A whangblamming thunderstorm and dazzling blue sky kind of day
. . . in more ways than one. In the first place yes, the weather is completely crazed. Because of other issues* the hellhounds got a series of short hurtles today rather than one long and one medium-length one, and trying to fit these in between cloudbursts was all part of the jolly fun. So I’d just had the latest bit of bad news about the weekend’s Adventure** and I was blitzing around the cottage in a dangerous, bruising torpor because the archangels were due ANY MINUTE*** . . . and I finally thought to check my email and the archangels were going to be an hour later than scheduled.
I could have had a little more sleep.
I could have given the hellhounds a little more hurtle.
I could have hung from the rafters screaming about the reality of Sunday travel a little longer.
I did make myself a second cup of tea, left it on the Aga to stew, and took hellhounds for their second sprint of the day. And got back to the latest parcel of little live green things, longing to be potted up and too tender to leave outdoors. I’m hauling in trays of the little ratbags every night—and back out in the morning. I’m running out of trays. And the sweet peas, which arrived weeks ago, are starting to need repotting. ARRRRRRGH.
The archangels arrived†, were here for two hours . . . AND COULDN’T DO ANYTHING I WANTED THEM TO DO. With the exception of a few bits and pieces, and getting the kanji-support Japanese download installed.†† But I need both Pooka and Astarte, both i-gizmos, frelling updated . . . and they couldn’t do it because my broadband is TOO SLOW. Meanwhile, my so-called provider has changed hands, changed its name and logo, raised its prices and lost my Direct Debit details. And claimed never to have received the archangels’ email, attachment and fax from a month ago about upgrading . . . they plainly raised their prices to pay the designer for the new logo which is undoubtedly larger, flashier, and in full colour, and which will cost more money to produce every month at the top of your invoice.
So the archangels sent it all again, and then went back to wrestling with various gremlins, ogres and unidentified snarly things.††† Raphael checked in with my nonproviders in about fifteen minutes. No, they hadn’t received the resend. Half an hour. No, they hadn’t received it. An hour. No, they hadn’t received it, hahahahahahahaha, isn’t this comical? Meanwhile Gabriel had taken the lid off my phone housing, or whatever you call it, where the wires come in from outside, and did a hissing-between-his-teeth equivalent. You will remember when this came up a week or something ago, that there’s nothing I can do about Brit Telecom’s utter indifference to the connectivity trials and tribulations of a small cul de sac in New Arcadia, and BT owns all the wiring. Gabriel stared thoughtfully out the window at the telephone pole that various hysterically-laughing linemen have nearly fallen off. Your Problem Is Obvious. However between them they think that Raphael can bedevil my provider into providing something, and Gabriel can do something about the connection between Outside and Inside.
But meanwhile . . .
I took hellhounds for another sprint and fulminated. Work did not go at all well in what remained of the afternoon. Also meanwhile . . . I had to go to Forza tonight. I’d missed last week’s practise due to family arrivals and Morse-code electricity, the week before was some rangleblagging scheduled cancellation or other, and I’m going to miss next week because they’re having one of their forty-six-and-a-half bell practises.‡ I didn’t want to go tonight. I didn’t want to go a lot. I’m completely demoralised on the subject of tower ringing and I’ve pretty much turned the fact that I can’t deal with the abbey into a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom, and I’m short of sleep, dreading the pogo-stick journey on Sunday, and totally furious with my technology. I’m clapped out on adrenaline and I’m exhausted.
I had to go.
I went.
Oh, and did I mention it was TIPPING it down? On the way over in Wolfgang we were creeping along in third gear because I couldn’t see out of the frelling windscreen.
And when I got there there were people crawling around with cameras. What? Leaving now. And the Scary Man was in charge. Whimper. Why was I ever born?‡‡
The Scary Man swooped down on me and said, Come ring some Grandsire Triples. —Wait! No! I was going to run away!
. . . I actually haven’t dwelled on how bad it’s been, the last few times at the abbey. I had what I thought was that little breakthrough ringing on six bells rather than eight a while back . . . and then it went away, and I couldn’t ring on six either. I am not joking about the demoralisation. If it weren’t that it felt like either go on facing the abbey or give up ringing, I’d be staying home with a good book.
