New member of the Country Diary Team.
And now to introduce a new member of the Country Diary team, John Cummins, who, with his wife, Penny,  lives in Chidham Lane.
	John loves the natural world in all its manifestations, but perhaps birds are his favourite.  He grew up in Welwyn Garden City and was given freedom to roam from an early age;  he reckons it was that "running wild" as a boy, together with long country walks with his father, which gave him his enthusiasm for wildlife and the countryside. He came to Havant as a GP and lived in Westbourne for many years, where his children, in their turn, had a "Swallows and Amazons"-style childhood, in woodlands and by the harbour.  John wrote regularly for the Westbourne Village Magazine. Keep a look out for John's first article, about water voles, which will be posted up in "Country Diary" shortly!
Here he is with his black labrador, Scipio  (over 11 years old now, but still fit and energetic).
And just a snippet of Chidham history - the house that John now lives in used to be called "Sunnyside".  Alf and Violet Lloyd lived there for some years with relatives after their bungalow, built under the seabank at Cobnor, was flooded out and condemned.  I used to visit them and sit in the gathering gloom in their sittingroom, drinking barley wine, until it was pitch dark, when the low-wattage light would be turned on.  Annie would tell me stories of making candles for the home as a child, and being a schoolgirl at the old schoolhouse, now Belfry Cottage.  Sunnyside still had no running water - it was, by a long way,  the last house in the village to be without a single tap, with all the water having to be drawn from a well in the garden - and this was the 1980s!  Violet, known as "Annie", was born in 1900 and was a Chidham girl all her life.  Still in her teens, she trained as a welder in the first world war, and worked at Cobnor at the airfield here, building planes.  She and Alf (who was gardener for my grandparents) sadly had no children of their own, and were like extra grandparents to us.  Annie died in 1995, living just long enough to share in the delight of the birth of our triplets, and had, of course, knitted wonderful little jackets and bonnets for them all! Diana Beale