Bird talk

 Eloise cat has just come in through the cat flap.  She had asked to go out a couple of hours ago, via the side door.  She prefers personal service, on the whole.  Not long after she went out, rain bucketed down.  I went to the door and called, in case she was sheltering nearby but, wherever she was, it wasn't close enough for her to brave the downpour - she doesn't mind rain, but this was too much.  Anyway, I don't know where she's been, but she is pretty well dry, as the weather is now.

Nowadays, I get both bored and tired in the evenings.  I often go to bed early, not necessarily to sleep.  I've moved my bed so that I can see out of the west window, where there's a fabulous view of the sunset.  Last night, the clouds were mottled blue and pink, they didn't look real.  Although it's not raining now and the sun has shown its face, I'm not sure there will be a view of a sunset.  I'm still tempted by an early night, though.  

I've changed so much in the past couple of years.  I used to be an owl and now I'm not.  That doesn't make me a lark, however.  I still don't like early mornings.  I have a very narrow useful time band now, which is an awful nuisance.  

I have maintained for some time that feral cats only hunt for food.  They don't bother with anything that's too small to eat.  A couple of days ago, I went to give them their breakfast - there's a large, flat topped chicken coop that isn't used any more and I leave its door open.  On that day, a bird was in there and it panicked, of course, when I turned up.  It was the size and shape of a starling but brown, I suspect a juvenile blackbird.  It flapped at the wire on the other side of the door - and all five cats ignored it.  I was ready to rush forward, but there was no need.  I went round the other side of the coop, so that it would flap away from me and it found the open door.  The cats still took no notice.  I've proved my point, as far as I'm concerned.  Not that I'm saying that cats don't catch songbirds, but feral cats don't bother with anything smaller than a magpie or pigeon and they're welcome to them.

When did birdwatching/twitching become birding?  Is it supposed to sound less dull?  Like playing computer games has become gaming.

Shapes and patterns

 On the way home, I called in at a client's house to pick up porcelain for the next auction (and the one after, as it's more than I can put for one person in one sale).  He'd said that it was already packed in boxes, which pleased me as it would save a lot of time.  When I arrived, I saw the boxes.  They were enormous.  No chance of getting any in the boot.  I put the passenger seat as far forward as possible (two door car) and then tipped it forward and it was very hard for him to get two of them in.  The third went next to me, which was okay except that I couldn't see out of the wing mirror, which one uses a lot on the motorway, so I had to plan changes of lane very carefully.  Then I couldn't get the boxes out, when I arrived home and had to leave them overnight and then unpack the boxes in situ.

I had asked, hopefully, if he had a list.  No.  So I'm having to list them all myself.  To start with, it's all polychrome and there are 22 teapots with covers.  D came over to help unpack.  When I pack anything with a lid, I wrap both items in bubble wrap and then tuck the cover upside-down in the pot.  This hadn't been done.  So we spent some time trying to match up pots with covers, before realising that most of the pieces did have numbers on.  

Anyway, I should have spent a couple of hours typing every day this week.   I didn't.  Partly, this was because I spent Sunday and Monday with my artistic friend and partly because yesterday was hot and sunny and I couldn't be bothered.  Of course, I regretted it today.  I've not quite got halfway through them - I had to write full descriptions, especially of all those teapots and I checked them for damage too.  My eyes were protesting too much by 6.30.  I took vegetable curry out of the freezer and heated it in the microwave for dinner.

This year is the year of the migraine for me.  10 already, including 5 this month and 2 yesterday.  I'm pretty fed up with it.  Can't see things getting less stressful though.

Z goes, Z comes back

From last week... 

I'm in Pembrokeshire at the caravan this week.  It's not been easy to carve out a whole week, but there's no point in coming for much less time.  It's the best part of 400 miles and, including stopping to see friends in Reading on the way, the journey took me nearly 9 hours.  Tim and I used to stop at his house for the night on each leg and I sometimes stay with Publog John, near Leicester, if I go that way, but it gives me more time here if I just keep driving and get here in one day.

