Draft complaints composed in a shed, with one bee, one heifer and no reply from the committee.
UTRECHT, Netherlands – It has rained since breakfast, so I have retired to the shed on my allotment with a flask, a kettle that is not allowed and a pen, to compose the letter I have been composing in my head since spring.
The Shed, Early Afternoon
The shed measures two metres by two and a half, and holds a deckchair, forty-one flowerpots, a radio that receives one station and a calendar of Dutch dairy cattle that I did not buy. The rain on the roof is the sound of every Dutch autumn: not loud, but unwilling to stop.
My plot is number 63. Beyond my fence lies number 64, which belongs to Piet, who has never been seen to plant anything and who has built a wall of pallets, in my professional opinion, for the sole purpose of annoying a naturalist. Beyond that lies a field of heifers, and beyond them the polder, the flat green sheet on which this country has quietly bet its whole existence.
The Letter, First Draft
To the Allotment Committee. I write regarding the bee hotel.
The bee hotel is a wooden box the size of a bread bin, filled with hollow stems and mounted on a post by my compost heap. It is occupied. I have counted nine residents this season, mostly red mason bees and one small and rather private leafcutter, and they pay no rent. It is the finest building on the site. Last Thursday, a member of the committee described it as “an unlicensed structure”.
I would like it recorded that a bee hotel does not require a licence, a planning meeting or a stamp. It requires only that no one hits it with a rake.
I put the pen down there. It is a good letter, but I know from experience that the committee reads only the first paragraph and the biscuits.
Tea with Mevrouw Kooiman
At three the rain eased, and Mevrouw Kooiman from plot 59 put her head through the door of the shed. She is seventy-four, grows a kind of leek that wins things and speaks to bees as to colleagues. She brought a slice of cake and an article on her telephone.
It was from Mongabay, about the women keeping Uttarakhand’s native bees alive. We read it in the shed with the door open, a Dutch pensioner and a Dutch naturalist drinking tea and learning from women in the Indian Himalaya who are looking after bees properly, which is more than our committee can say for its own. Mevrouw Kooiman said she felt a kinship. I said I felt a rebuke.
The same site carried a headline that I copied into the margin of my notebook: conservation is bringing species back, and governments must help those gains last. It is the fear of every volunteer. You spend years on the nest boxes and the ponds and the hedge, the lapwings return, the otter turns up like a rumour in a ditch, and then someone in an office decides the budget line has run its course.
Mevrouw Kooiman said that governments are like cows: they must be led towards the water and then watched very closely. Neither of us could improve on it.
The Cattle Page
While she finished the cake we looked over the fence at the heifers, who looked back at us with the placid contempt of a creature that has never read a budget. This reminded her of a farm.fm piece headlined a dairy heifer now costs more than a car, and the loan officer still wants 20 percent down. She had thought, she said, of the heifers in the field behind us as livestock. After the headline she thought of them as vehicles.
I looked at the nearest heifer. She was, to be fair, parked with great confidence.
Mevrouw Kooiman had also printed out, in her thorough way, a primer on Cockney rhyming slang from the Prat, because she likes to know what the English are saying about her leeks. I learned that “bees and honey” means money, which seemed to me the single most useful fact of the afternoon, since both are exactly what this allotment lacks.
The Ice, Before Dusk
As the light went, I read the one story I had been putting off. Greenpeace International had issued a statement headed a UN warning on accelerating ice sheet loss must be a call to action. It is the sort of sentence that looks small on a screen and large in a country where roughly a quarter of the land sits below sea level and nobody has yet suggested we simply move.
I looked at the polder, which was grey and calm and several metres lower than the canal. Everything we own is held in place by dikes, pumps, water boards and a polite agreement to keep believing in them. I do not say this to alarm anyone. I say it because it makes a bee hotel look like a very modest request.
Back at the flat I opened The London Prat, as I do when the national mood is wet, and followed a thread through the British news column until the kettle spoke up. The paper reads very differently in a country where you can see the sea level from your bicycle. Some of my longer notes live with my other diary entries at The London Prat, and tonight’s rain has earned a place there.
The letter remains unsent. Number 64 has installed a second pallet. The bees have gone indoors, and the hotel is, as ever, completely full.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/