100 Days - day seven

The world is packed with people on bikes and baby animals. Today in Platt Field park it was squirrel kittens in the hollow of a huge dead tree. I had only commented a few days ago how you never see baby squirrels, only grown up ones, and there I am, proved wrong yet again. Dunk and I broke from our routine and went down to the Floop, then up Wilmslow road, across Platt Field and back along Claremont to my road, covering nearly 4 miles.

We have had to do our most recent puzzle on the floor because it is more square, and too big to fit on the back on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lyra is already known for her puzzle piece stealing proclivities so we made a vain attempt to prevent her messing with the half completed puzzle over night, but when I came down this morning to make tea this was how I found her:

We spent the afternoon listening to 1984 by George Orwell on Youtube. It was depressing to read the number of recent comments saying how life under the coronavirus is just like a totalitarian state, as if people didn't actually listen to or understand the story at all. The scene quite close to the beginning of the 'two minutes hate' was chilling, and reminded me unpleasantly of the atmosphere at some Trump rallies where he got people riled up against Hilary Clinton. People forget that Orwell was not writing about the future but about what he thought was already happening in society. Big Brother really is watching you, you just call it Alexa.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - Osprey anxiety on day 6

I am mostly finding the Osprey Cam very relaxing. If I could be in a cosy nest I could happily sit and look at that view all day. I even put it on the computer in the front office at work today so I could go and watch between customers. But intermittently it gets slightly stressful. At one point yesterday Aila left the eggs completely unprotected for nearly a minute when she just took off, swooped round and then happily returned. Today I was watching the two of them struggle with an over-sized awkward twig and nearly stand on the eggs as they tried to decide where it might fit in the nest. Then someone in the comments shared a video from last year when Aila had a confrontation with a tawny owl that came to investigate in the night. 

I had other things going through my head to write about today, but by the time we shopped and ate dinner they were all gone. I have to go and wash up now. I don't mind; the washing up rota that I established a few weeks ago is working well, nobody is making fuss, so doing one day in four hardly feels like a chore. The colleague who annoyed me so much the other day chose today to confide in me about a relationship dilemma, we chatted for ages, and it felt good that he thinks of me as a friend when mostly I have quite superficial relationships with people at work. 

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - day 5 Lockdown sharing

Out on delivery today I encountered a 'share with your neighbours in lockdown' box on the windowsill of some flats in Withington. It is heart-warming to see people tentatively reaching out to others around them, and giving away books is always a winner as far as I'm concerned. So now we can spend the evening playing Exploding Kittens, having finished another puzzle yesterday:

I so enjoyed this poem by Imtiaz Dharker with my lunch today that I popped over to Bloodaxe and bought her book. "If there were to be a World Laureate, then for me the role could only be filled by Imtiaz Dharker" says Carol Ann Duffy, high praise indeed. I have resisted buying pretty much anything for weeks because I feel so angry at people buying crap and overloading the postal system, but Claire and I agreed that yarn and books were not crap and that ordering them was permissible given the circumstances (i.e. the need to read and knit things while you sit around at home). Having also been somewhat sarcastic about the fair-weather park walkers (it has been overcast the last few days and the park was pretty empty) I admit that a heavy downpour caused Dunk and I to wimp out today; I hope the cootling parents are managing without my supervision, they did seem to be keeping a close eye on it but I feel the need to check up on them.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - fourth day

It's an old photo but this is pretty much how things are. People are shopping like its Christmas and Royal Mail's response to the situation is to suspend letter deliveries on Saturdays. Quite how this is going to help they have not explained (in fact all their decisions have been taken without bothering to even inform us in advance). They have acted for weeks like the service has been unaffected by the pandemic, when in truth most people are probably getting post every other day, sometimes only one in three. And our office is currently coping well. No, that's a lie. We are not coping. Stop buying shit!