The weather is iffy, but one always expects that in Wales.  It rarely rains for the whole day and often rains at night, so I can always do what I want to.  What I'll want to do in the future about the caravan is something I need to think about.  Since I didn't have time to visit at all, last year, this week is a chance to resettle myself.  I'm hoping to come back twice more during the year.  I know it would be much more sensible to give it up.  Sell the caravan and let go of the lease.  I don't know if I'm ready yet.  I can't justify the expense, which has increased considerably, by 15% since last year, but it's somewhere that really matters to me.

However, that's the thought that's mulling away quietly at the back of my mind.  For now, I'm just sleeping a lot and enjoying the peace.  

Luckily, I had the good sense to ask Henry to get the caravan washed outside and the patio cleared of weeds.  Indoors, it's grubby.  I've bought rubber gloves and, this afternoon, I'll spend time washing everywhere.  Unfortunately, I can't persuade the water heater to get going - the spark isn't working.  So I suspect I'll have to get it looked at.  

This week, now I'm home again...

I did have to get the man in, who got the water heater going in no time, but I couldn't have done it myself.  I also have left the caravan very clean, including washing the carpet again, which I did two years ago and haven't dirtied myself.  Friends of friends used it twice (that is, different people each time), which they were welcome to, at no charge, but I think the last people snacked in front of the tv and were pretty casual about dropping greasy snacks.  They were equally casual about not washing the kitchen floor and not bothering to lift the seat when they cleaned the toilet, I discovered.  They don't even know me and it was a free holiday!

I had a really lovely break, all the same.  I slept amazingly well, walked quite a lot, didn't drink much (less than I do at home, that is) and I felt very relaxed.  I called on a friend for lunch on the way home, then stopped to pick up china for the auction.  The two delays meant that I hit traffic on the M25 - not literally, though one reason for slow progress was because of a collision ahead, which meant that two lanes were closed for several miles.  I arrived home about 7.20pm, dead tired, having left the caravan at 9.30.  Wink had dinner ready for me, though I couldn't eat as much as I'd have liked to and then went straight to bed.  

A friend called round for coffee, which turned into lunch too and we had a long chat about all sorts of things, predominately art.  She is an artist, which I'm not but our different, though complementary viewpoints, interested both of us.  It was great to have a fairly deep discussion and I think we both took quite a lot away from it.  It's almost made me want to take up drawing again - and I showed her my drawing of my hand and of the chair, which some of you may remember that I bravely posted, several years ago.

Pride turned up after the fall

 The temperature has dropped considerably since the weekend.  Warm and sunny, now cold enough for me to consider an extra jumper - which I'll go upstairs and get, in a minute.  I miss the Aga, which is switched down to the minimum for the summer.  I could turn it up, but there's really no need, much as I'd like to.  I have dough proving in the kitchen as the children ate all the bread yesterday except for one slice, which I toasted for breakfast this morning.  I was indulgent.  Usually, I have toast and marmite (I have several different breakfasts, this is one of them) but today, I had half the slice with marmite and the rest with marmalade.  I wonder if I'll bother to make marmalade again.  I'm still slowly ploughing my way through the last batch from at least 5 years ago.  I have almost stopped making jams and relishes too, since Tim died, but they keep a long time, so I'm still eating those too.  The only ones I have made have been the tomato relish - not quite a chutney, it's not cooked for so long and can be eaten as soon as it's cooked, it doesn't need to mature in the jar - and the wonderful chilli relish that all the family loves, so I usually give each a jar at Christmastime.  Didn't get around to it last year, it does take a long time to make as the chillis need to be sliced by hand.  But at least I make bread.  I am having an Indian meal tonight, so considered making chapatis or naan bread, but realised they're both much easier in the Aga, so I won't bother.  I haven't cooked rice on the electric rings very often - again, so very easy in the Aga - so that may not happen either.  I realise that a lot of my cooking is done simply so that I can warm up by the cooker.  There just isn't the same incentive in the summer.

A large fly is buzzing round the room, trying to get out of the window.  I've opened a window for it, letting the cold air in, but it ignores it, trying every other window instead.  I know people like that, too.  

