Free One for Sorrow by Chloe Rhodes

significant tree, especially to the Druids, who believed it had healing powers, and because the oak and the ash often grow side by side in woodland, getting the same amount of sunshine and rain, they made a very convenient weather forecasting kit. People believed that if the leaves of the ash tree unfurled before those of the oak, the summer would be rainy, if the oak came into leaf first the summer would be mostly dry.
    These days we use the snappier ‘Oak before ash, in for a splash, Ash before oak, in for a soak’ though no direct correlation has been found between rainfall and the order in which these trees come into leaf. We do now know though that the oak is sensitive to temperature and its leaves unfurl as the weather gets warmer, whereas the ash is light sensitive and its leaves open as the hours of daylight lengthen. In the last ten years, as global warming has produced warmer and warmer springs, the oak has beaten the ash in seven out of ten years.

Seagull, seagull, sit on the sand
    Seagull, seagull, sit on the sand,
    It’s never good weather when you’re
    on land.

    In traditional fishing communities, it is unlucky to kill a seagull because they are believed to embody the souls of drowned fishermen. As ‘soul birds’ they are said to have prophetic powers and since medieval times those whose lives were at the mercy of the sea would take whatever guidance from them that they could. In fair weather, seagulls usually stay in flight and if they need to rest they sleep on the water. In stormy weather, they find the gusts in the air and the choppy water make it more difficult to stay at sea and often head inland. The sight of a flock of seagulls huddled together on the ground would have been worrying for the families of fishermen who were already at sea and children would recite this rhyme in the hope of bringing better weather.
    These days though, seagulls can often be found inland for a different reason: food. Though historically their diet has been small fish, they are notorious for eating almost any kind of leftovers they can lay their beaks on and many now subsist almost entirely on the scraps they find at rubbish dumps and landfill sites, even in the finest weather.
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Beggars can’t be choosers
    When this phrase first came into use in the sixteenth century, begging was a very different business to the sort we’re used to today. The slow breakdown of the feudal system left many of the poorest tenant farmers dispossessed and towns and cities were inundated with poverty-stricken agricultural workers looking for food and shelter. The state did offer support for those who it determined had a valid reason for being unable to support themselves, but the rest were branded vagabonds and were looked down upon by the rest of society as idle and good for nothing.
    It was against the backdrop of this hard-line attitude that this proverb became established, and when it appeared in 1546 in Heywood’s Dialogue of Proverbs , it was recorded as:

    Folke saie alwaie, beggers shulde be no choosers.

    Subsequent collections usually had ‘must not’ – which places the emphasis firmly on the fact that beggars had no option. It meant that if a beggar was offered work or lodgings, perhaps by the Church or a privately funded charity, they should accept with good grace and be glad of whatever they were given rather than making further demands.
    The first time ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’ was used in print seems to be in an American novel, Snatched from the poor-house: a young girl’s life history by N. J. Clodfelter, published in1888. Over time, and perhaps influenced by the twentieth century’s more sympathetic attitudes towards homelessness, this version has taken over, and we now most often use the phrase when describing a decision of our own to take whatever we can get if there’s something we