Anyway. Yeah. Clearly I’m setting you up to say . . . it was okay. It was okay. I didn’t ring frelling Grandsire frelling Triples flawlessly, but I was ringing it. I wasn’t just blindly pulling on a rope and doing what my minder was shouting in my ear, which is mostly what it’s been so far. I am going to do this. I am going to learn to cope with the abbey. Which is to say I may even have a bell tower again. I’m sorry it’s a frelling abbey . . . but it remains the nearest tower that rings methods if I’m not going back to New Arcadia and, hint, I’m not, and therefore my best option is an abbey. . . . where things like BAFTA-winning documentary makers come round and frelling film you. Apparently we’re going to be part of a son-et-lumiere deal for some Hampshire festival. We had exactly thirty-seven ringers for our thirty-seven bells and the Scary Man told us all to catch hold which therefore . . . included me. We just rang rounds . . . but I’ve told you about this before: when you’re ringing rounds on four hundred and twelve or even only thirty-seven you pull off and then hold up for frelling EVER while you’re waiting for the other thirty-six bells before it’s your turn again. This doesn’t happen on six. It’s very disconcerting to someone who is used to ringing on six and finds eight a stretch. Oh, and if you see the film . . . I’m wearing a bright turquoise cardigan which would not have been my choice if I’d known I was going to be immortalised. I’d have gone more for dark brown and a bag over my head.
I also have to say a big fat shiny word for Gemma here. She’s an abbey ringer, and she knows what a struggle I’ve been having. She’s the one who’s kept saying, no, no, they will not tell you to go away and furthermore you will catch on. She’s also the one who suggested that I try a different bell for triples because she found it easier to see from . . . and she’s right. I think that’s one of the things that helped tonight. She does keep smiling at me in this Rather Amused Fashion, but I have this effect on some people for some reason. And I was so giddy tonight that I let her convince me to come to the pub after. . . .
I may have a bell tower again. My life is not over.
And the OTHER THING? I HAVE A NEST FULL OF ADORABLE FLUFFY BABY ROBINS IN THE GREENHOUSE. They’re so cute you could die. I rushed out and bought mealworms.
* * *
* Including sleeping really badly because I’m starting (early) to stress out about an Adventure I’m slated for this weekend that I am dreading extremely. So . . . of course. I turned the alarm off and went back to sleep in one fluid movement. The sleep I’d spent the last x hours not getting.
** You cannot go ANYWHERE on a Sunday in this country. They close the roads^, they close the railway lines, they lock all the barn doors before and after the horses have fled, they glue the wheels of all locally-flying airplanes to the runways, and the Sunday dog sled teams are booked years in advance. Maybe if I started walking now. . . .
^ Including bicycle paths and rickshaws.
*** And I’d overslept. See above.
† Gabriel reported that they had been given a very suspicious look by one of my neighbours. Hey, two young men in hoodies. And Gabriel has a two-day beard.
†† Do I even have to tell you that this did not go the way it was supposed to and I would have gotten totally screwed up and berserk if I’d tried to do it myself? Whatever. They pulled out one of their Magic Discs and made the software(s) talk to each other. And now my Learn Japanese site isn’t mostly little empty rectangles.
††† I sat on the floor and knitted. With some help from hellhounds.
‡ The half is the tower captain’s gerbil.
‡‡ Don’t answer that.
Poor overwhelmed exhausted lurgified person
My dog minder didn’t show up today.
Ordinarily I don’t absolutely need a dog walker to give hellhounds their second long sprint of the day Monday or any other day. But I found out the hard way that if you don’t get your dog minder on retainer, so to speak, she’s less likely to find time for you when you really need her for the exciting one-offs of life*. So I have her every Monday, and then I can come home and have a nice cup of tea after my voice lesson and before I have to go ringing.**
We had a traumatic morning*** when I bundled hellhounds into Wolfgang and went out to Warm Upford for fuel. It is insane that there are no petrol stations within about five miles of New Arcadia† but that’s the way it is. New Arcadia has several thousand residents and Warm Upford has several hundred, but it’s Warm Upford with the petrol station. It took sixty one quid to fill Wolfgang’s tank. I nearly had heart failure.†† Granted the tank was unusually empty, thanks to the petrol-strike panic-buying nonsense which I wanted to give a miss if at all possible (and there was no sign of it today), but for sixty-one quid in the current economic climate I could buy a perfectly serviceable, low-maintenance pony.†††
We did still have an excellent hurtle—it’s the beginning of April, the progress of the bluebells must be closely monitored from here on.‡ And this is the beginning of my favourite time of year: from the daffs and forsythia and the first little bluebell florets and the swelling lilac buds through to the great midsummer hurrah of my roses: everything is rushing out at increasing speed and your mission, Ms Briggs, should you decide to accept it, is to try and frelling keep up. I squeezed nearly an hour in the garden out of a schedule that had time for no such foolishness in it‡‡ and I did think, as I pelted off to Wolfgang‡‡‡ and Nadia, that it was odd my dog minder hadn’t come yet.