I was awake in time for the dawn chorus today (no, I didn't get up, bed was warmer) and, half an hour later, realised that there was just birdsong.  That is, a bird or a few were singing, but not the whole range of them.  I wonder what goes through their heads?  I'd woken earlier too, a while after midnight and, luckily before I went back to sleep, Eloise cat jumped on the bed, or rather, she jumped at it and missed.  I peered from under the bedclothes in time to see her walking out of the room as if that was exactly what she meant to do.  Poor cat, she misjudged the jump in the dark (it's a fairly high bed) and her pride wouldn't let her take a second attempt.  Later, once I was awake for good, she jumped back up (it was light by then) and had a long drink of Buxton water.  She has been drinking so much more, since I started to buy bottled water for her.

I'll go upstairs now and move the chaise longue to the foot of the bed, take a fresh bottle of water for her and get a cardi.  First, I'll close the window, as the officious fly has finally found its way outside.

The lark descending

 Ro and his children came over today.  They are a delight, eat whatever is put in front of them, without being greedy or picky and are always good humoured.  They're a credit to both their parents, who co-parent impeccably, despite their divorce.  

Rufus will be 11 next month.  Perdita was 6 in January.  Within a week, she managed to knock out both her front teeth, which was pretty alarming for Ronan, who was in charge both times.  The first tooth went when she was at school and fell off the climbing frame - or something like that.  When Ro arrived to pick her up, there was a lot of blood.  Second tooth went at his house, when the children were upstairs.  They weren't fighting exactly, it seems that Rufus sneaked up and grabbed her from behind, she swung a fist - and hit herself in the mouth.  Again, blood.  Perdita seemed less upset than he was, but they're all over that now and she's proud of her massive gap.  When they wanted a snack this afternoon, I offered an apple, cut up and she said quite casually that cut up would be good as she can't bite apples.

Anyway, it's now 7.30pm and the wonder is that I'm not exhausted already.  This morning, I woke up around 5.45, though I jolly well didn't get up then.  I'm not giving up my owl identity without a fight. I listened to the dawn chorus and read a book until a reasonable hour, around half past seven.  Even at that, I was ready for mid-morning coffee by 9.  Early mornings are great in theory, but they really mess up the day.

I made lasagne for lunch and, because we'd picked up new-laid eggs, that's what they had for their tea.  Rufus chose a fried egg sandwich and Perdita wanted dippy eggs with toast though, at their father's suggestion, I fried those too so she didn't have to manage an egg cup.  All four eggs had suitably runny yolks and both plates were cleared.  I'd absent-mindedly put butter in a saucepan rather than a frying pan, so I used it to make scrambled eggs for me.  I used rather more butter than I'd normally have, which added nicely to flavour and texture.  It made me think of Swallows and Amazons, where they called scrambled eggs "buttered eggs."  They were.

Tots and tottering

 Completely unintentionally, I'm becoming fond of the tortoises.  I read, the other day, that they can eat lilac - by good fortune, the lilac was just coming into flower at the time.  They like scents and flowers - I've got some lovely, scented roses and occasionally pick a handful of petals that are just about to drop, to scatter in their run.  I was going to cut a few pieces of lilac for the house, so took off a couple of sprigs and took to the Tots.  Fyodor was just munching on a globe artichoke leaf,  Of course, he has to chop through it at the bottom, beaver-style, so the whole leaf is destroyed, but I can't begrudge it.  So he was not especially impressed by the lilac.  His smaller brother was thrilled, though and I took a little video of him chomping happily.  Today, I picked them sensible greens - deadnettle mostly - and left it for them and later went to find dandelions.  Tortoises love dandelions.  I also picked some plantain, lilac and ground elder, plus a few leaves of sedum and houseleek.  Leo was just inside the door of the run, so I went to him first.  He's not very bold and drew his head in with a hiss each time I put food in front of him, though he immediately poked it in again.  They don't actually hiss, it's the sound of air being squeezed, rather like a foot-fart (I trust everyone knows the expression?).  I looked round.  Fyodor was positively scampering towards me, eyes fixed on the dandelions.  He covered a couple of metres in seconds.  Such an expression of bliss as he tucked in.

