It’s almost summer solstice time. Monday 21st of June to be precise. I read somewhere that the Uk will have 17 hours of proper daylight. We already do well. When I looked out of our attic window at 11.30 last night there was a substantial expanse of pale sky to the west still. It still felt remarkably like daylight. And it’s getting light already at about 4.00 in the morning. This is a lovely time of the year. I truly appreciate being able to stroll out in the evening, especially as we have had decent weather for it over the last couple of weeks.
In fact there seems to have been an odd reversal of the usual weather situation. As a rule at this time of year we moan about the miserable weather in the north while our son is able to organise an early evening meal in his garden down in the south of the country. Instead this year, although they have had some very high temperatures - Evan Davis on Radio 4’s Today Programme giving tips on how to keep your house cool - they have also had more rainfall in the last week than we have had. On BBC’s Newsnight Lewis Goodall was reporting from a rainy Chesham last night, talking about the Liberal Democrats’ success in the by-election there.
The warm and sunny mornings have seen us flinging open the back door at breakfast time, letting the warmth seep into our almost always cool, if not distinctly chilly, semi-basement kitchen. This morning, sitting at the table eating toast, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I wondered if one of the neighbourhood cats was trying to sneak in. But, no, not a cat! There, just inside the doorway was a blackbird. We have had a prodigious number of blackbirds in the garden this year but I’ve never had one try to come indoors before. Fortunately it flew out as soon as I stood up. I have a severe horror reaction to birds, indeed almost anything that flaps its wings, in enclosed spaces!
I have learnt, trained myself, not to get into a tizz about moths, which used to really freak me out. Once I had children, however, I realised that I needed to overcome that little phobia so that I did not pass it on to the offspring. (So why is my daughter afraid of spiders? I can deal with even the large ones by catching them under a glass, sliding a card underneath and releasing them into the outdoors as far from the house as possible.) But birds indoors are a different matter. It takes a sheer effort of will to go into the bat cave with the grandchildren when we go to the zoo.
Hence my relief when today’s blackbird just departed as quickly as possible.
By coincidence Tim Dowling wrote about birds in the house in his column in the Guardian this morning:-
“There is an insistent sound coming from outside, like a flag snapping in a stiff breeze. Then the sound moves inside, and stops. I lift my head from my hands to see a magpie the size of a chicken standing in the middle of the kitchen floor.
It’s not a phobia exactly, but I set strict limits on the amount of time I can spend in a room with a large bird: ideally, no time. I recognise this magpie, with its crooked tail, as the same bird the youngest one sometimes feeds from his bedroom window, but that relationship has nothing to do with me.
“You should go,” I say. The magpie appears to be thinking the same thing: he lifts off and flies straight into the back window, beating his wings against the glass for a few sickening seconds before falling back stunned on to the sill, next to the cat.
The cat cannot believe its luck. It pounces on the bird immediately, but the magpie has a considerable size advantage. It breaks free and flies straight up, banging against the skylight. A single black feather drifts to the floor.
“OK,” I say. “I can’t be here for this.” I back out of the kitchen and shut the door.”
He manages to go back indoors, shielding himself behind a wooden tray, opens doors and windows and watches the bird make up its mind to fly out. Phew! Magpies are intelligent birds. Braver people than I am invite them into their homes. The mother of my daughter’s best friend hand-reared a baby magpie that fell out of its nest. It survived and for years it would come visiting, hopping around her kitchen. My idea of one kind of hell!
I wrote yesterday about the treatment of people with disabilities, particularly children in mainstream schools. Today I came across a report about a school in the USA whose cheerleader squad included a girl with Down syndrome. She seems to have been a kind of team manager and knew all their routines, went to all the sports events with them. The time came for photos for the school’s yearbook, a curiously American institution - when I was at at school here in the UK, we just collected our classmates’ and teachers’ autographs. They took a photo of the team with the team manager, the Down Syndrome girl, on the front row. Photo session apparently over, she went home. Then the school photographer, sneakily, took another photo of the team without the manager. This was the photo that was printed in the yearbook. And her name was omitted from the team list.
Token inclusion, if you ask me!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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