cute little heartbreaker....

In the small hours of Saturday morning, we were awoken by a strange noise.  For a moment, I thought it might be a cat fight, but as I lay in bed and listened, I realised that the noise was more of a kind of bark/whine and was far more likely to be coming from a fox.

I like foxes.  We used to have loads of them around here, and I have a very fond memory of the time when I sat by the ground floor window of my bedroom in a shared house and watched two fox cubs playing on a flattened cardboard box right underneath me as their mother watched me closely from the bottom of the garden.

It was a magical few minutes.

We don't see them so often any more.  The council switched to wheelie bins a few years ago now, and I guess their food supplies just dried up now that we don't have bin bags piled out in the street.  I don't suppose anyone misses the mess, but even so, it's almost a shame.  I used to love watching them running up and down the streets in the middle of the night or if you bumped into one first thing in the morning.  I don't know about you, but I love these little glimpses of nature in our man-made world.

On Saturday morning, I got out of bed to peek out of my window, and in the dawn light, I saw a young fox just on the other side of the street.  He was fussing over something and letting out these strange little yelping whines.  I watched for a while and saw that he was playing with something that looked like a ball.... then it dawned on me: he had a hedgehog.  I had no idea we had any hedgehogs around here.  Not surprisingly, the hedgehog had rolled up into a ball, and the young fox was experiencing the pain and frustration of trying to bury his nose into the spikes as he tried to find a way in.  He looked like he wasn't having any luck, and he gave up once, but soon came trotting back to have another go.  A few minutes later, he gave up for good and trotted off down the street as if he had other urgent business that required his immediate attention.

I watched for a bit longer to see if the hedgehog uncurled himself and wandered off, but he seemed reluctant to move until he was quite sure the coast was clear... and who could blame him? I pulled the curtain back and went back to bed.

Next morning, the hedgehog was still there.  I popped out for a closer look and saw that he was still curled up in a ball, but he was missing his head.  He'd frustrated the fox, but for him is was no more than a pyrrhic victory.

As I watched that scuffle in the early morning light, I had a quick look around for my cat. If all the noise had woken me up, she was hardly likely to have ignored such a noise on her territory and was bound to have gone to investigate.  Sure enough, she was nowhere to be seen.  I should imagine a fox would know better than to tangle with the spitting ball of muscle, claws and fury that is an angry cat, and I also would think that most cats are smart enough to stay out of the way of a hungry fox.  Mind you, our cat is not the shiniest pebble on the beach, bless her....you never know what's going through her little head.  As she was nowhere to be seen, I imagine that she was watching the whole thing from a distance and a safe vantage point off the ground with BIG eyes.

You can't trust these foxes, you know. As any fule kno.

a modern day fagan....

When I got home from the pub quiz last night, I was a little surprised to see that someone had covered my front doormat with rice. I'd only had a couple of pints, so it didn't take long for me to realise that this was a somewhat unlikely scenario, and so I had a closer look: the bits of rice were moving. The mat - and in fact the whole of the little storm porch the mat sits in - was swarming with maggots. Nice.

It was by now 23:30 and I was quite keen to get to bed. C. wasn't due home on the late flight from Prague until later. For a fraction of a second, I contemplated stepping over the mat and pretending I hadn't seen anything. Well, they definitely weren't there when I left earlier, so perhaps I could mount a convincing defence about them not being there when I got home.

Hmmm. Perhaps not.

With a deep sigh, I opened the door and stepped over the writhing masses to help me mount a defence against the invaders. My first act was to gingerly pick up the doormat and to carry it around the corner to the bin. It was pretty old anyway, has been peed on numerous times by various cats annoyed that our Minou has disappeared through her cat flap and that they don't have the magic key that allows access, and so it was no great loss (and perhaps it exuded a smell that was attracting the damn things in the first place). My next step was to sweep the remaining maggots into the dustpan and to toss them down the drain. Easier said than done. For one thing, they seemed to be a little sticky and were actually quite tricky to sweep up. I persisted, but it quickly became obvious that more were arriving almost as quickly as I was sweeping them up. What's more, the wheelie bin round the corner was now covered in maggots too, climbing off the doormat I'd tossed in there earlier.

