Bird watching

The weather has been fine all week; some frosty mornings, but no rain.  The paths in Stanmer woods are once again walkable without the dog coming home covered in mud and yesterday afternoon I spent a few delightful minutes there watching a flock of long-tailed tits as they hunted grubs or whatever it is they eat.  These elusive little birds travel in family groups - I assume they re family groups - usually a dozen or so strong and are best seen when the trees are leafless as they tend to stay in the higher branches.  There used to be a family of them in Withdean Park that I would see occasionally but have not done so for some time.  We get plenty of blue tits in the garden - another delightful bird - but I only recall ever seeing a long-tailed tit in the garden on one occasion.  My friend Tony has them visit him quite frequently, which makes me rather envious.

Mention of Tony reminds me that his late wife planted daffodil bulbs on the triangular, grass-covered traffic island outside their house.  She chose the earliest flowering variety she could find and I noticed this week that they are already in bloom.  Last Monday (St David's Day) I wondered if the daffs were blooming in Cornwall and on Tuesday it was reported in the paper that daffodil farmers in the Vale of Glamorgan (which is in Wales) had no blooms for their patron saint's day, the daff being the national flower of Wales.  The report also said that the Cornish daffs were not yet ready and that everything was a month behind.  That seems a little strange as only in January we were being told that everything was three weeks ahead!

A day or two back, Skip posted a picture of grape hyacinths blooming in his (Californian) garden.  We have one or two trying to bloom here in Brighton, but the crocuses are doing very well.  Many years ago I planted a couple of hundred or so bulbs.  They were the naturalising sort and in various colours - white, cream, yellow, pale mauve and purple.  They have almost taken over the garden, despite rigorous thinning, but are now nearly all pale mauve.

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I have until now forgotten to report back on the malt bread.  It was surprisingly successful, albeit not of the same stickiness that there is in the shop-bought variety.  At the request (request?) of She Who Must Be etc I made another this week.  I think I squeezed in a few extra sultanas - this loaf seems fruitier - and I made sure to put in two full tablespoons of malt extract.  This is of such a high viscosity that it is difficult, no - it's impossible, to ensure that all the extract leaves the spoon so this time I used two overflowing tablespoonfuls.  The result is a marked improvement and I suspect it will not be long before another is made.

Getting serious again

I rarely touch upon political matters and never offer an opinion on party political matters believing that my politics is a matter that is private to me.  What I am about to write is political but sectarian only in that it reflects upon national and international affairs.

So oil has been discovered in the Falkland waters and Argentina wants a share of the revenue.  Surprise, surprise.  The view has been expressed in our media that this is a gesture, mere posturing, by the Argentine president for home consumption and that there is no intention of taking the matter as far as invading the Falkland Islands on the spurious grounds that they belong to Argentina.  The last time they tried this, in 1982, we very quickly despatched a task force and liberated the islanders.  Of course, in those days we had a navy with sufficient ships to make a task force.  These days our entire navy probably consists of fewer ships than were in that task force.  Fortunately the Falklands are garrisoned by a larger number of troops than was the case in 1982 and they would probably be sufficient to deter any landings.

Why is it, I wonder, that our politicians are unable to learn the lessons of history?  It was 80 years ago that we started to run down or navy, only to find that we needed it again in the fight against Hitler, and history shows that we did exactly the same thing after the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.  The Government has, I appreciate, the difficult job of keeping down taxes while keeping up expenditure on defence, the National Health Service, education, etc etc.  But if there was less wastage on ridiculous ideas such as the national ID cards (the latest example is £41 million on an abhortive attempt to introduce road pricing) and less of the snouts in trough, not to mention the EU, well, then there would be plenty for all the important things.

But back to the Falklands.  Hillary Clinton has kindly offered to mediate between the Argentine and British governments, but she and Bill are personal friends of the Argentine president.  Impartial mediation?  Anyway, there is nothing to mediate.  The oil is in Falkland waters and belongs to the Islanders, who want to remain a British dependency.  Full stop.

