Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Here, especially for my pal Polly, are Cocky and Clara the Pekin bantams. Their story goes like this: Cocky began fighting with other cockerels in his group and his owner was about to send him to market or wring his neck. G brought him home at once without hesitation and built him a run, then considered the matter of his sex-life, Cocky's that is. Clara - she of the magnificent golden bum - was bought from neighbour Jim's flock and the two hit it off straight away.

One day G said "Cocky could do with another hen really." "No more," I said "they're such a tie." Next day in the pen, gift of God, was an ugly black bantam hen who had flown in from absolutely nowhere. She had pallid wattles and a tiny head, we called her Yasser; but Cocky didn't see her that way, to him she was sex on legs. In retaliation Clara pulled rank and has been doing so ever since - Yasser must always wait her turn for food and roost.

We had two more bantams, thanks to rogue eggs that hatched while we were in America. Only one of these, Bella, remains, a tiny black soul with a big voice. She and Yasser prefer not to be photographed just at the moment as they are in moult and not looking their best.

Number five is a link to a photograph of the steps at Beacontree underground station. A grey rainy-day shot with interesting perspectives and the texture of a watercolour. It comes from a superb set of images of the London underground. (Via Big n Juicy)

I made a quick Google search on this station and came across a bit of interesting background. One link shows the rise of property values in adjacent Dagenham now becoming commuterland after the demise of the Ford factory.

Another traces the housing price boom in relation to underground lines.
'First time buyers trying to get onto the property ladder may consider pockets along the District and Central Lines, Beacontree and Dagenham Heathway (£118,219) are the most affordable places to buy and have seen growth of 115 per cent since 1998.'

I can't believe what this woman is wearing round her shoulders. I wish the poor thing would come to life and give them both what for.

I was looking for a quote in an old, inky anthology of French poetry. A few lined pages were tucked at the back. One was a highly emotional essay on Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. I remember being stunned and fascinated by these poems which were very strong stuff for the convent. A selection was on the 'A' Level French syllabus and it transpired that the rather too worldly Sister Philomena had a penchant for Baudelaire and sold him to us well.

The rest of the pages were my bungling attempts to write verse in my schoolgirl French, most are ludicrous, but I quite like this one (dated 1960):

Voyez la nuit
Qui tombe sur la mer,
Elle éteint toute bruit
Sauf la chuchote légère
Des vagues sur la sable.

Et les réflets d'étoiles
Brillent vifs sur la mer,
Dans l'ombre les voiles
De la lune font si clair
La beauté des eaux tranquilles.

My all-time number one turns eighty tomorrow.

The team made some clever word re-definitions on last week's show, I managed to scribble down a few:

Horticultural - Brian Sewell
Deliberate - imprison
Orchid - son of a Brummie
Coincidental - having matching teeth
Teutonic - what one orders with 2 gins
Disdain - rudeness to someone from Denmark

Dame Miriam Rothschild has died aged 96; I became interested in her life through her pioneering of wild flower gardening and began to feel affection for her after a film showed her walking through her flowering meadows at Ashton in sheer ecstasy at their beauty. Her scientific achievements were awesome. I admire her values and sentiments which were very fine and her eccentricities were all that one could wish for:

'Disapproving of the methods of slaughter used in Britain, she did not eat meat, or use cosmetics. She also refused to wear leather shoes, and instead liked to wear white wellingtons in summer and moonboots in winter. Her wellingtons caused a considerable stir at Prince Charles's 40th birthday ball at Buckingham Palace.' ( Times Obit.)

Please read and enjoy this Guardian obituary which documents her work and captures her so well.

Perhaps not exactly exciting, but a pair of Egyptian Geese is an unusual sight in anyone's garden. These two divide the day between the nearby river and our oak wood.
Unusually for geese they like tree life and have chosen the bend of a Scots Pine trunk as their perch. They swoop on any bread and grain we put out, so they get shooed off to allow smaller birds a turn. Plumage is amber and beige wing feathers, snowy undersides to the wings and the strange kohl-outlined eyes of old Egypt, pretty un-goosey. Tucked up together in their tree they sit with constantly turning necks, viewing the terrain; when they quarrel their awful croaking cries echo through the wood. This profile explains their presence here - escapees from imported Victorian collections in the great houses of Norfolk.