Where on earth were they coming from? I fetched a torch and had a look around: although they were making a beeline for my front door, they actually appeared to be coming in off the street. I looked around at the various wheelie-bins nearby, but there was no obvious cadaver or anything. It was now getting pretty late, so in a last-ditch attempt to clear my lines, I boiled the kettle a few times and filled a bucket with a mixture of boiling water and bleach. A few applications of this seemed to slow the tide, if not actually stop it, and I was soon aided by the arrival of reinforcements in the shape of C. and her willingness to pop every moving maggot she could see with the toe of her shoes. By about 01:15, we looked to have won the skirmish. The area around the door was clear, I'd emptied the hoover of live maggots, and the bin looked much quieter after an application of boiling water and bleach. I retreated to bed, not entirely convinced that I wouldn't wake up to a front hall filled with writhing maggots. Luckily I slept a dreamless sleep.

As it happened, by the time I woke up, it was as if nothing had happened: apart from the odd cadaver, the porch and the bin were completely free of live maggots. They say that the weather this year has been perfect for bugs, being just the right combination of warm and damp. A rise in the number of ladybirds is one thing though; an infestation of maggots something else entirely.

Yuck. Good job I'm not really squeamish (or that I hadn't had more to drink. Can you imagine stumbling across that after a skin-full?).

But a few mysteries remain: where on earth did they come from? Where did they go? Is that it? Is this something that happens every year? Does it always only last for a few hours? Was I actually pretty lucky/unlucky to have witnessed it at all? So many unanswered questions.

Nature, eh?

(but baby you'd freeze out there)

It was the unnatural glow that made me open the bathroom window to have a look outside. I knew what it was even before I opened the window, but I had to see it with my own eyes. Snow. Bollocks. It's great when you're a kid and you might get a day off school mucking about on a sledge, but when you have to slog your way to work, it seems to be not much more than an inconvenience that makes your feet wet, your car journey to work a nightmare and the cancellation of your football game that evening a certainty.

A little later on, as I opened my car door to reach for my scraper to remove some of the snow, a little fluffy bundle fell off the roof and landed squarely on the driver's seat and began to melt. My hands were getting cold and I was not in the best of moods as I contemplated the almost virgin snow still sat on the road.

Brilliant.

And then, completely unexpectedly, somewhere along the way to work, I had a total change of heart about the whole thing. Traffic was moving slowly and carefully on roads still slick with snow and ice, and my usual ten minute journey to work was taking far, far longer than usual. I was running late, but for some reason I began to enjoy the weather. After all, surely anything that can enliven an otherwise mundane Thursday in February, the first week back in the office after a lovely holiday, is surely to be embraced?

The roads were busy, but they were also blessedly silent, with the usual noises of traffic hushed by the snow. There was an air of camaraderie amongst the rush-hour drivers too: we were all in this together. The car park at work was oddly quiet too, with people apparently marooned in their lovely houses. You couldn't see the parking spaces either, so people were just doing the best that they could. It was nice.

I left the office fairly early and, in lieu of my cancelled football game, I decided to go for a run. It was dark, and the slightly warmer temperatures meant that the snow was rapidly turning into slush, but I loved every moment of that 4 miles, even though the icy water quickly turned my feet into mobile blocks of ice. As the relentlessly random DJ in charge of my iPod took me from Jeff Buckley to AC/DC and from Scott Walker to Iron Maiden, I admired the slightly sagging snowman in the doorway of a house with his parsnip prick still standing proud; I smiled at the huddled couples walking their frolicking dogs alongside the pond; I weaved my way through the forest of waterfowl footprints in the snow along the Trent Embankment; I ran down the slippery green trails left by the first beginnings of snowmen; I tipped my metaphorical hat at the snowman and the snowdog sat on one of the benches by the river. Above all, I enjoyed the fresh air and the sense of quiet. Thursday evenings around rush hour are not normally this peaceful.



Robert Frost springs to mind:

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

We might get some more snow tonight, although I think it might be too warm now. I actually hope that we do. Perhaps I'm still suffering the aftershock of a happy week spent in the snowy alps, but I could swear that the world seems a slightly nicer place with a blanket of snow.

....and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

I've got a feeder for you to perch on...

I like birds, although I'm not so sure that they're very fond of me at the moment. We were driving home from a visit to my parents on Saturday when I contrived to run over a blackbird. It happened when I was just tootling along, minding my own business and obeying the speed limit on the way to the motorway junction. I saw a pair of blackbirds out of the corner of my eye on the side of the road, heard that distinctive alarm call and had just enough time to see the male bird launch itself into the air and in front of the car.

