Hazel

I left it a bit late to take a photo. The catkins on one of the small coppiced hazels in the garden are looking great at the moment.

I spent a good part of the day reading about the British and French armies' doomed attempt to wrest Norway back from the Nazis in 1940. A lot of the fighting centred around Narvik, in the Arctic Circle, that is the ice-free winter port for the rich iron ore from Sweden's Kiruna and Gällivare iron ore mines.

At one point during a hasty retreat to the south of Narvik British troops thought they were under gas attack from the advancing German column. The yellow smoke they saw was in fact pollen blowing out of the birch forests.

Narvik was taken from the Germans on 24th May 1940 and evacuated on 8th June 1940 as the focus of the war shifted to the defence of the UK from German invasion after the Dunkirk withdrawal and the fall of France.

The book I was reading was Churchill and the Norway Campaign 1940.
I also have an interesting 1959 account by a destroyer commander, Captain Donald Macintyre, that I shall take with us to Scotland. This was a splendid gift from The Birchingtons-Sur-Mer.