I'm on board for The Woodland Trust's six species survey. G saw the seven spot ladybird already, crawling up the side of the aviary last week. I hope it went back to its winter quarters before the fierce frost caught it last night.

I have had a day with my trees, working as assistant to Dennis and his chain saw. We took off six big sycamore boughs, decimated a massive laurel, chopped down a messy old Skyrocket and trimmed the conifer hedges round G's shed. Shrubs and trees are becoming too dominant, growing so fast that they take too much light from the garden. We had perfect weather for the job, bright, cold and dry; I can still see the remains of the huge bonfire from my window , sparking and flaring in the dark.

I'm still learning to use Photoshop tools. Current favourite is the smudge.

I took Pauline and Theresa to Welney Washes tonight to see the swans - two thousand of of them on the lagoon. This year many more Icelandic Whooper swans arrived, unusually outnumbering the Bewick's. It was such pleasure to watch Pauline's utter amazement at her first sight of that great ballet of white feathers against the night sky. Local TV was there filming the six o'clock feeding session with its great race for grain between swans, pochard ducks and mallards. The interviewer asked a lady beside us why she had come. "Well not to see elephants, obviously," said the dear old girl.

The wardens were on a high having seen a White Tailed Eagle well off course on the fields at Welney for the first time. Here, by the way, is the final report from last year's award-winning swan migration study.

We have a new, exciting pair of birds in the garden, I'll write about them tomorrow if I can get a picture.

Months ago Monica sent me a compilation of ballads by Loreena McKennitt, a Canadian singer with Irish roots. It somehow vanished into a stack of disks, re-emerging last night when I needed sleep music. A haunting voice - Judy Collins out of Enya - traces broad historical musical references and texts. She is centred on the Celtic cultures:

'A pivotal moment for her evolution occurred in 1991 in Venice, Italy, at the largest ever exhibition and collection of international Celtic artifacts.

"Until I went to that exhibition, I thought that Celts were people who came from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany."

Seeing the unimagined riches and variety in the centuries of Celtic art gathered from as far afield as Hungary, Ukraine, Spain and Asia Minor, she recalls, "I felt exhilarated. It was like thinking that all there is to your family are your parents, brothers and sisters, and then you realize there's a whole stretch of history that is an extension of who you are."'

In the group of songs I have, there are Medieval English, Spanish and Asian references so interesting that they urge me to explore more of her work. I suppose what fixed me was her perfect interpretation (from The Visit) of The Lady. It had me sitting bolt upright in bed at 3 a.m. with the hairs prickling on the back of my neck.

15th September 1935
At a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, German leader Adolf Hitler issues new decrees which relegate Jews to sub-human status and make the Swastika the official German flag.

15th September 1984
Prince Harry - second son of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales was born.

My last post reminded my nephew Mark that when he and Sarah came to visit, they would raid my make-up drawer and have a dressing-up session. Some photos were taken on one occasion and he has dared me to put them up. (Incidentally, I wrote a piece a while ago about the effect that Sarah had on me that day). Here are the princess and the pirate of twenty plus years ago.

Quite a few children visited us over Christmas and I got out my face paints again - they always go down well. Once I used to do fetes and parties, and, apart from back ache, had a load of fun. I remember making fifty kids into various animals for a school play in 90 minutes and nearly passing out with stress.

What's best about it is the trust the child gives in putting itself physically in your hands. Tiny kids sit quietly while you wet their skin and tickle their noses. Tough lads submit to being made-up in order to get Millwall colours, or camouflage on their spotty mugs.

They often asked for wonderful things:
"I'd like you to make me look very ill."
"Can you reverse us?" (two friends, one black, one white).
"I want to be Spiderman, only green."
"Can you do a warthog?"

One of the best things ever was a group of Down's Syndrome teenagers; I made the first a princess, gold green eyes, pink blusher, very glam'. They all wanted it then; you can imagine the impact of five extremely posey Down's princesses walking up Brixton High Road.


Here are a squaw and an Egyptian tucking into cake and Coke last week.

I had half a mind to write tonight about resolutions that have already bitten the dust. Fatuously, probably. Then I read Paula and thought "Why waste their time, just pass on the link to a perfectly-rounded piece of self observation."

Vincent van Gogh View of a butcher's shop. 1888

Had lunch today with my good friend P - I took a runny camembert, Boursin, oat biscuits and salad, she supplied olives and garlic cloves pickled in lemon, bought from a Greek in the local market - they were amazing. Now I 'whully reek', as they say in Norfolk. We had a sort of indoor picnic, with Lu the Jack Russell dozing in her basket and Leonard Cohen moaning gently in the background.

P is obsessive about buying books - cheap books from charity shops - being gathered ready 'for my old age'. She's a fair way along to setting herself up as a small lending library to her friends. Out from the spare room came sixteen Tesco carrier bags, a charity shop had been selling off all its books before Christmas at 20 pence each. We had a great time going through the lot which were a fair representation of the modern novel. I came away with half a dozen (Joseph O Connor: J G Farrell: Elizabeth Buchan; Janet Davey; T Corghessan Boyle(?)). I picture P in ten years time, glasses on nose-end, reading all day in a minute space among dusty towers and packages of books, eccentric and happy as a pig in muck.

I walked back from Joyce's in the rain and pitch dark and halfway up the drive I heard a scratching noise close behind me. I turned, there was no-one there. It came again as I set off faster, almost running. As the kitchen door shut safely against my pursuer, I heard that same noise on the slate floor. The sound of the metal buckle of my mackintosh belt, undone and trailing on the ground. I'm going soft, I was half-expecting that white balloon to re-appear out of the shadows.

We went to King's Lynn today to take two ladies shopping. In the precinct, a small herbalist's shop had stuck hand-written advertisements for its products on its window. Under one which read "We stock Herbal Viagra", was another - "Stiff Neck?" "Ah," said June, "I expect the tablet got stuck".

I was left to mosey around the book sales and treated myself to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. I bought a pair of half-price elegant shoes with 'bottle heels' and got talking to a girl sitting on the shoe-shop stool. She had a snake tattoo winding round her ankle as far as mid-calf. "God, didn't that hurt terribly?" I asked. "Oh, yeah, it was awful, but that's the point." "What do you mean?" "For me, yeah, it means more if I have to go through it to get it. I've got several piercings too." She was a normal-looking, rather lumpy teenager in a hooded sweatshirt and huge trainers, she bought a pair of Clark's loafers and offered me a Polo mint. Nice kid, her motives unintelligible and sad to me looking at her clear young skin. Fuddy duddy Anna.

On New Year's day we went to Canterbury to see if the cathedral was still as beautiful as ever. Having got to bed at 3 am after the revels of the previous night, we somehow dug ourselves out at 7 am to set off on the M11 South; it was so utterly deserted that we had a strong impression of leaving the whole of East Anglia dozing drunkenly behind us.

The cathedral's power to grip you is in its mix of architectural styles, the amazingly fluid joining of the old romanesque and the gothic, the sense of layer upon layer of history, stone below stone. It offers up its riches - artefacts and shrines, sleeping marble figures, pale ghosts of wall paintings and the burning glow of its unrivalled glass, a miraculous survival of the Reformation.

I had a strange experience outside in the grounds. On a light breeze a white balloon moved gently to my feet, then drifted at my side as I walked around all four sides of the cloisters. I picked it up and smacked it up into the air by the Dean's garden and wished it goodbye. Ten minutes later by the old monastery wall, my balloon rejoined my feet and shadowed me as far as the Chantry door. I left it waiting quietly by the steps. Shades of "The Prisoner".