Yesterday it rained all day. I gave up any ideas of running or walking in the rain and simply stayed at home all day. Besides I had an Italian conversation class (on zoom) in the afternoon, for which I still hadn’t got round to doing any “homework”, and there was the remains of Sunday’s roast chicken to be dealt with: chicken soup was on the cards. We seem to have moved rapidly into the time of year when warming soup is called for with our evening meal - goodby summer salads.
Today is marginally better. It’s not actually raining but it’s generally dull and damp. It didn’t seem especially windy when Iw went out running first thing but since then the wind appears to have got up. All the treetops are waving around vigorously!
According to something I read about the Royal Horticultural Society, experts say that the climate of Great Britain will become warmer and drier over the next 10 to 20 years. That is all of Great Britain with he notable exception of Greater Manchester! Well, of course! We’ll continue dull and damp, which makes this the ideal place for the Royal Horticultural Society to establish an arboretum, providing a refuge for native trees such as oak and beech which apparently are already suffering from drier conditions in more southern parts of the island.
On the subject of protecting species, I read that pine martins are returning / have been returned to Dartmoor. The headline, “Pine martens return to Dartmoor after 150-year absence”, made it sound as though they had been held hostage somewhere. Scotland it seems! Numbers have been increasing there and a group of 15 - 8 female and 7 male - have been released (you see, perhaps they were hostages after all!) into secret locations. Secret locations, secret from the general public, but they have been tagged so that their progress can be followed by experts. It appears that they now need protecting because back in the dark ages at the turn of the century they were specifically targeted to prevent them from killing off the pheasants that huntsmen wanted to kill for themselves. They were also believed to get into henhouses and kill chickens.
From villains to being in need to protection: it sounds like a metaphor for something!
Granddaughter Number One has something of a menagerie in her house. I must have mentioned it before: a dog, a cat, a tortoise, a corn snake, an axolotl, and assorted creatures from the lizard family. There were smelly rats (oops, officially knowns as fancy rats!) now deceased, and a bearded dragon (also recently deceased. Some weeks ago, maybe even a couple of months ago, she and her best friend / housemate took possession of a bunch (a clutch?) of newly-hatched quails. These are supposed to live outside in a special quail-house, which I trust is protected from the weather.
So on Sunday Granddaughter Number One turned up with three quails’ eggs for us. This evening I think I need to fry or scramble the aforementioned eggs, purely so that we can tell her what we think of them. It has to be said, they look almost too ornamental to consider eating them. So it goes!
Life goes on.stay safe and well everyone!
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