I have no wish to become emotionally attached to tortoises.  But at least they're likely to outlive me, which my other pets may well not.  I mean, they won't unless I die in the relatively near future.  Do I feel lucky, punk?  I don't even know what that means, in this context.  

In a moment of good cheer, a couple of months ago, I bought a small lemon tree - actually, a bush - in a pot.  It was covered in flowers and I love the scent of lemon flowers.  Apparently, it's self-pollinating.  I kept in on the kitchen windowsill to start with and then moved it to the study window.  To my surprise, quite a number of lemons have set and are now about half an inch long (I mix imperial and metric measures and hardly notice doing so).  It seems I need to look up how to care for them.  It's now reached the stage where I'll feel mean if they shrivel and drop off.  I don't like to think of myself as sentimental about a lemon plant.  I have a cactus that the Sage rescued from a house which his firm had for sale, some 60 years ago and he gave it to his (probably dismayed) mother.  She dutifully kept it and I inherited it.  I've done my best to kill the wretched thing.  I left it outdoors all last winter.  It seems to be fine.  I have to respect it.  I did repot it last year, because its pot had been broken for the last decade or two - I'd avoided doing so because its spines are vicious and barbed.  But finally, armed with thick towels and leather gloves, I did the deed and, unfortunately, it seems to have a new lease of life.  I'm not even going to consider any kind of a metaphor.

Z rambles and posts this two days late

 I didn't use an alarm clock for some years, unless I needed to.  With a depressingly irregular sleep pattern, I thought it was better to sleep as much as I could, as I was often awake for several hours in the night and then nodded off just as it wasn't too early to get up.  Eventually, it occurred to me that it was better to train myself by getting up at the same time and I've had my phone alarm for 7.15am ever since.  I don't leap straight out of bed as it whacks my blood pressure right down and I am liable to faint, so I check the news, do puzzles and so on for a while before getting up.  

This morning, after switching off the alarm, I dozed for a few minutes more.  Checked the time - 7.30.  That was fine.  As long as I was downstairs, dressed, by 8, I could spend the morning doing a job I'd planned.  Ten minutes later, I looked again - 8.43.  What?  Obviously, I'd dozed for more than a few minutes, but I thought I'd looked on the digital display of my phone, not the clock face of my watch.  It occurs to me that I dreamt I was checking the time.  Oh well.  There's always tomorrow.

Wink and I are going out to lunch.  I'm not sure how I've been drawn into this, though I'm sure it'll be pleasant.  While I was away last year, she re-engaged with someone we were at school with, though in age she's between us and neither of us really knew her.  There's a group of them who meet for lunch about once a month, but no one is the same age as either of us, so the people they talk about are little more than names to us.  Neither do we have particularly enthusiastic memories of school. Wink was not very happy there and, though I wasn't unhappy, I wasn't sorry to leave.  The teaching wasn't a very high standard overall and we were bright, we should have been stretched more.

I have no idea why we were not sent to a better school. I asked my mother and she was defensive.  She said I should have told her it wasn't good.  I asked how I was supposed to know, since it was the only school I'd been to?  She had no answer.  She did know and so did my father.  I said, not unkindly - though I see that it probably sounded unkind - that we'd have gone to a good school if we were boys, ours mattered less.  She was furious and denied it, but it was true.  The odd thing was, there was an excellent girls' school, less than half an hour away and it took nearly that to get through the traffic to ours.  We could have gone as day girls, weekly boarders or full boarders.  My parents could well have afforded it, but they just didn't bother.  Such a pity.  

The local grammar school was also superb, but it would have been very odd for us to go to a state school.  It is impossible for people who do not have an understanding for and acceptance of social history.  It's too easy to judge the past, especially the relatively recent past, by present rules.  If you go back far enough, it becomes somewhat easier.  Simply, if you could afford to pay, it was tacky to take it for free.  Likewise, private medicine.  In those days, it made little difference in time, but you didn't bother NHS funds if you could afford to pay - it did mean a private room,  but everything else was the same.  This is simply an explanation, not a justification or a claim that things shouldn't have changed.  Different times.  

Anyway, I had a really poor education and I wish I hadn't.