Nadia was teaching in a new place—and fortunately I met her previous student leaving or I might never have found it, hidden away as it is behind some trompe d’oeil hedges. It’s a nice if fairly ordinary looking bungalow and then you get inside and . . . golly. Serious music room. Yeep. Intimidating. But it was still Nadia. And it was Nadia who had told me during my last lurgy§ that often enough to be hopeful about it, you can sing through a lot of head, throat and upper respiratory malfeasances, and this is (so far) one of those. It’s positively bizarre, to sing as well as you ever do§§ and then as soon as you stop, to be sneezing and talking in a hoarse, scratchy voice. And I have not one but two new songs to learn over the Easter break§§§.
I then came back to the cottage, feeling a trifle worn, wanting only to pick up well-hurtled hellhounds and sweep down to the mews to have a nice cup of tea and perhaps some extravagance like an apple before ringing . . . and my dog minder hadn’t come. Weep. Weep.
I hurtled hounds—perhaps a little slower than usual, and with more pauses for nose-blowing. I rang Niall to ask if he was going ringing tonight. He answered the phone sounding like me. I will if you will, he croaked. So we went, trying to breathe shallowly, although a bunch of ringers is not so unlike a classroom of virusy children, and you all know how that works out.# It was a particular ratbag to be tottery and brainless too because my old ringing master, from the veriest deeps of time before ME and the turn of the century, was there, and he can ring anything. He does, however, need the band to ring any/everything, and . . .
I am so going to bed early.##
* * *
* Or possibly the opera-season-offs.
** I like that have to go ringing. Well, I do. Ringing is necessary to my life. Which is a good reason for living in England, which still has the highest density of change-ringing bell towers anywhere on the planet.^
^ Not to mention the beginner handbell education seminar tomorrow. Did I tell you about this? Niall got me into it. Of course.
*** Aside from the ‘getting up’ part. Lurgies share with ME the delightful business of making you need more sleep and allowing you to get less. La la la la la la la. Well, my TBR pile has lowered noticeably, although I may be throwing the rejects against the wall sooner than usual.
† I suppose one positive side effect of all the new-build we’re going to get whether we like it or not, or whether we sign petitions till we’re blue and purple in the face or not, or whether we attend town meetings twice a day for the next sixty years or not, is that we may finally get our own petrol station. I guess that’s positive. . . .
†† I nearly bit the attendant, who was way too jolly and perky. I could probably have claimed it was an uncontrollable spasm.
††† I tweeted the £61 and had a few tweets and emails in reply that I should stick to walking, biking, buses and trains. In a perfect world. Nadia is twelve or twenty-plus miles away. When she’s twelve miles away the bus service between here and there exists, but it would take me all day, and I could probably knit cardigans for all of you in the time I spent waiting around for my next connection. When she’s twenty-plus miles away . . . I don’t think you can get there from here.
I will not bike on Hampshire roads. People certainly do and they shouldn’t. They’re a danger to themselves and to fossil-fuel-powered traffic. The little country roads are mostly barely two lanes wide—at least when they’re one lane wide you jolly well ought to be driving carefully—and usually close-bordered by hedgerows, but most of those tiny roads nonetheless have a 60 mph speed limit, which most cars are eager to take advantage of. And then you hove around a blind corner and find a bicyclist pedalling slowly down the middle of the road, either because he is a careless moron, or because he’s read or been told that it’s safer to occupy your lane and make cars slow down than to hug the edge and encourage them to blast past whether they’ve got room or not. I don’t know why we don’t have gruesome bicycle fatalities a lot more often. I personally slow down on blind corners, but then I’m a wuss.
And local trains are a species of fiction out of P G Wodehouse or Dornford Yates.
