pool (or pond)
Finally we have a pond. According to my records I’ve been promising this for some time, you may pick for yourselves from my litany of excuses as to the cause of the delay. (Don’t pick one that I use for my wife!) If you asked me to provide an excuse I’d say that it was the weather.
Ramesh, now an ex-officio member of the gardening club, and I did the digging. Then the plenum of the club assembled to do the hard landscaping (as I believe that it’s called). It was half-filled with buckets of water from the canal; you can’t use tap water, it contains chemicals, which the wildlife doesn’t like. That’s what I learnt from my youTube studies anyway. I also learnt that people who produce gardening videos are all very irritating people. Something about their inane chirpiness really grates. They fall into that category of people who, “should have been shot at birth”.
Now at the moment our pond, or mere, or perhaps tarn looks a wee bit underwhelming. We must wait for Mother Nature and her things to work their magic. Somebody kindly left a load of broken paving stones in the car park, which we utilized to create the border. Then Ramesh and I stole a statement stone from the building site over the road to finish the job.
I’ve decided that the pond/mere/tarn/billabong should be of the wishing kind. We’ll put it about that a votive two-pound coin or five is very effective in resolving affairs of the heart. We should be quids in, the young adults have plenty of dinner money and, if I remember my time as a young adult correctly, affairs-of-the-heart type problems take up a lot of their time. The only issue with this is that the coins might poison the nature. This might interfere with our other plan — the Goldfish. But that might not be the greatest idea anyway, we might just be creating a Carp gulag.
Still, pond acquired, let’s see what happens.
It leaked. Which we never managed to fix.
snámh dá éan
I’ve been on early shift this week for the first time in a while, and I’ve noticed quite a change in the pace of life in our wee part of the planet compared to my last early shift. The birds have started making a lot of noise in the morning. Too me it sounds sweet, which is odd when you come to think about it — the noise is the avian equivalent of The Wurzels singing, “get off my land” and Luther Vandross crooning … well, the type of stuff that Luther croons: “take off that brassiere my dear…”. Whatever the intention behind the chirruping it was pleasant listen on my walk to work.
Later, taking the morning air by the bridge, I saw two Blackbirds fighting. They’re vicious little beggars, they really go for one another. Usually this is accompanied by a lot of squawking but this pair were fighting in total silence, as if it were a fight to the death. They rolled around, wings flapping and beaks stabbing. After a couple of minutes one decided that he’d had enough and hopped off into the night. The winner preened and strutted over to his missus who had been lurking behind one of the benches watching the fight.
There are other signs that spring is nearly here — the Daffodils are flowering in the park and the Cherry trees at the front of the school have blossom. Way too early! It’s still only February. A frost will burn the blossoms right off.
Our Swans, Sandy and Helen, have been gaslighting me. To start with there’s another male, Menny, in the mix. I only realized this when I saw all three of the together. Sandy and Helen are clearly an item: I’ve seen the doing the synchronized neck dance, which is their equivalent of slow dancing. Now they’ve disappeared somewhere. At the weekend I’m going to walk along the canal to see if I can find them. Hopefully they are nesting somewhere close by. I also hope that this isn’t the start of yet another an obsession.