First cut (2013)

It was a 9 boxer, but a bit brutal, a bit functional. No edges, just the centre; all the posts and trees still wear their cuffs. Unfortunately I met a frog on the way, but it wasn't one of those embarrassing encounters where you just disable a leg and have to watch them hop in circles because you are too squeamish to finish the job properly, no. It was a proper brain pate event.

It was only a week ago on Friday that I noticed the leaves breaking on the apple trees. That weekend there was a peacock butterfly and a comma. Monday I saw that the custard maple was flowering. Pink cherry opened cheekily last week, to drop and carpet the floor before a light shower on Friday that swept up all the petals to piles.

Some camellias have bloomed patchily this year, looking as though the frost scorched their buds at the wrong time. The tulip flowered magnolias though seem unscathed and are bright beacons in gardens everywhere.
I passed a ditch this morning, lined now with slowly baking green slime. whether due to drainage or the last three dry weeks I don't know, but I seem to remember water in that ditch for a year - since it began to rain last April.

I snook a morning away from my desk and went to almost paddle by the sea. Wearing a jumper, but feeling warm in shelter, I sat a few minutes and groomed beach gravel; just long enough to find a fossil tooth. The folk there were all cheery; happy to share the sun and a few words each according to their need for solitude and the sea. I could have stayed, but I had the wrong sandals and nothing to drink and the usual lingering guilt.

Dancing

As I drove the pothole polka across the village, a flurry of fluffed ice crystals danced out of the slipstream of the car in front, looking like nothing in the cold dry morning so much as the fall-out of a high altitude pillow altercation.

I was reflecting on Monday, as I drove past the Spring gently freezing into sparkling rims round the still puddles, how fortunate we are here. Too Easterly for the South Western snow; too Westerly for the South Eastern. Too far South to enjoy the Northern snow now coating Cumbria and drawing, like a damp unwelcome blanket, as far as the knees of Basingstoke at the weekend. Not, in the bitter wind that has chivvied us back in the door after a single lap of the lunchtime building, in the Goldilocks Zone, by any (except the fevered physicist's) stretch of the imagination, but better off than most.

The distant, pink camellia is showing opening buds down the garden, joining the red in the front now showing its colour all around, not just against the single-glazed window pane's microclimate. Under the busy bird feeder clematis is climbing and blackbirds are building again in the garage ivy.

In the dusk, setting

My neighbour's security light flicks into action at every passing car, themselves shining eye-scorching beams East, but even so, fail to prevent this morning's pony theft of rubbish bags.

At 19:10, bare feet slowly losing heat to the gravelly driveway, just above the nearby chimney, West; C/2011 L4 Pan-Starrs I salute you, and also use my left hand to steady binoculars.

A corner turned

Glowing white stems and a purple haze coating their terminal branches; these trees look more like Factory produce than young stands of sibling saplings self seeded across the heaths. Alien in the springing morning light beams cast by our orange star, partially occluded by cloud banks and the edge of the Earth. The silver birch, still remembering the gold pennies of their cast off clothing already dream of the coming solar energy boom, wriggling toes deeper into loam. Photosynthesising gowns still locked against the worst of winter; ice and the weather's wind tsunamis driven by alternate vortices, Siberian and Saharan blasts, oceanic and continental.

Inundated

I take the back road this morning, both for some quiet reflection and to avoid the queues of cars driving slowly through escaped rivers now flowing over bridges in the Forest. Black waters inundate the roads but they remain passable with a care I abandon on some straights, aquaplaning from island to low island across the heaths. The concentration required to do this saves me from self examination. Like the water flowing across novel waterways, my reflections are fragmented by undertows and currents.

Build a better one

Two weeks ago, or there abouts, a mouse entered our lives rather more intimately than we felt comfortable with. It probably jumped in through the conservatory door on the Friday and, finding the interior warmer, and plentiful food supplies, settled in for a quiet winter. I first noticed its presence on Sunday when there was an unexpected rustling sound by the window when I went out to check the conservatory plants. The rustling repeated on Monday, when I went to fetch the battery lantern and then on Tuesday, as I tapped away on the keyboard of my office, next to the conservatory, a brown mouse ran behind my comfy chair from the conservatory door.

The conservatory, garden room and my office are all well interconnected, but the doors giving access further into the house are mildly more rodent proof. I started being careful about closing these doors. More worryingly, the garden room is currently being refurbished and there is access to the house wall cavity from there, end thence the loft and who knows where else.

After failing to remember where my mass-produced and highly efficient humane mouse trap is stored, I thought to use a model one I put together for the amusement of my children a few years back. This device has only ever worked once with any success, when I managed to get a mouse in my car. I found the base and the lid, baited the contraption with peanut butter in a milk carton lid and left it primed in the centre of the room, with a paint pot to prevent the lid being lifted. The following morning I found my trap with the door wedged half open with the milk lid, but no mouse in evidence except by the tooth marks in the butter.

I left the trap, more carefully primed in the same place for the next half week, and then thinking that the mouse may have suffered some trauma with it the first time round, tried moving it to a new location, but to no avail. The mouse was evidently still free and active, visiting my office again, rustling on the window sill (where there was a scattering of birdseed from a split bag).

Last Saturday, I checked the trap as normal and decided to clean out the bird feeder that hangs outside the kitchen. I levered all the old peanuts out, washed it, refilled it using a bag of nuts from the conservatory and re-hung it outside. I closed the conservatory door to the kitchen carefully behind me and sat in my office, playing on the computer. Half way through the morning there was a frantic scrabbling sound, as of trapped rodent. At last my trap has worked I thought. I walked round to the conservatory, but the trap was still open. There on the window sill the bag of peanuts was jumping around. I grabbed the top, rolled it, pegged it and peered at my little adversary. My children showed some friends up the road and then let it go 300 yards and a water course away from the house.

So I have to ask myself; had I not planted the idea of peanuts in the mouse's mind, would it still have risked the peanut bag? or was it just the most cunning psychological mouse trap ever?

Cold snap coming

Yellow adorns trees, not yet clothing, nor yet the year's floor shrouding. Large forest mammals wear their thickened coats, proof against frost's fingers, that catch the low sun glowing. Our adopted, suburban, festival of the dead marks this fall, but also the kick back of the clocks bringing colded and stilled wildlife to our road verges.