Silent September

My back garden (AmEng backyard) is usually alive with birds noshing at the various feeders that I put out for them: peanuts for the tits (similar to chickadees) and woodpeckers, sunflower seeds for the finches (especially Greenfinches), nyjer seed for Goldfinches, and assorted other foods for the ground feeders like Robins and Blackbirds.
But it has fallen silent. Scarcely a bird to be seen. The reason: I have removed ALL the feeders. At first the birds came back for a couple of days, metaphorically scratching their heads and wondering where the free food had gone. And now they have gone.

I have had to do this because there is a widespread outbreak of something nasty that is killing birds at feeding stations, mainly Greenfinches. In the last week, I have picked up at least eight, dead or dying. The disease we all worry about is trichomoniasis, caused by a parasite, but is more likely to be salmonella, the result of a great density of birds at the feeding stations and the presence of water, ideal conditions for the infection.

So, I have sprayed the whole feeding area, disinfected and washed every feeder, and must now wait for two weeks - that is the received wisdom about the period needed to beat the disease - before resuming the feeding.

I tell you, it's scary. Not a repeat of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, thank goodness, but still an ominous silence in September.

Butternut Squash

I was standing at the checkout at the Newmarket Tesco's yesterday - interesing place, Newmarket, lots of bow-legged little men and muscular women with moustaches, but I digress - when I noticed, as you do, the purchases of the lady in front of me. She had a spectacular bosom, an object of great beauty, but I wouldn't want to have to carry that around on my front: my wine-fed embonpoint is quite enough for me. Don't worry, the bosom has no further part in this story (although it WAS magnificent and it is as well, for the sake of my continued survival, that she was not sitting on a John Deere tractor at the time).
"What is that?" I asked, pointing at a curious gourd-like object in her pile of purchases (You get bolder when you get older, and don't mind asking questions like that of buxom women whom you have never met before. About the only consolation of becoming an Old Scrote)
And it was a butternut squash. It looked to me an ideal object to gouge the contents out of, put a 25mm diameter circular hole in the side and hang it in a tree for Blue Tits to nest in.
But apparently you can make soup out of them. It was her way, she said, of making sure her children had their vegetable fix without realising it.
Magnificent. I wish I could have taken a photograph.

An Old Lady in the garden

It's not often a man can go into his back garden and find that an attractive Old Lady has arrived during the night. And there she sat, motionless except for a slight quivering which I found most endearing.
It can be a lonely life out here on the Cambridgeshire fens, with nowt to look at between my back door and the Urals.
So my visitor was doubly welcome: a bit of company on an early dew-kissed morning, and only the second Old Lady that I had ever trapped.
Here is a picture of her. (Not my pic. In the ones I took, she looks like an ink blot)

Abuse of the uvula

I wish to declare war on the glottal stop. Things are not ge''in' be''er, they are going from bad to Estuary English worse.
Don't misunderstand me. My heart soars every time a BBC announcer manages to say Law'and'Order rather than LauraNorder. That is legitimate. And I am happy for Arabic speakers that the glottal stop is a consonant in their language. After all, they don't have much going for them, apart from amazing oil revenues.
But the use of the clack (uvula) among young people is ge''ing ou'ev'and.
I appreciate that it is all about street cred, which is why I have taken to wearing a codpiece on my bi-weekly trip to Tesco's. It's grotesque. I trow, but no' as ba' as the fu''in glo''al stop.
See you in court.

Mrs T gets mildly political

Our indomitable North Walian correspondent leaps in once more where angels fear to tread:

Dear Frau Merkel, she writes, I am not one of those who goes on a rant about the bloody Germans, etc. We won fair and square, and that should be the end of it.
But I do have a problem with your language, not that I know much about it, except that it seems to consist of capital letters, long words and people clearing their throats. A bit like Welsh, really, except that Welsh sings better.
I asked my neighbour what Weltanschauung means, she being something of a polygon (the result of a lot of hankypanky with foreign POWs during the war). And she said it meant Global Warming, which you might like to confirm, it seeming very unlikely to me.
May I take this opportunity to wish you every success as German Chancellor, or whatever your title is. I do admire you, with you being so plain and dowdy and all.
If you are ever in North Wales, do call by and we can listen to Marlene Dietrich singing "Lili of the Lampost" together. I reckon it was songs like that helped us win the war.
Yours regrettably
Blodwen Trellis, Mrs, Widow, undaunted

Weltanschauung, as you might say

In 1955, I stood in St Giles and cheered on Hastings Banda. Down with colonialism! Up with independence for black Africa! In 1956, I stood in St Giles and excoriated Anthony Eden for invading Suez.
Later, I followed Mau Mau in Kenya and thought: nasty. During the Wilson administration, Ian Smith declared UDI in Rhodesia, and I thought, yes, maybe he's got a point.
Now, before you fall asleep from boredom at this trawl through dead matter, let me pose a question: What happened to change my Weltanschauung so completely?
Today I articulated my feelings to my neighbour, a Zimbabwean exile. It seems to me that every country, whatever its colour, political complexion or system of government, needs a stable infrastructure if [a] it is to prosper [b] its citizens are going to have a reasonable life.
So, it doesn't matter if Angola is Marxist or Zimbabwe is effectively a dictatorship or Tanzania is a confused socialist backwater. What matters is that they don't have a stable infrastructre which allows normal commercial and social transactions to take place safely.
And now, because you and I are both terminally bored by these meanderings, I will post a picture of something to aid your digestion and your sleep. I love my teddy bear.

Virgin territory

I received this from Mrs Trellis and reproduce it here without comment.

Dear Richard Branson, she writes, first of all, I want you to know how much the late Mr Trellis and I loved your Branson Pickle, a truly genial invention: it does for a piece of stale cheese in a sandwich what horseshit does for radishes. Howesomever, my reason for writing to you is not to praise your chuntney, but to ask you why on earth you named everything "Virgin". I looked the word up in my Tesco's Bargain School Dictionary and it says virgin
n. a who has no previous experience of a specified thing;
adj. in the original condition, unattained, untouched, never having previously undergone or been affected by the thing mentioned.
If that describes your airline and your trains, I am personally reluctant to use them. Mind you, I wasn't planning on going anywhere anyway. Unless, of course, you were looking for a mature air hostess......
I am not saying you are not a nice person, I just meant that after the pickle, I truly think you struggled a bit.
Yours imperviously Mrs Blodwin Trellis, Widow, no serious offer refused.
PS Get a haircut. The late Mr T was strictly a short-back-and-sides man, which gave him a certain military bearing. You look like Pooh Bear, only not so cuddly.