The pony-trap could at least carry my music. But it would still be a long jog to Nadia on Monday afternoons.
‡ Yes, gods willin’ and the crick don’t rise, there will be the Ritual Sea of Bluebells Photos in a few weeks.
‡‡ The robin is still sitting on the nest. Yaaaay. The first time I saw her she was sitting high and proud but as the days pass she seems to be sinking lower and lower. I wonder if the fault in three-dimensional space on that shelf is likely to spread. I could use some hidden space for empty plant pots, which breed like mosquitoes in a marsh, but only if I can get them back out again at need.
‡‡‡ I half-expect his fuel tank to Glow with an Unearthly Light
§ Generally speaking I rarely get this kind of dumb short-term bug. I resent being ill AGAIN.
§§ Poised under the ceiling dormer with the glass sun roof, where the acoustics are a bit friendlier
§§§ And a third if I’m feeling silly. I do need to be kept away from Una Voce Poco Fa for another . . . decade.
# The seminar tomorrow may sound like the ear, nose, throat and pulmonary ward.
## EARLY! EARLY! EARLY!
Thrilling, thrilling news*
THE ROBINS’ NEST IN MY GREENHOUSE IS INHABITED. Er. By, you know, robins.
It was time for the day to start improving by then. It had not begun well. It had not begun well several days ago. The old mews laptop has been off line since last Friday, which is a mega frelling pain in the patootie, since while the little knapsack computer is a gigantic patootie-saver, in all other ways it is too dagblaggingly SMALL. Somebody sends you something you want to look at? Forget it. You have to scroll around so much it’s a seven blind persons and the elephant show. The keyboard is almost big enough, so you type on it as usual, only you’re making as many errors as Frodo the Nine Fingered would, playing Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.
I had emailed the archangels the beginning of the week, and Raphael had responded that he’d be in touch Tuesday or Wednesday to come out Wednesday or Thursday. By last night—Thursday night—I hadn’t heard from him so I sent him a one-word email: whiiiiiiiine.** This morning there was an email back saying that he’d left a message on Pooka on Wednesday. WHIIIIIIINE. In which one’s technology lets one down again. New phone calls or texts are supposed to show up ON THE OPENING SCREEN of your semi-reliable*** iPhone, and I never think to go looking for them as I go looking for email. There it was, sure enough: but Pooka had apparently been having the vapours when it came in, and failed to put it where I could see it. Meanwhile, however, the little laptop was beginning to emit dark smoke and chittering noises—and the mews had been entirely off the air for about three hours one evening and two hours the next AND I was getting very tired of writing the blog on the off-line mews proper-sized laptop and putting it on a memory stick to plug into a live socket somewhere. †
So Raphael, who is a wonderful human being, I mean archangel, rejuggled his Friday and came out anyway. I texted Oisin that I might be a little late . . . I guess maybe. Two and a half hours later I texted Oisin again, saying, cup of tea or do you want to kill me? Raphael had walked in the door, pressed ONE MYSTIC SYMBOL—I mean it’s not even a button or a key it’s a perfectly flat, non-contoured symbol—on the semi-dead†† laptop and LO! it was live again. Kill me.††† However . . . nothing else was the slightest bit straightforward and two and a half hours later he had to leave because he had to leave‡ . . . and while he had convinced the iPad update not to delete everything stored in my library, iPod, photos, etc, he hadn’t convinced it to, you know, update either.
ARRRRRRGH.
I’m also trailing around at one-quarter speed because I was comprehensively shattered by yesterday’s events. I had slept badly night-before-last in dread of yesterday, and I couldn’t really separate out grief for Gloriana and Gloriana’s family and simple fear of walking into my old ringing chamber. I also wanted to go to the funeral, but where was I supposed to sit? With the ringers because I was ringing or not with the ringers because I’m not a member of the band? I don’t think this is covered by Miss Manners.