This has happened before, but usually you look in your rearview mirror to see the bird wheeling away into the air without a care in the world. This time I glanced back and saw a cloud of feathers and a lump in the middle of the road.

Ooops.

I know it's ridiculous, but as I drove on, I couldn't help but anthropomorphise the situation and imagined the female of the pair standing on the side of the road looking folornly at the body of her soulmate, wondering how she was going to feed all of those hungry mouths in the nest now.

We've got some blackbirds living near us, and they're frequent and welcome visitors in our garden and in the surrounding trees-- although perhaps a bit less frequent since we got the cat, mind. One often sits in the tree outside our bedroom window, and maybe it's my imagination, but he seems to be looking at me somewhat accusingly at the moment; my guilt confirmed when I fail to return his gaze and won't look him in the eye.

it feels like years since it's been here...

I ventured out into the spring sunshine at lunchtime today to go for a run. I don't generally need much encouragement to flee my desk, but I really like running when the sun's out. I run all year round, of course, and I'd never exactly say that I enjoy it, but there's something especially soothing about sticking your sunglasses on and running in the sun. I'm still going out in my thermal long-sleeved tops, mind you, but then I've always been a bit of a masochist when it comes to running, and I like it when I get really, really hot and sweaty as it always makes me feel like I've had to work that little bit harder. Besides, I've started leaving the hat, gloves and windproof jacket at home, so things must be looking up. It was lovely outside here today. Warm, but with a lovely breeze - strong enough to be cooling but never strong enough to feel like a headwind. A good way to spend your lunch hour, I think.

As I was running along the new path down by the river, before hooking back towards the office, I looked up and saw that the sky was filled with the sleek, streamlined shapes of swallows. They were swooping and diving and generally making flying look like it's not just a mode of transportation but a really great game. Now, we all know that one swallow does not a summer make, but they are the traditional harbingers of the summer and there were five or six of them swirling around up there so..... is it safe to wonder out loud if we might actually get a bit of summer this year? A proper summer. Y'know - one where it actually stops raining for a bit so that the sun can come out?

Now, i wouldn't want you to think that I keep a journal of these things like some kind of low-rent Bill Oddie, but I can't help but notice that I didn't spot a single swallow around here until 3rd June last year.

Oh no. I'm nothing like Bill Oddie.

Nothing at all (although I do note the grey flashes in that beard...)

So what conclusions can we draw from the fact that I've spotted a swallow a good three weeks earlier than I did last year?

1) That we're going to have a really fantastic summer this year. Really hot and with loads of sun. Glastonbury's going to be brilliant.

2) Nothing at all. The number of swallows in the sky bears very little relation to what kind of weather we'll be having over the next few months. Anyway, what about global warming?

3) That I'm an feckless, near-sighted eejit who barely looks in the sky and couldn't tell the difference between a swan and a swallow from a distance of anything greater than about 10 feet.

My money's on a combination of 2 and 3, but there's surely no harm in hoping for number 1, eh?

Or - and here's a thought - instead of rabbiting on about the weather all the time, maybe I could either:

a) just move somewhere with a somewhat more clement and predictable climate.
or
b) shut up

Or is this what happens to all British people when they get to my age? Mild Weather Obsession (MWO) brought about by living in a damp and temperate climate subject to slight fluctuations but no great extremes? How many words do the English have for rain? Is it more than the Eskimos have for snow? It must be close.....

cold, cold water surrounds me now...

At the risk of sounding like a survivalist or as a supporter of some strange millennial Christian cult, I have to say that I find it quite alarming just how close to the Dark Ages we appear to be.

A little bit of water (well, several weeks of solid rain... finishing up with a month's worth falling in a single hour on Friday), and the fabric of our nation seems to be on the verge of falling apart. Apparently 350,000 people in Gloucestershire are going to be without running water tonight - an irony that is surely not lost on them as they sit in their sodden homes.

In spite of our pride in our wonderfully advanced civilisation, it seems that we are only ever around 72 hours away from chaos.... the 72 hours that it takes for the supermarkets to start running out of supplies. Apparently supermarkets across the west of the country have started selling out of basic essentials like water, bread and milk as people panic buy now in case they don't have the opportunity later. I should think that come tomorrow, it will be a case of the survival of the fittest, as hunter-gatherers in coracles strike out looking for their next meal, and the rest are just left to rot in their lovely detached houses with double-garages.