Third time lucky?

The living room in our house, which we bought very late in the 1960s, has an alcove either side of the chimney breast, a common feature of houses built before and soon after World War II.  We decided that we would like a light on the wall in each alcove and my late father-in-law, an expert DIY man, fitted them for us.  They were switched on buy a pull cord so there was no need to run wiring through the walls to a single switch.  Not surprisingly, by the late 2000s those lights were looking a little dated - very 1970s - and She Who Must Be Obeyed suggested that we should replace them.  I was, in principal, in agreement, especially as the only way I could remove the shades was by inserting the index and middle fingers of one hand and turning the fixing ring with the tips of those fingers, not a particularly easy job.

After many hours of searching we eventually found fittings we both liked.  There was just one problem: the wall lights had no pull cord to switch them on and they had to be wired in to the normal flick switch.  I gave the matter considerable thought and hit upon the solution, which was to place switches where the old lights had been and carefully cut a short channel up the wall so that the lights fitted above the switches with the bottom of the light fittings resting on the tops of the switches.  It proved remarkably easy, and it was a piece of cake to fit the three-branch matching central light.

All went well until, about a year later, one of the lamps in the central fitting went out, came back on a few minutes later, then went out again.  I removed the bulb - which looked fine to me - and fitted a new one.  This performed in exactly the same way.  I swapped it with a bulb from another of the branches, only to find the the "new" replacement didn't come on while the replacement bulb that I had put in another branch performed perfectly.  I diagnosed a wiring fault in the light fitting.  Having taken the fitting down and dismatled it as far as I could, I realised that there was one junction that I could replace, but I was unable to get to the area where the lead reached the lamp holder and Murphy's Law said that was where the fault would be.  The answer was to exchange the whole fitting.

I took it back to the shop, the local branch of a national chain of DIY stores.  As I was unable to produce the receipt, they refused to replace the fitting - even though it was one that was exclusive to that chain so could not have been bought anywhere else but one of their stores.  I swallowed my chagrin and bought a new fitting.  (I later discovered that we had bougt it not just the previous year, but two years and a day before my attempted exchange.)

Within a month, the new fitting played up in exactly the same way.  Yesterday I was finally able to take it back and get a replacement.  How long, I wonder, will this last?  Or will it be third time lucky?

Let's lighten up a bit

We've I've been getting a tad serious with my last couple of posts so let's have a little light relief.

I love those optical illusion thingies - you knw, the picture that could be two faces looking at each other or a vase.  Here's one I've not seen before:

Do you see a skull or a woman looking in a mirror?  This one and many more at www.indianchild.com.

Manners maketh man

The motto of Winchester College and almost certainly coined by William of Wykeham, founder of the  College.

Although when the motto was adopted by the College the word "manners" probably had a different meaning from our understanding today, to me it still seems very apt.  Life is so much sweeter when those around us display good manners, and I don't mean good table manners.  Placing one's elbow on the table while discussing a serious point over dinner hardly counts as a major breech of etiquette these days, although seeing a dinner companion chewing with an open mouth is a little off-putting.

I do get slightly irritated on those occasions when I have displayed good manners by holding a door open for a lady and she just sweeps through with no acknowledgement.  It doesn't seem too much to ask for a smile and a 'Thank you'.  I get just as annoyed when I see somebody leave a supermarket till without thanking the cashier, although in that case I am annoyed for the cashier rather than myself.  I sometimes stop and wonder how often I am equally guilty given that it is so easy to be in a hurry or to be worlds away mentally writing tomorrow's blog or some such.

I think that I generally remember to thank the supermarket cashier and the bus driver, but one place where I slipped up for a good many years was in the home.  Every night the Old Bat puts a meal on the table having spent an hour or so preparing it - not to mention the time and effort involved in shopping etc - and it is just too easy to take that for granted.  I do now try to make the effort to express my appreciation, but it is difficult to come up with a different form of words to avoid it sounding either insincere or mere habit.  I console myself that it is the thought that counts.