I was also, of course, terrified that I was going to put my foot or my head through the frelling rope, or break a stay, or fall down in a fit, or something. . . . But in fact in terms of blood and horror it was a complete failure. I’m pleased to say. Admin was extremely gracious and I was gracious right back. And I’m not a good ringer, and I’m a twitchy, jerky ringer but I’m still a ringer, and the feeling of my hands on a bell rope is automatically steadying. And those bells are—aside from the crucial health and safety stuff that made the work necessary—noticeably easier to ring.‡‡ I had thought it was ‘open’ ringing where everyone who knew how was welcome to come have a pull, but there were only eight of us for the eight bells. We rang. Hands on ropes: bong. Bong. Bong. This is what the bells are for: well, change ringing was invented by Christian bell ringers for Christian churches, but I cast the net wider: for me the sound of the bells is a declaration: there is something beyond us. You want it at a wedding, but—for me—you need it at a funeral.‡‡‡
Admin wanted to try to ring after the funeral too. I had been planning on opting out, but that would have left them with only five—six is a good number, and five isn’t really. So I stayed. The funeral itself was pretty gruelling—the church was packed out; she had a lot of friends, and quite a few of them spoke—and when we got back to our ropes we just rang rounds: one-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six, the bells in order, smallest to largest, over and over and over and over. Your heart lifts at the same time as you’re trying not to burst into tears. . . .
So. Yes. I went. I faced all those people§. I rang on several of the bells in the ringing chamber that used to be as familiar to me as my own furniture in my own sitting room. It was a bit miserable, but then it was a funeral, and Gloriana will be much missed. And . . . it was still a good decision for me, quitting my tower. I don’t like that it was a good decision, but it was a good decision. And I think I slept fine last night, I just need a month or two of hibernation.§§
. . . So I went along to Oisin’s nearly two hours late this afternoon. And I drank several cups of tea and raved, chiefly about bell ringing and computers§§§ and after I eventually wound down a little Oisin asked if I’d like to sing something? I’d even brought my music. How about that. I must be beginning to believe in the system. So I sang something. And it wasn’t too bad. I may even learn my entries on Dove Sei. It is very confusing having some piano galumphing along with you and throwing you off.
And then I came home and rushed out into the garden because there was a little daylight left and since I don’t dare plant the frellers I’d better pot up the blasted sweet peas . . . and there was a little robin face peering out at me from the shelf in the greenhouse.
* * *
* Books? Why would it be about books? No, it’s not about books.
** He’s used to me. It’s a good thing.
*** This is similar to ‘a little bit pregnant.’
† Diane in MN
On a typewriter. Remember typescript? [ . . .] Nostalgia.
Yes–but it’s tempered nostalgia. I like word processors a whole lot. I think of my mother, going to work out of high school in a lawyer’s office and having to retype entire documents for a single error because corrections weren’t allowed . . . I really really like word processors!
I have also spent time typing contracts that you couldn’t make an error on—and while I’m sure that someone on salary who wasted hours retyping wouldn’t be long for that job, it was immediately critical for a free lancer like me who got paid by the assignment. So. Yes. And I love the internet, but a lot of the frenzy of that love is on account of needing underpinning and maintenance for the sodblasted blog which itself wouldn’t exist . . . without the internet. You didn’t get error messages with typewriters and they broke or blew up only RARELY. You didn’t have to buy a new one every few years . . . and when you did buy a new one you were not legally required to buy with it a new keyboard layout, a new return mechanism, a new brand of error cover-up paint (with a new dispenser), a new dictionary, new encyclopaedia, a new language . . . all of which you would have to LEARN TO USE.
Er. Hurrumph. I like word processors too. But I’m not a whole-hearted fan. Especially not after a week like this one. And if you’re going to go all snippy on me and say that a word processor has nothing to do with internet connection . . . I shall become CRANKY.
†† Very like ‘semi-reliable’ and ‘a little bit pregnant’.
††† Oisin having declined.
‡ I think this may be very like being paid by the assignment.
‡‡ Siiiiiiiigh. Nicest set of bells in the area just got nicer.
‡‡‡ I know this isn’t going to happen, but I wish ringers were on retainer, so more weddings and particularly more funerals had bells. We ring ordinary services as part of our charter, but bells for your individual event are expensive.
§ Most of whom, in a few cases to my surprise, are apparently still talking to me.
§§ And, tension level? I seem to have sprung just about every muscle in my body. Pulling a big, ratbaggy, awkward bell, you may feel it—or anyway I¸ who am not very good at it, may feel it—in my shoulders and stomach. Ordinary ringing on ordinary bells, no.^ But yesterday . . . my chest, shoulders, arms, belly and back . . . all of them were telling me that I had been toting barges and lifting bales all day. Good grief.