... and to think that only this weekend I was laughing at the British National Party's plans to build a refuge in rural Croatia. Apparently this is where the leaders of Britain's premier political purveyors of racist stupidity are planning to go when the oil supplies finally run out and the world collapses into anarchy.

As The Observer reported yesterday:

"One day some in the party hope it will become a sustainable community, one that is not reliant on fossil fuels or outside power of any kind but instead is capable of harnessing solar energy and tapping into local streams for fresh water."

I'll bet that sounds like a mighty attractive proposition to large portions of South-Western England at the moment (the terrible company you'd have to keep notwithstanding).

Oh hold on, what's that last bit about tapping into local streams?

Have those deep thinkers at the BNP taken flooding into account, do you think? Wouldn't it be ironic if this blissful idyll was destroyed by rising waters caused by global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels?

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people, obviously.

(The BNP, I mean. Not the people of South-Western England. I'm sure some of them are lovely.)

it seems like years since its been clear....

Right.

That's it.

I know it's ridiculously English of me to talk about this, but I am now officially bored of the weather we've been getting this summer. It just has not stopped raining in weeks. Last month was apparently the wettest June since records began (which sounds impressive, but records only began in 1914, which isn't really so very long ago in the grand scheme of things, but I suppose the wettest summer in the last 90 or so years is still pretty wet).

Frankly I'm amazed that there's any water left in the sky to fall, but it's been relentless.

Normally this doesn't really bother me - my bedroom when I was growing up had a partially flat roof and I used to love the sound of the rain beating down on it. I like rain. Hell, I spent a weekend in a tent on a muddy farm a couple of weeks ago, and that was just brilliant.... but this is ridiculous. Occasionally the sun comes out and it looks like things might be looking up.... but before too long it's pissing it down again with renewed fury, often with the sun still out (raincoat, umbrella and sunglasses? It's quite the look this year). You can't seem to go anywhere without getting caught in it. The last few times I've been out running, I've been drenched. Now, I quite like running in the rain once in a while, but every time I go? No thanks.

It was nice for most of the day today.....and then I went out to play football and it rained solidly for about 4 hours.

Is it me? Is it something I've done? Was it something I said?

I'm supposed to be going to the One Day International between England and the West Indies at Trent Bridge on Saturday. D'you think I should get the hint and maybe take an umbrella? Or perhaps I should just save myself the trouble of a drenching and stay in bed?

I suppose it could be worse: at least I don't live in Hull.

Not because of the floods.

Just generally.

here comes the summer...

It's really started to feel like summer in this particular corner of the East Midlands over the last couple of days. The sun has been out pretty much all weekend, and although it hasn't been particularly hot, it has been nice to dust off my sunglasses and to leave my coat and my umbrella at home for a change. I even attended a splendid BBQ on Saturday, of all things.....

At the risk of sounding like Bill Oddie (albeit a rather taller, thinner and less hairy version), it has also been nice to see the nicer weather bring out some of our more welcome summer visitors.



Firstly, I had to rescue a bumblebee from the kitchen, where he was rather indignantly headbutting the window and wondering why he wasn't bobbing lazily above some flowers. I like bumblebees: they're such friendly looking things, aren't they? Apparently they are in some danger of extinction though, so I was more than happy to rescue this little chap and to set him loose in the garden, where he buzzed away sluggishly on his silly little wings and slowly disappeared up into the blue skies (a bumblebee's wings, of course, have been scientifically proven as being insufficient to enable them to fly. According to these learned people, a bumblebee only manages to fly under "the power of its own arrogance". It's the obvious solution to an otherwise intractable problem....)

I was out in the garden again a little later on when I spotted some birds swooping and soaring above the suburban rooftops.



They were Swifts, back from their winter quarters in the tropics to enjoy the few brief weeks that we somewhat laughably call our summer (if it was me, I reckon I'd stay in the tropics. Why bother with all the dangerous hassle of a migration?) I suppose they could have been swallows.... but I reckon they were too big to be swallows, and I used to be in the YOC, so I'm prepared to stick my neck out over this).

I don't think there is any other bird that manages to make flying look like quite so much fun.

Mind you, I was soon reminded that not everything summer brings is so welcome: I popped into town and was confronted by the sight of loads of gnarly footed men wearing flip-flops.

Swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts.