Give us a kiss, whoever you are

Hillcrest. I realise that a reference in an earlier posting to the Hillcrest soprano voice might not have meaning to those of you - ie, 99.9% of the population of Planet Earth - who have not visited this particular quarter of San Diego. Hillcrest is where the ladies wear sensible shoes and don't smile at men, and where the men mostly mince and don't smile at women, if you catch my drift.
To both of these variations on the human template, I am invisible, being aged and decrepit. In fact, if they notice me at all, they tend to be very nice to me: to the lesbians, I am no threat, and to the gays, I am not worth the effort.
But it's not all same-sex stuff in Hillcrest. I did recently see a hetero couple on the corner of University and Fifth having a quick snog, but they were quickly arrested by the Police ("San Diego's Finest") on the grounds that their action was provocative and likely to cause a breach of the peace.
By the way, the reason I go to Hillcrest is that my favourite restaurant is there. You remember? The one with Chicken Piccata, Argentinian Keiken Red and the lovely friendly waitress, Gail.
Honestly.

Mrs T addresses a guru

It is such a relief to know that Mrs Trellis is alive and well and still banging the rocks. In her fashion. She writes:
Dear Mahatma Ghandi, I saw your movie the other evening and can't tell you how impressed I was, specially the spinning, which as you know is a Welsh speciality, there being so many sheep here and so little to do nights.
Also, I liked how you enjoyed having young girls around you, propping you up and bringing you tiffin, or whatever it is you Indians drink. Enjoying young girls is another Welsh speciality if the late Mr Trellis is anything to go by.
What I didn't know is that you were also interested in the other kind of birds, the ones with feathers. I thought you were VERY Hindu about those sparrows, personally I would have thrown a bucket of water over them.
One thing I didn't quite grasp: what was that business about the salt? We can buy any amount in our local supermarket, you should have said, you really didn't need to walk all the way across India, though with your bandy legs, you probably needed the exercise. Anyway. if you need any more salt, just let me know.
Yours submersively
Blodwen Trellis, Mrs, Widow, Retired

Now, 'ere's a funny thing, as Max Miller used to say (You don't know who Max Miller is, or rather was? Goodness, you must be either under 50 or a foreigner - both enviable states in their way).
Yes, here's the funny thing: the local SoCal equivalent of our garden Spotted Flycatcher (when we had them) is the Black Phoebe. I mean, it's a garden-loving flycatching passerine, but there the similarity ends. It builds a nest you wouldn't believe: it is exactly like a House Martin's nest, a quarter-or-half-melon-shaped mud construction plastered into the eaves. I know this because I watched adult Black Phoebes carrying food to their nest on the house across the road from here.
I realise there is absolutely nothing you can do with this information, but it may be a consolation that NOBODY in Huntingdon knows it.
And here is a picture of a Black Phoebe at the nest to convince any sceptics you might bump into in Huntingdon:

Aubergine panegyric

This is an aubergine, aka eggplant, aka patlican, aka brinjal, but whatever you call it, it has got to be the sexiest and most versatile vegetable in the culinary repertoire.
No doubt, you - my erudite and much-travelled readers - know about the Turkish IMAM BAYILDI, the stuffed aubergine dish prepared ad hoc by the Imam's wife which caused him to faint (though whether from ecstasy or shock is not clear).
Well, today, I had lunch with my friend V at an Italian restaurant on the corner of 7th and Ash called LunaSole, and we had the SoCal equivalent of the imam's surprise dish, and very very good it was too.

The restaurant posts a daily motto outside. Today's was Cosi e la vita - Such is life. If this is the such that life is, I am all for having a lot more of it before I am finally summoned to the Great Vegetable Patch in the Sky. And I wish a lot of such for all of you who read my blog: a life of good suches, including aubergines and the wonderful things you can do with them.

Balmy evenings

The days are getting hotter now, afternoons are to be avoided, and the best time of day for sitting on the back porch is the evening, as the temperature falls slowly and a gentle zephyr begins to fan your cheek. It's a magical time, a time for thinking about nothing much; just allowing the twittering of the House Finches at the seed feeder to caress the edges of your mind.
And then I see a pair of House Sparrows in flagrante delicto, and my serenity is shattered. Not because they are doing what comes naturally to all God's creatures, but because of the sequence of events, und zwar:
She is perched on the bougainvillea, he is feeding voraciously at the seed feeder. Then he flies over to her, mounts her, exercises his conjugal rights in that here-I-come-there-I-went way that males have, and then returns to the seed feeder, leaving her to unruffle her feathers.
It all seemed a bit cavalier to me. A quick rumpipump and then he's back to his supper without so much as a backward glance or a how-was-it-for-you-darling.
I have heard of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, but when it comes to ungracious couplings, that male House Sparrow could give MaleChauvinistPiggery a bad name. Mind you, as far as I can tell, she enjoyed it. It's difficult to know, though, what goes in the mind of a lady sparrow - or, indeed, in the minds of ladies of any species meinetwegen.

PS I would like to acknowledge the copyright of the photo at the top of this article, although the pair of sparrows I witnessed did not, of course, have iStockPhoto scrawled all over their plumage.

Excuse me, Mr D, could you just run that past me again?

I don't know if the controversy has hit Britain yet, but here a battle is raging between the Creationists and the Evolutionists. The catalyst for this seems to be the new multimillion-dollar Museum of Creation in Kentucky, which shows, with a great deal of pezazz, that Genesis had it right, and Darwin and his followers are a bunch of deluded atheists, poisoning the minds of our youth, etc.

In an earlier blog, I wrote about some gorgeous moths, and said: "I don't care how they got here, I am just glad they did." I know at least one loyal reader who then crossed me off their ("their", what a useful ambiguity!) Christmas card list, and I am really sorry that I should have provoked such a reaction (Contempt? Anger? Sorry, H)

The reason I am returning to this theme is because I have just been reading [a] the latest issue of the New Scientist, which lampoons the Creationist Museum and all its cookiness; [b] the Simon & Schuster Guide to Mammals (originally published by Mondadori under the title Mammiferi), which contains a detailed description, complete with polysyllables, of how life evolved from Reptiles to Me, as you might say.

As to the first, it is, for me, like listening to medieval monks arguing about how many angels can stand on a pin. As to the second, I love the idea that everything today was derived from everything then, with changes triggered by climate change, the odd galactic catastrophe, a butterfly beating its wings in the Amazon, and so on.

As you are probably nodding off at this point, let me bring this to a pithy conclusion. I like the idea of God, and I hope God likes the idea of me. I also find the whole evolutionist theory very intellectually satisfying: like my life, one thing should always lead to another, not always for the better, of course.

So, maybe God and Evolution are facets of the same thing. How should I know? All I know is that when I see something as glorious as a Monarch Butterfly (another nearly landed in my coffee this morning), I am just glad it exists, and I really, honestly, truly, don't care how it got here. I am just glad it did (And that it didn't in fact land in my coffee. For both our sakes).

A Load of Warlocks

Once again, it is a joy to give my NorthWalian correspondent space on my modest little blog. Her latest contribution is truly seminal.
Dear J K Rowling, she writes, first may I say how much I enjoyed your novel Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings. I rarely get excited by magic, except for Paul Daniels, such a chuchy little man, makes you wonder how he's built, doesn't it, but I think you have really hit the hammer on the brass tacks with your amazing sago. It's almost Icelandic in its epicity.

Anyway, I am writing really to let you know that I have given up vegetarianism, having recently had some bad experiences, including choking on a broccoli stalk and finding half a worm in a half-eaten apple. So, it's back to chicken nuggets and Welsh rabbits for me.

By the way, why haven't you put any Druids in your stories? They are really BAZAAR, believe me, dressed all in ankle-length white frocks and pointy hats and going round burning crosses to intimidate people who don't like poetry. They would fit in a treat with the load of warlocks you write about, not to mention talking trees.