^ It’s never about sheer strength. It’s always about (sheer) skill.
§§§ And the continued non-existence of the New Arcadia Singers
Slow Theatre*
I have a thing to say.
Birds are overrated.
They’re endangered, their habitat is being destroyed, the agrotoxins are mounting up in their blood, their eggshells are too thin to grow babies in, their populations are plummeting, they’re really unhappy.
Great. Bring on the gigantic oil slick. I have a birdbath I want to put it in.**
I am frelling knee deep in blackbird fledglings at the cottage, and they’re driving me nuts. Endangered? Feh. Give me a nice family of Ashy Storm Petrels or Asian crested ibis and I will totally behave myself. I’ll build a rice paddy for the ibis. I’ll raise krill in the pond.***
But BLACKBIRDS? Blackbirds are thugs. Blackbirds are hooligans. And smug with it. There’s nothing worse than a smug hooligan. Especially a smug hooligan the size of the palm of your hand.
I’m not sure how many of these adolescent ruffians† there are—seventeen, maybe. Well, two anyway. Maybe three. At least two, because there are ruckuses in the shrubbery while I’ve got Jesse James underfoot. And furthermore they’re so frelling TAME. Beat it, Buster, I say, or I’m going to dropkick you over the wall. There’s a cat on the other side of the wall.††
And the bloody thing sits there, cocks its head, looks at me, and goes chirp chirp.†††
And then it makes a beeline for my latest tray of freshly planted-on little green things AND STARTS YANKING THEM OUT AND THROWING THEM AROUND.
Don’t talk to me about ‘disturbed ground’ and ‘searching for earthworms’. I know vandalism when I see it. ‡
The slugs and I are already engaged in a war that makes Athens and Sparta look like a tea party.‡‡ Die! DIE! Squish.‡‡‡ And slugs are sneaky beggars. I use slugbait§ but I try not to use any more than I absolutely have to. So anything that seems not to be under savage munching attack I will leave unadorned. Which is, of course, the sign to target it one night and chomp it off to ground level. Arrrrrgh.
And now the sodding birds. Pigeons are rats with feathers.§§ If this country allowed air guns to the average householder I’d be out there going plink, plink. Blackbirds . . . §§§ Why can’t I have a nice crested ibis? Something I could respect. I’m sure their adolescents are much politer.#
Meanwhile . . . what’s a gardener to do? I’ve started snapping those green flower sticks and wooden kebab skewers in halves and thirds and sticking them into the ground around whatever I’ve been planting. In trays this tends to produce a peculiar wigwam effect since the compost isn’t deep enough to hold a spike in true tiger-pit erect readiness. It does appear to have a discouraging effect however. And with the bright blue slugbait . . . charming. Elegant, even. It does an ornamental-flower gardener’s heart good to look out on her afternoon’s work## and see a lot of listing and shell-shocked plants peering nervously out from behind their barriers of splinters and blue-jelly-bean fragments.
The blackbird theatre is pretty frelling rapid. In all the wrong ways. Chirp.
* * *
* I’ve told you Peter calls gardening very slow theatre, haven’t I?^ Days like today, when I’m (still) barely moving anyway, very slow is attractive. Of course, in my garden(s), where I have 1,000,000,000 little green things shouting to be potted on, ‘slow’ is an expletive.
^ Almost certainly. So Slow Theatre Revisited.
** Remember I told you that the Pond Man carefully sieved out a lot of tadpoles before he cleaned Third House’s neglected pond? The pond is now teeming with big fat tadpoles.
The minute they develop feathers, they’re outta there.
*** I may have to put in a second pond if they don’t get along with the tadpoles.
† And I did miss the cute they’re-still-in-the-nest phase. Which lasts about two blinks in the case of blackbirds. You can see mum and dad tipping them over the edge. Out! Out! I have every sympathy. But I wish it was happening in someone else’s garden.
†† There are cats everywhere around here, except where there are hellhounds. There are advantages to going to bed at mmrmph o’clock in the morning: the cat fights don’t wake you up.
††† They are amazingly noisy. The adults sing, of course, but the kids . . . chat. Yo, how’s it going, you great hulking monster? they say, clear as clear. You gonna plant some more stuff? Great. We’re bored.
