Letter from the Vicar

During this Lent, local churches have been meeting weekly to think about the importance of Belonging. We have used the recent Stephen Spielberg remake of West Side Story to help focus our minds.

It is a challenging story of two rival gangs, the Jets are native New Yorkers, the Sharks recent arrivals from Puerto Rico. In the midst of conflict there is an unlikely tale of two young people from rival gangs falling in love, & trying to plan some kind of escape, to a place where they can be together without the gang pressure. Of course, it ends tragically, with the death of Tony, & Maria discovering that deep love can lead to deep hate. If we are not careful our ‘belonging’ to one group can mean that we reject all those who are not part of our ‘gang’.

As we celebrate Easter this year, the theme of belonging is an important one. For the first disciples, belonging to & following Jesus during his life & ministry was certainly challenging. And then even among this group we are witness to a great betrayal. After enjoying their Passover meal together on Maundy Thursday, Judas, one of those twelve, led the soldiers right to Jesus & identified him with that most intimate of weapons, a kiss.

Many of the disciple’s simply fled when Jesus was arrested. Peter denied ever knowing him & only a few remained to watch his crucifixion. Fear of facing the same fate meant many just disappeared, full of disappointment as the hopes & dreams they had invested in this man were shattered.

Belonging is great when the going is good, but can be hard when things turn ugly. But then the greatest miracle of all time occurred. Jesus rose from the dead. For Christian’s, after we have witnessed his death on Good Friday & after we have experienced the emptiness of Easter Saturday, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with great joy. And in this joy, we fully recognise the importance of our belonging to Jesus. After the resurrection Jesus appeared to the disciples & they belonged once again. This Easter why not pay a visit to your local church service, you will receive a warm welcome & you may find a new place to belong.

Wishing you all a very happy Easter!

Lynne

Bit of a change round at the front end of the magazine this month. The Coronation Celebrations have taken over pages 2 & 3 this month. Seems we were given ‘duff’ information previously on the proposed date for the Coronation Celebrations in the village. These will now take place on Saturday 6th June and not Monday 8th .

It seems our plea for additional advertisers has been successful. The Sports & Social Club have taken up 2 pages to re-launch the Club and list up-coming events. See pages 22 & 23 Plus a further page (page 21) with their Membership form. Please support them if you can.

In addition Piggott’ Butchers in Biggleswade will be taking a full page advert with effect from next month. I think they are going ‘Up-to-date’ with a QR code within their advert. We’ll see how we cope loading that into the magazine!!

Another ‘old friend’ SJ Tax & Accounting has returned, so if you need any help to make sure you are claiming all the tax allowance due to you, please contact them.

Friends of Cople Church following the success of the Safari Supper, are arranging a few more fund raising events following the success of the Safari Supper. See page 31 for more details.

We ran out of room this month, but look out for an article on Sheerhatch Rotakids ’Empowering Kids in Kenya’ in next months edition.

Regards

Libby & Linda

Roy Tombs funeral 30th March

The Friends of Cople Church would like to thank everyone who participated in the Safari Supper on Saturday 25th February. Fifty-five people traipsed around the village in fairly pleasant, dry weather for the time of year & all the feedback on the night & subsequently indicates a good time was had by all, & the event raised a little over £1,230.

We would like to thank all those who provided raffle prizes, desserts, or hosted a starter or a main course. Without hosts, the event simply could not take place, but everyone who came provided something for the evening. The biggest problem we had all evening was trying to get people to go home!

Our coffers are running very low at present, so we have several events planned to cater for different tastes, thus we have three dates for your diary: -

Saturday 22nd April 7:30 in the church – Music Bingo and Quizzes. See advert in this magazine.

Saturday 24th June, Barn Dance at Oak Farm. Details will be in the next edition of the Magazine.

