CONSIDER THE LILIES

The Birds of the Air

We have a very healthy colony of wood pigeons around us at the moment; sometimes you can see a dozen together, feeding on the grass behind the flats, or denuding trees of berries. They always look fat and prosperous. Mysteriously I found one with a broken neck on my lawn a couple of mornings ago, presumably killed by a cat, but if so the cat had made no attempt to eat it. Casimir? Hardly. He ignored it when I found it, and I'm fairly sure it wasn't there when he came in the previous night. Perhaps this is the work of the cat he fights with, trying to show how tough it is.  Meanwhile, the swans on the canal have cygnets that are almost full size. There's one pair with two, and another pair with seven, which is an amazing achievement. Cycling along the canal reveals that there are large colonies of swans, and we only get errant pairs; the occasional pair nests on the island in the Pool, but we almost never get the quantities you see around Alperton or Southall. I'm pleased to see we have a pair of Egyptian geese again, as they are just charming birds. Bizarrely there was a salmon's head on the cycle path the other day, cut clean off, and more bizarrely, split in half, Damien Hirst-wise. This was not the result of bird activity!


Harrow Road Fashions

I am well aware that I am not particularly well-placed to pass comment on people who dress unusually, but there have been one or two characters about recently. This morning on the Harrow Road I saw someone who might have come from the retreat from Moscow; he appeared to be wearing a carpet and carrying an unfeasibly large number of things. Admittedly he did not have an 1812 musket, but instead had a large umbrella in a decorative cover. He also had grey dreadlocks emerging from his hooped woolly hat. Presumably an authentic gentleman of the road. There is a mother who I often see taking her child to school whose make-up always impresses me (it is very professional), and she teams it with carefully teased and highlighted frizzy hair and leopard-print leggings. Always cheers me up. Then there's a chap of Caribbean background who cycles in a little West African hat, and whose clothing is always impressively layered, with a definitely "ethnic" flavour, but I couldn't tell you which specific ethnos.


Panic Over

Last night I had a big scare. A plumber had been installing a new boiler, at the back of the garage, to replace one which failed last week, so I had taken the car and the bikes out of the garage. When he went home he told me he would be back in the morning to finish off and said he had left the garage door closed. After dinner I went out to put the car and bikes away, but when I went to open the garage door I found the knob rotated freely without achieving anything, and then it came away in my hand. The door was securely closed, though unlocked, with car and bikes outside (which, I suppose, was less disastrous than it might have been). There is no other way in. I texted the plumber, suggesting he bring tools to try to fix it in the morning. He rang me almost immediately, which was very sweet, wondering what he had done, and was confident we could fix it in the morning. I was less so, and spent some time on the internet trying to find suggestions, which was pretty fruitless, because people are only interested in electronic doors these days. I brought the bikes into the hall, and spent a sleepless night. When the plumber rang the bell this morning I was astonished to open the door to find that he had the garage door open already. He had moved the lever inside with a long screwdriver. Last night |I couldn't see anything to be moved when I looked into the hole, but I was hugely relieved. The pin holding the knob to the shaft had simply corroded away. so I found a new pin of suitable size and he fixed it. Panic over.


Deliveries

One of the advantages of having a building site on your doorstep is that it is somewhere for deliveries to be made. This week I had some new vestments coming, and the suppliers were anxious that they needed to be signed for, so I told them to deliver them to Lee in the site office if I was out. That all happened very smoothly (I had warned Lee) even if it was a bit incongruous for all concerned. To be fair, I have taken in deliveries for the site as well, particularly at the start, when they were all working in the school. Blessedly, the work in the school was finished in the nick of time, despite the best efforts of the gas people, so they only had one day of cold lunch (it might have been so much worse). At the moment repairs are going on to the school's automatic gates, as Cadent (the gas people) managed to sever the cable that controlled them (which, to be fair, wasn't buried at the correct depth). The contractors have allocated a man to be gatekeeper pending the repair, which frankly gives the school more security than the automatic gates. We are all going to know each other well by the end of this.