better person’. 

As all good stories do, Charlie starts his with ‘We were in the pub one day…’. Having met in the early weeks of their first term at Durham University, the four young men proceeded to, as is now a regular occurrence, chat the night away with tales of stupidity and plans of adventure. When given too much free time and a couple of pints, they have a habit of ‘coming up with dumb ideas’. Charlie in wistful reminiscence tells me that ‘we were going to sail a bathtub across the English Channel’, but then, in reflection he adds ‘you forget about the choppiness’, followed by ‘and bathtubs aren’t particularly stable’ (Not quite a sieve, but something of that Edward Lear poem ‘The Jumblies’ springs to mind). Unlike the failed bathtub race though, the Mongol Rally actually exists, as does the boys desire to partake in it, and so they shook hands and were set. 

The trip has been branded ‘Tour 4 MMM’. They proudly regard it as ‘a very clever multi-layered name’. Four young men, raising money for the charity Men’s Minds Matter, by touring across Europe and Asia in a rattling tin can. Their slogan? – ‘Eat my rust’. It’s a tacit nod to the boys’ style: speed is necessary at all costs, and a little rust never hurts. Or does it? I’m not entirely convinced by the quality of mechanics skills on hand. Fortunately, ‘Ralph studies engineering’. This reassuring statement seems to be their answer to any mechanical mishaps they might encounter along the way. 

Friends of the boys thought it was a ‘pipedream’ until ‘Nina’ showed up in Durham. The love these four have for one car could quite frankly compete with any Hollywood meet cute. Think love at first sight but the car dealer version. Ralph found it on Ebay, and Archie and Charlie went to check it out in some slightly dodgy looking industrial estate. They spoke to ‘a proper wheeler dealer’, with an earpiece in and a supposed long list of clients desperate to buy the car if these boys didn’t. One test drive alongside some haggling and it was a done deal, that was their car. ‘It’s the look we’re going for’ is the fond way they describe the rusted top, jammed close sunroof and awkwardly square bonnet of the tiny Nissan Micra. They were hooked. And the next week ‘Nina’ (the name taken from a sort of anagram of Nissan) arrived. 

The role of securing sponsorship and heading the campaign is given to Archie aka ‘Mr corporate chat’ himself. He is also head navigator because, unfortunately at 20 years old, he still can’t drive. A skill one might think useful for a multi-week road trip. This did not seem to faze the boys; they are convinced he will learn before the summer – nothing will deter this team. I asked who would be the man to get them out of a sticky situation and Archie is their answer – at least he can talk if he can’t drive.

George, head of socials and marketing, has big plans for spreading their story, aiming for 1,000  Instagram followers by next term. The Instagram page in question is a combination of amusing stories and serious content, ‘come on boys take this seriously we need a picture for our corporate post’ we were told on the photoshoot. It was hard to balance that with George’s insistence on ‘more sex appeal’, if we’re going to look like a boy band (as a passer-by suggested them to be) we want more Oasis and less Blur. 

Charlie is ‘Head of finance’ or so they say – Archie usually chips in before a heated debate ensues regarding who best lives up to their roles. They meet in the Swan to discuss plans, a pub where electronics are banned and storytelling encouraged, an environment fitting for the remote nature of their upcoming mission. When I asked the location that they are most looking forward to travelling in, Ralph suggests anywhere remote, ‘when the road goes from tarmac to dust, then we’re getting serious’.

‘What’s going to be your go-to meal?’ I tentatively asked. Archie’s face lit up as he explained that he is in the process of gaining sponsorship from MRE empire, an army rations company. Quite a pragmatic answer to the pertinent issue of eating during the trip. The same couldn’t be said for George’s insistence on bringing ‘one of those blow-up mattress things’ along with him for five weeks in a car that barely seemed big enough for themselves. Another sponsor that Archie has worked hard to secure is ‘Fuel the Adventure’, providing the boys with iconic jerry-can shaped electrical power banks. CEO Barry Jenkins described the boys as ‘4 lunatics’ but has said in a comment ‘I am delighted to be supporting such a worthy cause as they fuel their adventure for MMM’. Then, George piped up with ‘do you want a joke for your article?’:

‘Who can drink 20 litres of petrol?

Jerry can.’

(There we go George, joke included)

I inquired, in true Desert Island Discs fashion, what luxury items they would be taking – they will be camping and roughing it with the bare minimum of luggage. Ralph initially said a pillow, which they all agreed was a necessity, before settling for loo roll. In my opinion loo roll is a given – but there you go. Archie picked a satellite radio so he can listen to football – the language barrier won’t be an issue he insists, ‘I could be listening to it in German, you can still understand ‘1-0’. 

Charlie contributed with ‘I’m a pretty simple man I don’t really need any luxuries in life’ and mentioned something about maybe a pot of olives. In the meantime, George, as a diligent PPE student, has decided he will bring a book or two to enrich himself along the way; he’s recently been reading Hawking’s ‘The Theory of Everything’. He reckons he’s cracked physics, now I wonder if he should move to a car manual. 

Loud would be an understatement when describing these four. I overheard someone put to them the question of whether they might run out of conversation. My opinion? No chance. The only silence will be when they have a hugely over-dramatic argument over who messed up the cable ties that were holding the wing mirror together. Not unlikely given it fell off during a drive to the coast. I asked if they think it will fall out and the responses were mixed. Let’s hope the team doesn’t implode from within like a supernova surpassing Chandrasekhar’s limit, but only time will tell. This phenomenon (dredged from my non-existent knowledge of physics) happens when a star’s core surpasses a certain mass, which leaves me wondering what the mass limit is for a Nissan Micra to carry four blokes, an armfuls of army rations, George’s blow-up mattress, a slab of hopefully correct visa paperwork, and a couple of tinnys thrown in for those not driving (so Archie all the time at this rate). 
The Mongol rally organisers give some helpful words which I think are quite fitting: ‘if the sky falls on your head, prop it up with a stick and carry on. If you break down, find a way to fix it, buy a horse or start walking’. Our interview ended with imaginary maps being drawn in the air, and across the pub table, the words border crossing, getting lost, and avoid war zones blended into the general evening buzz.