But that was not today's offload. This is:

You know those people who love to tell you how to do your job like you're stupid or something. I have one of those. I mean I like him really, but mostly he does like to think he's 'in charge', when he is just a colleague, and consults with the manager on behalf of everyone. This week I am one earlies. That makes me responsible for the cage jobs. I had it all in hand, then went out to do a tiny bit of delivery. Said colleague comes past me on the street with his delivery and proceeds to tell me something I had already dealt with and how he had sorted it out and told the manager about it. And I think I will give myself a round of applause for not telling him to fuck off with his interference. 

You know I think I could enjoy this offloading.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - Day 3 Wildlife

wikimedia commons

Dunk shared a nice photo of the heron. The nest that 'our' coots have built contains nearly as much rubbish as twigs, the one in this picture is much more photogenic. I don't have a thingy to take photos when I am out. It is one of the few things that makes me even consider getting a smart phone. At the weekend the coots in Alexandra Park had two cootlings (cootlets ... cootles ... whatever baby coots are called), but now they only have one. I wonder if coots can count. Even if not I assume they notice that one is missing. I have mentioned before how much I like even the most tame of encounters with wildlife. Are waterfowl on a pond in an urban park really wildlife? I am not sure. I do miss the countryside for that reason. Although there are plenty of foxes in the city I used to love to see buzzards, and once even a live badger (as opposed to the numerous dead ones). 
Have got Louis and Aila on the Osprey Cam loaded in another tab, you can just sit and watch them, waiting for the chicks to hatch. They are, I said to Toby, the most magnificent of birds. He disagreed and said that no, the emu is the most magnificent of birds ... because of the Emu War.

"The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird, indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns, - leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. While a number of the birds were killed, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction." 

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 days - Day two Pista Chio

We have been eating a lot of pista chio nuts (that's not a typo, that's how my brain read it on the packet). When I say 'we' I mean Tish. Maybe she will turn into a pistachio nut. That's what parents say when you do stuff like that as a child. The things is the shells can't go in the worm bin and it seems a waste to throw them away. I have suggested she bury them in the tiny flower bed to add some extra bulk to the soil, and maybe help the drainage ... who knows. 

We decided not to risk food poisoning yesterday and threw out some chicken that was past the sell-by date. It felt hugely wasteful considering the circumstances, but also sensible since the last thing anyone needs right now is to get ill.
Monkey says her ear tickles; we are cleaning them out with ear cleaner stuff since they were feeling blocked up. Blocked up ears is not as bad a food poisoning but little things can feel disproportionately significant when the world is all weird.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 days - Day 1

Dunk posted yesterday about 100 Days To Offload, which sounds like just what I need at the moment. My blog posting has dropped off significantly over the last couple of years, and even more so recently. It feels as if I have lost confidence in any thought that goes through my head, an overwhelming sense of being irrelevant. I joined Extinction Rebellion in 2018 with a huge surge of enthusiasm and feeling of power, which over time had petered away to a disheartened ignoring of all their facebook posts. I have started crying at work. Even writing this is hard. Maybe if I force myself to write down thoughts ... who knows ... whatever, 

I read this book a few weeks ago, I wanted to write about it but had reached the point where I assumed only bots visit my blog so why bother. Homestead by Rosina Lippi. It was so, so lovely. It is set in a remote farming community in Austria, across the span of the 20th century, following the lives of the people. During that time, barring the devastation of the world wars, their lives remain utterly unchanged. They farm, they marry, they have children, they die. I fell in love with both the people and the place in a way I have not done with a book for a long time. 

"Barbara stood there looking back towards Half-Moon Hollow, where she had lived for just over a year, where she had been the farmer's wife, where she had thought to live out her life and bear her children and die. Then she looked up towards Bengat, the house leaning out over the cliff. Her mother's household, and after that, when one day her mother was gone, her sister-in-law Anna's.
But there was nowhere else to go, and so she climbed the path to Bengat and let herself be taken in.
The only surprise waiting for her was the sheep: her father said they were hers, in her charge. Whatever profit came from them belonged to her, and when she married again she would have a dowry any farmer would be glad of. Barbara tried to look surprised at the idea of marrying again, ashamed of the fact that this thought had come to her almost as soon as Franz Michel died. Before the last of his blood had been soaked out of her apron." (p.75)

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload