So I nipped into the office to check email and glance out of the office windows which look across the patio and over the lawn onto the extension opposite. I say extension but it is more of a conversion as it would have been a small attached barn originally and is probably as old as 200 years!
Now as I sit here there is a familiar knock, knock, knock on the front edge of the flat roof above me. It has been going on for 3 - 4 days but there is no or little breeze and nothing appears to be hanging off, as it were. So what is the noise then? Well I am so glad that you have shown such an interest, it is a Blackbird whom has found that my gutter provides a good source of sludge, much to my embarrassment. He is tapping away at the plastic guttering stuffing as much of the goo into his beak as possible (urggggg!) then he launches himself from the gutter sinking straight down towards the lawn as if he has forgotten to account for the extra payload he then levels off, with his belly all but tickling the grass, pulling up out of his dive he flies up to a rambling climber on the opposite side of the garden and disappears into the thicket of branches. I guess that my gutter is somewhat a bit of a cement factory supplying a good gunk to hold the nest together.
Meanwhile on a top floor window of the said barn conversion opposite me a Blue Tit has been going crazy for about the same amount of days. You may remember that I had to withdraw a mirror from my garden because several Blackbirds were arguing with their own reflections getting all territorial about themselves and Percy my visiting Pheasant was spending hours and hours checking himself out in it.
Well this poor Blue Tit flies up to the Fig tree branches that are in front of the barns window then launches itself up to the top of the window and with beak pressed up against the glass it struggles to fly forward, loses all lift and ends up fluttering and sliding down the glass until it hits the window sill where it will either fly back up for another go, or fly to a branch next to the window, or simply rest on the sill if it has been doing this for some time. It has easily made this foray several hundred times. So why have I not shooed (in the british context you understand as "Shoo, Shoo, be off with you pesky little Tit" and not in the Iraqi I'm a journalist and I don't care very much for George Bush Shooing) it away? Well I have and it keeps coming back like a homing Tit. Mmmm, hold that thought for a while....
In the 15 minutes that I have been writing this the Blue Tit has left, come back and fluttered up and down that window many times and the Blackbird has been pecking away over my head 5 times (lucky I don't have hangovers eh?).
I just stopped and counted how many times the Blue Tit fluttered down that window, in 60 seconds it did so 14 times and was still doing so when I stopped the clock!
Yesterday pre-empting the hose ban (April 5th or so we are warned) I have power washed my front yard and my oh my was it dirty. Mainly as a result of moss growing between the cobbles which I believe are 'set' far too high above the cement. As I blasted the ground with the washer hundreds of little bits of moss flew off in every direction and half way through the clean up it looked like a moss factory, if there was such a thing, had exploded. Now it is finished the whole thing looks so much better. The jet wash machine was just £25 and I bought it about 7 years ago only getting it out of the packaging when I moved here, just as well it works because I don't think I would be able to get my money back now even more so as the receipt has faded to become just a blank piece of paper!
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