The trees in the wood have become very large and on a gloomy day hang over the garden like a dark cloud of foliage.
On the other hand I have no thought to getting in a tree surgeon to cut them back - yet.
So here are a few of the birds on then feeders. From my window it does not take a very long lens on the camera. The windowsill is loaded with dormant (well just in leaf) amaryllis pumping iron into their bulbs for next year. This gives a screen through which I can peer without being noticed. 
Names are needed? - top is a cock chaffinch, then two goldfinches and left - a young greater spotted woodpecker, right - a juvenile greenfinch.The one-legged chaffinch is still scrabbling around on the ground looking for dropped morsels.
I found a small cluster of feathers down by the hedge yesterday - probably a cat had got a sparrow. It is a wonder that there are any small birds when one considers predation - cats, squirrels after eggs, woodpeckers after chicks, let alone hawks and falcons.
I have pruned back the senecio (brachyglottis (whatever)) by the house and started to cut back the grass on the lower banking. There is so much to do and so little me (and R).
Just had an old poem published in an online mag. Well, it is a rewrite and revamp. The them of the mag was 'Killing'. Yes, I know, very cheerful. I must have written it when feeling morbid. There is some mucking about with structure and internal rhyming and such.
This is where you move to another blog - picture first.
PAPER WINGS
Rings set by summer sun running in elm-sap,
trap, in their stain, seasons of snuffed years.
Rain and sorrows run from the furrowed bole
where, beneath the waxen bark, beetles burrow.
Dutch mandibles bring lethal hyphae,
leave bleached skeletons of silent wood
spread against the sky, rattling in the wind.
Within the darkness of an autumn hanger,
from the brown of beechwood litter
and black-edged mould, a parasol emerges,
a Destroying Angel dressed in innocence,
pure and virgin-white against the soil:
and when the ignorant have eaten well
bells ring for worms and new mycelia.
At the north gate of the cattle paddock
past hangs in the dull eyes of a dead rook
hooked by its black neck to barbed wire.
Future crawls in its corrupt corpse,
a white choir of gorging maggots
warming the tangle of its rotten guts,
moulding old flesh to new flesh and paper wings.
There, I did warn you.
If you are still with me I will continue - let me talk about food - actually shortbread. I come to make some and we had no plain flour so R says use the self-raising flour.
I did and it is Okay-ish but there is a slight lingering tang of baking powder. Next time plain flour or nowt.
Just dug up these spuds - I did not know what I had put in and was surprised to fine red ones. They tasted good though.
Also picked the last of the black currants and then picked them over removing stems and leaves. They were almost over ripe, almost - now in freezer and one day may be jam.
R went to a garden open day and met a lady. She asked this lady where she worked and the reply was that she worked at the H Surgery. (I should mention here that in my previous existence I was a family doctor.) My wife then said that I went there to which came the reply that she knew that.
She said, "He looked after us and now we are going to look after him."
What more can I say!
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