BIRDS AND BONFIRES AND BOTTOMS

Now there is a title to conjure with.

Yesterday it was a beautiful day and we decided to leave the garden in the morning and walk down the Canal to the Bay Horse Inn and have a coffee, return and do some shopping.

As we passed under the railway bridge we saw a cormorant sitting in the top of a fifty foot tree - very odd, R had to skip to avoid a mute swan who had decided that the middle of the footpath was a good place to sit, and then we met a friend who was taking photographs. He said that he had passed some walkers who had said that further down the canal were lots of ducky birds.

Did they mean geese, moorhens, coots or even ducks? The expression just stuck in my head - so now I have let it escape.

When we got home I started doing a bit in the garden including dismantling a decrepit rustic fence which I had put up to hide the septic tank.

The wood from it was dry and, I thought would burn well - little light above head moment.

Remember this heap of brushwood from the hedge-laying?

Well, I started a fire beside it with some newspaper and a wigwam of the dry sticks. Gradually I added brushwood from the enormous mound - it had taken several days to stack it, ten feet high and fifteen feet across.

Two and a half hours later with the sun going down this is what was left - I was too tired to put sausages on sticks and potatoes into the hot ashes.

This afternoon I tidied up - the fire was still well alight, and I added a collection if fallen twigs and wood from up on the hill. It is smoking still.

So to why the bottom in the title - to a tale of a prat fall.

I went out for lunch with a friend NC as we are wont to do once a month or so, and we decided to be a pair of schoolboys and climb a craggy hill. Now as one gets a little older that faculty called balance becomes less effective, so, coming down I did a whoosher onto my backside on wet grass - wet shirt, wet jacket and more especially wet trousers and underpants.

I drove home sitting on a piece of groundsheet to protect me from the leather seat.

Yeah!, yeah! Go on have a good laugh.