Mid to Late July one Saturday evening – a farm walk hosted by Charlie Porter at Wood End farm. Details will be announced in a future edition of the Magazine. Miles Tetley

As of the 1st March, Spring is officially here, and things on the arable side of the farm are just starting to happen. As I have mentioned before, all our arable land was drilled last autumn, so we have no drilling to do this spring. The crops, Beans and Wheat have fared well, both having benefitted from the hard frosts that we have had this winter, which have killed off any frost susceptible weeds, fungal diseases and aphids that were around last autumn. The first job that needs to be done now is to give all the wheat crops a feed of Nitrogen (N) and Sulphur, the beans not needing any N as they make their own. This feeding is usually given in two applications, one in Feb/March, and the second in April, being split roughly 1/3 now and 2/3 later, when the crop is in its rapid growth stage and therefore needing most food. We use a liquid formulation which is applied by the same machine that applies the weedkillers and fungicides that the crop needs later on in the year.

Fertiliser can also be applied in a granular form, but this has its downsides. Firstly, if it doesn’t rain, like last year, the fertiliser just remains on top of the soil and hence is unavailable to the roots of the hungry crop, secondly, these granules have to be spread by a machine that throws them to the required width, which is not particularly accurate, and finally N pellets that are on the surface are more likely to lose some of their N to the atmosphere in the form of ammonia, which is a bad gas for global warming.

Our N will be applied by a machine with booms that are 40m wide, and the liquid N will trickle out of nozzles a foot apart directly onto the soil, where it will be rapidly absorbed and used by the plant.

The amount of N that we are allowed to apply per hectare is strictly controlled according to your estimated yields and the quality of wheat that you are hoping to produce. This ensures that by the end of the growing season all the N that you have applied has been used up by the crop and is therefore not at risk of ending up in the watercourse, and that I have not wasted money putting on fertiliser that the crop did not require.

Some years, if the crops are very patchy and uneven, we can vary the amount of N applied to different parts of a field according to what the crop actually needs in a particular area. This is done by using the satellite technology that is now available to us. The farm will have been scanned from above using Ultraviolet technology. The scanning will have identified the thickness of the crop below. This information will then be held in the spraying machine’s computer, and as the sprayer knows exactly where it is in the field, thanks to GPS technology, varying amounts of food can then be applied to the wheat crops, more being given to the thick parts and less to the thinner areas. You won’t be using less fertiliser; you will be putting it where it is most needed and will be used and not wasted.

Now is the time of year when we all become aware that the birds around us are bursting into song. The purpose of these songs that are normally sung by the male birds is twofold. Firstly, to announce your presence and to say look at me because I am very handsome and will make an excellent father for your babies, and the second is to tell any other male birds in the area that you are here so don’t mess with me or chat up the ladies around here, because this is my patch.

Identifying birds by their song is undoubtedly difficult, but it is not impossible to learn a few of the simple ones. Now is a good time to start as there are not too many singing yet. In a few weeks’ time, when all the migrants start to return from their winter quarters and begin to sing, it does become very hard to pick out individual songs from the cacophony that greets you as you step outside.

The Great tit that lives in all our gardens is one of the easiest songs to identify. Just two rhythmical cheeps repeated several times that can be rhymed with ‘Teacher Teacher’ or simply sound like a squeaky bike pump going ‘Squeechy Squeechy’. The Greenfinch is also easily identified as its song is a unique wheezy Zheeeow, Zheeeow.

Pigeons and doves are possibly the easiest to identify by sound. The big fat Wood Pigeon with the white patch on its neck repeatedly going Coo Coooo Coo,Coo Coo, the Collared dove with it’s black neck ring, going Coo Cooo Coo and the Stock Dove with its turquoise neck going Whooip Whooip Whooip

And finally, a song that is one of our most beautiful spring sounds is that of the Song Thrush. This song is a series of different phrases, each phrase being made up of three identical sounds. So it will be noise, noise, noise, gap, different noise, noise, noise, gap a different noise, noise, noise ….. On the farm we have a Song Thrush with a beautifully clear opening set of phrases that sounds like ‘Ricky, Ricky, Ricky’, followed by several different three sound phrases. I am told that it sounds just like Bianca from Eastenders shouting ‘Ricky Ricky Ricky’! This bird is now obviously known on the farm as the Ricky bird.

One bird that I really hope to hear this spring is that of the cuckoo. The classic bird song of my childhood, now sadly so rare. There is now an app available to download free called Merlin Bird ID. This app can identify a bird by its song and is quite amazing.