"The French have a word for it."

Or so it is said. In fact, that is not quite true. The Acadamie Française - I think it's them - has been conducting a campaign to purify the French language by eradicating foreign words which have crept into everyday use; words such as "weekend" and "picnic" - although the latter is sometimes spelt "pique-nique", presumably in an attempt to make it look more French. I think the Acadamie is fighting a losing battle as those words are now far too deeply entrenched in the minds of the Frenchmen "sur la route".

There is another way in which that old saw is short of the truth. Sometimes the French don't have just a word for it; they have several. For example, a potato is pomme de terre, literally "apple of the earth", which is three words. I always thought the French for apple was simply pomme but I have recently seen the fruit described as pomme de l'air - four words, and literally "apple of the air".

But we Brits can't afford to poke fun at our nearest neighbours.  After all, we no longer have an English word describing an establishment where one goes to buy a meal.  We used to have chop houses, and then there were dining rooms, but they are now all called restaurants or bistros or cafes, all French words, although café in France means "coffee" rather than the place where one buys the drink.  And it's not as though we are actually short of words in the English tongue.  Take the words ditch, rill, stream, brook, dyke, burn and bourne.  All of them mean a waterway smaller than a river, although it is true that they are not quite synonymous as there is an implied difference in the size of the waterway.  That said, it is difficult, even impossible, to define just when a stream has grown big enough to be called a river, and some of those words are virtually obsolete or mainly regional in their use.  One word missing from that list is creek.  I think I'm right in saying that in America it is used to describe a waterway like a large stream or small river.  In England that is not the case.  Here a creek is a tidal inlet which may or may not lead to a stream and creeks are generally associated with areas of marsh.

Whether the words are French or not, what a vast wealth we have in our native tongue.  Things can sparkle, glitter, glisten; water can be still, unmoving, limpid.  It's such a shame that there are so few people nowadays able to use the language in the way that the Bard did 400 years ago.  We are missing so much.

St David's Day

St David, of course, being the patron saint of Wales.  I'm not Welsh; nor have I a drop of anything but pure English blood running through my veins.  All the same, St David's Day is an important date in my calendar.  As far as I am concerned, 1st March is the first day of spring.  Not that the weather lords seem to agree with me.  Nevertheless, by sheer coincidence I lifted the last of the parsnips from the garden on Saturday (we had fine weather, unlike yesterday) and ate them, roasted, with the roast pork for dinner yesterday.  I always regard the parsnip as a winter vegetable, so eating the last two on the last day of winter seemed particularly appropriate.

I've grown parsnips in the garden for a good many years now, despite the fact that our soil is almost too shallow and definitely too stony.  The stones cause the roots to split, so our parsnips remind me of squids - a bulbous bit at the top with loads of trailing tentacles.  It does require the demonstration of a certain degree of dexterity to prepare them for the pot, but they taste so much better than those we can buy in the supermercado and roast parsnips are among my favourite vegetables.  Some years ago now, a neighbour advised me to use a dowel - the end of a fork handle or broomstick is ideal - to make a hole in the soil.  This should be filled with compost and the seeds placed on top.  The idea is that this gives the parsnip a chance to develop without splitting, but it has never worked very well for me so this year I have decided to try something different.  I have a number of deep flower pots which I don't use for anything, so I will fill them with compost and sow the seeds in them.  Maybe we will get some proper looking parsnips next winter.  Or maybe we won't.

Anyway, it's now spring.  The crocuses are in bloom (when the sun shines), the snowdrops are out in force, there are catkins (see the picture on Fern's daily photo blog) and the daffodils planted by my friend Tony's late wife in the grass in front of their house are waving merrily in the wind.  They are a particularly early variety.  I have seen none in the shops as yet, but no doubt my brother has seen plenty.  He lives in Cornwall in a spot where they are grown commercially.

 

And so we are back where we started as the daffodil is the national flower of Wales.