‡ And I’m about to give up on my poor little magnolia. I’ve been hoping that Ghislaine de Feligonde would throw out enough thorny arms to protect it before the pigeons finish killing it by stripping every bud it produces, both leaf and flower. Well, she may yet. She’s certainly gotten over that far, and the magnolia is still trying. I’ve netted it the last couple of years but I can’t face this as an annual activity.^
^ Mind you, I probably will bubblewrap Souvenir de la Malmaison every year when her flowers are about to come out and we have rain for a fortnight. But bubblewrap is a significantly less maddening material than netting.
‡‡ With chocolate biscuits. And scones. And clotted cream.
‡‡‡ I hate stepping on them. One of the things I have against them is how much I hate stepping on them.
§ And yeah, it says ‘organic, harmless to pets, children and wildlife’ but I don’t let the hellhounds anywhere near it. And it clearly has no effect on blackbirds.
§§ Squirrels are rats with furry tails. Sue me.^
^ Of course some rats are cute. Penelope and Niall’s daughter’s Lesser Spotted Jeans-leg-pulling-pick-me-up-pick-me-up rats are adorable.
§§§ Where’s my robin? I barely see him, now the blackbirds have taken over. And they really have taken over. I keep finding frelling blackbird nests about the place. Today I was moving the pots on the shelves outside the kitchen window around and yeeep there’s another frelling blackbird nest tucked in among the back row.
# Neener neener neener say the blackbirds.
## Performed, allow me to add, in weather that has clearly escaped from either February or Antarctica. Or possibly both. We may have a frost tonight. I should be out there spreading fleece and bubble wrap over the wigwams. Siiiiiiigh.
More baby things
Too cute or what. 
And as anyone who has ever tried to photo the little frellers will know, they swim like the very devil, hurtling around in a manner that would not bring shame to a hellhound.
And in all directions at once, so you’re also lucky to get more than one of them in a shot. They leave wakes like powerboats, unlike the more sedate adults. I assume all this manic activity is a predator avoidance technique, but that plus growing, they must have to eat their own weight about once an hour. The tiny ones also have no neck yet, and with that and the speed at which those little legs churn the water, they plough along as if they’re going downhill.
These two photos were taken however at a plant nursery I . . . ahem . . . frequent. Ahem.
I left the ducklings behind but I came home with a rusty-red yarrow with a gold centre, and another iris. Only two? you’re saying. Well, I do still have 1,000,0000 dahlias to plant up.
Now find the hidden blackbird nest.
I had noticed that there was a male blackbird around an awful lot, but then there usually is. Blackbirds are cheeky, and the town ones seem to be born half tame, like robins.* Like robins, they are very interested in you when you’re messing in the dirt,** and if you turn around quickly there will probably be a sudden flurry of wings. I didn’t twig [sic] there was anything else going on till one day when I was potting on right under the apple tree, I saw the quick flash of black wings diving in among the whatever-it-is growing into the apple tree, an immediate chorus of memememememememe, give ME the worm! burst out, my head snapped up like Darkness sighting a pheasant, and I thought, Yah! Babies! –waited for Dad to depart on his business, and went questing.
I don’t know if there’s a system–like mum robin may start a new nest elsewhere while dad finishes off the old brood–but I seemed only to see the male before I discovered the nest, and the female since.
Mum giving me the hairy eyeball.
And let me tell you I sweated to get this photo. 
All that standing on a flagpole with a torch between your teeth***–the dratted camera refused to focus without a spotlight–and furthermore trying to do it at a bit of a distance so mum didn’t have apoplexy: as you see, the nestlings couldn’t care less. This is a few days ago, and you see they’re pretty much fully fledged: and we’re now into the Little Rustling Things in the Shrubbery phase. They still yell mememememe when mum flies in however, and the shrubbery briefly rustles violently. There is this to be said for a small garden: the Little Rustling Things in the Shrubbery phase is a lot more exciting. It’s too spread out to make good theatre in a big garden.
And hey. How about another lamb. Or two. (Or three.) Lambs are always good.
*No robin nest in the greenhouse this year. Sob. Maybe they’ll rediscover me later in the season. I’ve seen him–or her–around, but maybe the blackbird is the current chief garden administrator.
** Oh gods, she’s using that damn bagged stuff again. There’s never anything worth eating in a plastic bag!^
^ [irony alert]
*** Electric torch, ie flashlight. This is not a remake of SPARTACUS.