Oliver's Surprise.

It seems Oliver the undersized cock pheasant has more vim and vigour than I credited him with. You might remember that I was concerned that if he couldn’t make the four foot leap onto the bird table, he would be easy prey for prowling foxes.

I saw him again this evening. He was heading for the garden and I fully expected to do the feeding duty again, but he changed his mind and flew from the road into one of the big sycamore trees to roost instead. Much relief all round, and he knows where he can get food if he needs it.

(I assume cock pheasants do have minds. They’re not known for being particularly intelligent.)

Wondering About the Wages of Sin.

I find the idea of death quite scary, you know, simply because I don’t know whether anything comes after it and, if it does, what form it takes. I think part of this stems from having been a keen churchgoer as a kid, in which occupation I was constantly reminded that sinners go to hell when they die and spend eternity burning in an everlasting fire.

It seems to me a little cruel and unnecessary to pump this sort of stuff into the heads of children, in part because nobody can expect to go through a life without sinning in one form or another as defined by the various Judaic religions. I gather the Church itself recognises this fact and takes the view that there’s only ever been one man who never sinned, and that was Jesus.

(Ah, but wait a minute. According to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus killed a boy with his supernatural powers when he was himself a child. But I suppose that’s OK because Jesus was a part of God, and if Boris Johnson can break his own rules with impunity, why shouldn’t God?)

The Church does give us a get-out clause, of course. If we can be lucky enough to be given absolution placed conveniently between committing our last sin and taking our last breath, everything gets washed away and we spend the afterlife fortified by a cornucopia of milk and honey and surrounded by feathery beings singing everlasting hymns. Not a very reliable prospect, is it? Nor even a particularly endearing one.

I think I’ll take solace from the notion that God loveth a sinner that repenteth. I do quite a lot of that most days.

An Unusual Tribute

You might recall me complaining about the amount of union flag detritus littering the Shire in obeisance (carefully chosen word) to the Queen and her Jubilee. Mostly it takes the standard form – whole flags, bunting, flags with pictures of the Queen in the middle, and so on. But today I saw the most unusual one and couldn’t help admitting a modicum of approval.

A woman up the lane had hung a union flag bikini on her gate, positioned approximately in accordance with its normal positioning when functioning in the manner one would expect of a bikini. I considered knocking on the door and asking whether she’d done this to serve the requirements of economy in these troubled times, whether it was an attempt to do something out of the ordinary, or whether it was meant to make some sort of statement (the exact nature of which would be open to conjecture and lead the mostly conservative denizens of the Shire to scratch their heads in bemusement.)

I didn’t, of course, because a gentleman wouldn’t do that sort of thing. I simply walked on wondering whether her acquaintance might be worth making. I’ve only ever spoken to her once and gained the impression that she likes cats, so thank heaven Matthew Hopkins is long gone. The liking of cats was enough to get a woman executed in his day, so imagine what effect the public display of a bikini might have occasioned.

Baby Blue Tit Day.

I saw the first baby blue tit of the season today (I chose to presume that it was from the nest box behind my kitchen, even though I had no direct evidence on which to base such a presumption.)

I was standing by my little pear tree when it flew onto a branch a foot or so from my head and rested there without paying me any attention whatsoever. An adult blue tit flew onto an adjoining branch and held out a morsel of food, but declined to let the baby eat it. (Back to that old getting-them-out-of-the-nest ruse again, I suppose.) The adult then flew off to the nearby plumb tree and waited. Baby followed and also waited. Parent nudged baby in the back, flew to the top of the garden, and baby followed as you might expect (because that’s what babies do.)

It’s all about training I assume, and all rather life-affirming. Whether you agree or not is up to you, but I do so like that sort of thing.

A few minutes later I saw a second one on the feeding table at the side of my house – plumper, less ragged, and possessed of much yellower plumage when compared with the adults. They’re very handsome and a lot more naïve than the grown ups when approached by big creatures walking on two legs. I got almost to within touching distance before instinct took proper control and the little guy rushed off to the cover of the nearby hedge. (The adults are not so accommodating, being mad, feisty, and prepared to fight anything smaller than a sparrow hawk.)

