A variety of short writings by Patrick Roper, an author who now lives in East Sussex, UK
7th November 2025. In spring Sammy was dividing up some plants of flowers currant and I took one piece to turn into a container grown, single stem cordon. It has settled down well and now it is putting out small new shoots and buds some of which may turn into early spring flowers. Pruning is best done after flowering and I shall look forward to that if I can get to the plant. Pruning and training…
1974 Age 35/36. My team at the English Tourist Board consisted of Bill Richards, Caroline Gillies, Jean Ashton, Pauline Martin, Jean Cuthbertson and Michael Dewing. This year I wrote a little booklet called The Mini-conference Market about, believe it ornot, mini-conferences at hotels. I think I also started the survey of the Wild Service Tree following a Botanical Society of the British Isles…
These notes were written fifty years ago and are my particularly significant as the ye@r our son Charles (Dobby) was born. 1975 Age 36/37 - from my notes. Early in 1975 we saw our old friend John Newbery, now living (rather unhappily we felt)in Bull Cottage, Battle. He had had a series of strange misfortunes. On one occasion he had been standing in front of a log fire when their had been a loud…
4 November 2025. I have been going back over some of my old notes that I discovered after thinking they had been lost in cyberspace. They stretch back over 70 years and my challenge is how to annotate and present them. Some of the better standalone essays have been copied to my website: www.patrickroper.co.uk
My daughter has put a pot of tulips by our front path to welcome visitors. Tulips grow wild mostly in the Middle East and as garden plants they became popular in Turkey before travelling across Europe to The Netherlands and other countries. In Turkey tulips have a spiritual significance as the letters of their Turkish word for the flower are the same as those in one of the names of Allah. The…
This mouse lives under a cupboard in our front room. He, or she, appears to be a hermit mouse and only ever appears alone. I give it bits of bread crust but it remains unfriendly. it reminds me of that lovely, 9th C Old Irish poem Pangur Ban about the stand-off between a medieval cleric and his eponymous cat. I have adjusted one of the verses to apply to me and the mouse, Luch Beag (Irish for…
A visit to Canada, 2nd to 10th November 1984 Patrick Roper revised 21st September 2013 and 30 th December 2023. In late October 1984 I flew to Toronto in Canada for an Association of British Travel Agents annual conference. I also took a few days holiday with my Canadian relatives in Ottawa. The long, dull flight across the Atlantic was alleviated by a large group of First Nation people…
Calderdale, Yorkshire. 22 and 23 August 1984, revised 2023. Patrick Roper (December 2023) In 1985 I started a series of visits to Calderdale in West Yorkshire. They were to help the local authority, Calderdale Council, develop a tourism strategy for the area. Perceptive readers might notice that I have a particular interest in food and drink. That’s partly because I was also in charge of the…
Remi’s helping hand Patrick Roper, 7 December 2023. We arrived back from the hospital in Hastings and Sammy, my granddaughter, parked her black VW car in the parking space at the front of the house. It was wet, there had been much rain, and shallow puddles spread over the greyish brown grit among the sparse flora that had managed to grow there : pineapple weed, smooth hawksbeard and annual meadow…
The Isle of Wight and south Hants in June 1984, revised 2023 Patrick Roper, 20 June 1984. I took the car by ferry from Portsmouth to Fishbourne then drove round the back of Ryde to Bembridge, stopping on the way at a curious sandy peninsula of scrub owned by the National Trust and called The Duver on the north side of Brading Haven. It Looked worthy of brief exploration in the future, but I have…
A tour of the Midlands in May 1984 2 May 1984 Drove from Sedlescombe to Stoke via the M25 and A5 for the Great British Holiday Exhibition. Took a walk in Wicken Wood in Northamptonshire, now Forestry Commission but part of the old Whittlewood Forest. Just over the county boundary to the east in Buckinghamshire there is an adjoining natural area, Leckhampstead Wood, which I also visited: mostly…