Sunday 14 March
This time next week my time will be up. Three hundred and sixty five days of this blog and we find ourselves right back where we were. Restricted in our movement, meaning we can only travel for essential reasons and we can only exercise once a day outdoors and only within our own household bubble. A whole year. But I am grateful that no one in our immediate families have suffered massively, everyone is still here.
Still feeling pretty tired today but got up and decided to wash the cars whilst the sun was shining. Then pressure washed the patio ready for the longer days. Possibly a tad early and fuelled with shovel-fulls of wishful thinking but there is definitely a need to ‘look forward’ to something. Although we have our national road-map to see us out of the lockdown, there is still a way to go and I know things won’t be back to normal for a few months yet.
But there’s still the outdoors on our doorstep to enjoy, and the simple things in life to revel in. Plus those little everyday qwerks that present a twist of the odd, obscure and mysterious.
Today we went on our walk with the dog just across some local fields and a woods. The sunshine was only going to be a temporary thing and we knew rain was coming. As I write this, the rain is tap-tapping on the skylight above me, so we did well to enjoy the dry and fine weather earlier. We’re really getting to know these local routes, perhaps too well. We’d obviously like to spread our walking wings just that little bit further afield but, as this blog has shown, look close enough and even the most familiar places can offer something new each time. Particularly at this time of year.
Spend any time in the back garden this time of year and almost immediately after I come inside the birds have taken my place. There is a huge flock of birds swinging around the orchards. I can’t really decide what they are, Fieldfare still? But they also look plumper like pigeons? I’ll keep a closer look. Then, as well as the usual visitors to the feeders, a magpie was sat proud on top of the central pole. Glad I saw that this afternoon.
The Bald Birder 