So there you have it: today was Baby Blue Tit Day, and such days come close to encouraging the belief that life on this benighted planet is not so bad after all as long as you steer well clear of humans.

The Worrier.

So this is me. I worry about things, lots of things, and the latest worry concerns Oliver the little cock pheasant.

I wrote him into a post on Thursday night; about how he approached me asking for food, and how he got food, and how he was smaller than the other cock pheasants and therefore probably less able to compete for natural food. It could be that the bigger birds bully him out in the fields because birds sometimes do that sort of thing.

And so this evening it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him for three days. I asked myself whether the food I gave him on Thursday would be sufficient for three days. I can’t know whether it would or not, can I, because I’m not familiar with a pheasant’s dietary needs.

Perhaps, I thought, he’s been into the garden hoping to be fed again, but I wasn’t there so he left hungry. I’d never seen him fly onto either of the feeding tables, you see, as the other pheasants do, and I wonder whether he doesn’t have the strength. Pheasants are poor flyers at the best of times, and it takes some evident effort for even the big fit ones to make the flight-cum-leap from the ground up to a four foot high perch. And if Oliver is too weak to do that, what chance would he have of escaping a prowling fox?

So herein lies the lesson: it’s a bad idea to become attached to a wild creature because the wild is a hazardous place, and Mother Nature is implacably pragmatic and impervious to the needs of the singular individual.

Stream-of-Consciousness With Punctuation.

Bad day today. Too much despair at the badness in the human condition; too much anxiety over matters identified and unidentified; too much reluctance to carry on walking into whatever future I have left; too much discomfort from the cold east wind at twilight in what used to be referred to as ‘flaming June’ in dear old Blighty; too much eagerness to close the curtains so as to shut the world out. Taking refuge in reading old correspondence from once-valued people now gone.

Minor matters:

I found it ironic that the President of Russia should have responded to America’s promise to send longer range artillery to Ukraine with such a seemingly inept statement. He is reported to have said: ‘this will only fan the flames of war.’ Has he forgotten already that Russians have been sent to prison for calling it a war? And has he also forgotten who lit the fire in the first place?

Virginia Woolf’s description of Mrs Ramsey’s thoughts, responses, inclinations and desires in her novel To the Lighthouse are illuminating and make compelling reading. Mrs Ramsey is turning out to be the main character so far, and I gather she is closely based on Woolf’s own mother. If so, I would have loved to meet her. This book is a veritable cornucopia of insights, but it gives me a problem. The stream-of-consciousness writing style requires that every clause be read with full attention if the panoply of delights is to be extracted to the full. During the day my mind is too active for such a discipline, and late at night I’m simply too tired. It has to be read, therefore, in short bursts at carefully chosen times, and so I think it will be occupying the designated place next to my desk for a long time yet.

A Sort of Harry Potter Post.

I had a response today to a comment I put on YouTube a few years ago. I’d made the point, very briefly in keeping with the nature of the medium, that some of the incidents in the Harry Potter movies failed the test of logic and were effectively glaring plot holes. After all these years, some poor lad came back to me with:

Stop ruining Harry Potter pls (sic.)

And then I noticed another comment on the same thread which said:

They say Harry Potter isn’t real but they can’t prove it.

Well now, where could this post go in considering the nature of belief? I suspect it would require the holding of Harry Potter in one hand and religion in the other, and then discussing their similarities and differences. I don’t think I’ll bother.

(Interestingly, however, I did find myself comparing Vladimir Putin to Voldermort this morning, and wondering whether the level of hatred aimed in his direction might have some effect on his (allegedly non-existent) health issue. But that was before I stood enthralled as usual by the local village’s best cottage garden, at which point my sense of priorities became properly re-aligned.)

On Royal Indisposition and Avian Connections.

I spent three hours today doing some moderately strenuous garden work with very little in the way of the usual deleterious physical consequences. That made a refreshing change.

The same cannot be said of our dear old Queen (or queer old Dean, as Dr Spooner would have it.) Today was the first day of the Jubilee celebrations and she has already pulled out of the memorial service (or whatever it’s called) in her honour because of ‘experiencing some discomfort.’ Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The sort of discomfort commonly experienced by ninety-six-year-olds is not something one generally associates with royalty.

But the big news of today concerns the birds.

Firstly, I’ve noticed over the past couple of days that the blue tits have been bringing food to the nest box but not taking it in. Instead, they appeared to be only showing it to the chicks, which suggested that they were tempting the brood to come out. Today I saw the two parents come to the box without food, take a quick look around the inside, and then fly away. I didn’t see them come back. I think it reasonable to assume, therefore, that the babies are now experiencing their first day in the big, bad world. (And it’s heartening to think that the parents bothered to come back to make sure they hadn’t left any of the kids behind.)

Secondly: remember me mentioning in a post a moth or two ago that a strikingly marked and coloured cock pheasant had appeared in my garden? I hadn’t seen him again until today, but as I was walking up the lawn I saw him approaching me with apparent purpose. And then he began to make a strange sound. Now, the usual form of vocal expression from a cock pheasant is either an ear-piercing shriek when they’re declaring their territory or warning the hens of possible danger, or a mellifluous (and rather irritating) clucking sound when they’re eating. This was different; this was a sort of squeak with a distinctly pleading tone. And the same pleading tone was evident in his eyes as he looked up at me.

I studied him and decided he looked underfed. He was a little smaller and less rotund than the average cock pheasant, and it seemed to me that he would have been quite unable to compete with the bigger males for food, mating rights or anything else. I beckoned him to follow me and he did. I put a handful of bird seed on the lawn, which he devoured quickly before giving me the pleading look again. ‘May I have some more, please?’ was the obvious message, so more was what he got – a substantial amount in a bowl, most of which he ate before wandering off without so much as a ‘thank you.’ And that’s why he has now been christened Oliver after young Master Twist.

Connections and Goodbyes.

I finally did it yesterday; I finally said goodbye to my old but broken Spanish guitar which has been with me all my adult life. It now lies forlorn but not forgotten in a large skip marked ‘non-recyclable waste’ in Ashbourne’s municipal tip. And it has company in the form of my old woollen jacket which kept a little of the cold out through many a stark winter’s night in my office. (That was in the days when I couldn’t afford supplementary heating in here, and I suspect they might be about to come again.)

When you live alone and rarely speak to anybody, it’s easy to invest near-anthropomorphic qualities in inanimate things. Or maybe it isn’t quite that simple. Maybe something of our personal energy does become infused into things we’ve been close to, and so the sense of saying a sad goodbye to them isn’t quite as silly as it might seem.

I saw Gimli in Ashbourne again, trundling along with his trusty staff as usual. He has no hair now, and appearances would suggest that it must have favoured warmer climes and migrated south to his voluminous grey beard.

Ashbourne, and Sainsbury’s in particular, was unusually busy for a Wednesday, and the smaller shopping trolleys which I use are becoming scarcer and scarcer. I had to wait for the trolley man to bring in what few were standing in the storage bays before I could do my shopping. I wonder how many more ways the world will find to change in these increasingly challenging times. And will I say the final big goodbye before they become intolerable?

The Scruffiness of Jubilee Mania.

The Shire is currently littered with Jubilee detritus. Union flags, bunting, and pictures of our dear old Queen are everywhere – draped across the front of houses, slung between walls and gateposts, hung scruffily on fences, and so on and so forth. There’s even a union flag stuck in one of the farmer’s fields, and several public footpath posts in Church Lane have mini union flag pennants tied to them. To my eye it makes the natural beauty of the Shire landscape look cheap and tawdry, but I suppose it helps people to feel reverence for something in a world turning darker.

What I find amusing is the bunting adorning the village hall. Much of it isn’t composed of union flags at all, but individual pennants of red, white and blue which, taken together, recall the French tricolour. As someone who feels more reverence for Amelie and M. Hulot than I do for the royal family, I can’t say that I disapprove.