Tuesday, April 08, 2025

 ðŸŽµ "I'm washing on sunshine....wo-oh!" (as Katrina & the Waves didn't sing).

It's true, though - I've just completed a machine wash of socks (and a short tumble) and Greger said the electricity meter remained the same. He's now put the car on charge, so when we go out tomorrow he'll be driving on sunshine. Wo-oh.

My first willow warbler of the year was heard and then seen at the entrance to Keanchulish Estate.


A greenshank far out on the golf-course spit was my first for the year in Ullapool. Yesterday, I walked the round at Ardmair (caravan site now open) and was pleased to hear the singing of twite. A third individual was foraging on the ground.


Back in March we went to Edinburgh to buy a coat-and-shoe stand from Ikea, as solar-panel installations in the wash-room meant the old coat hooks there had to go. Idly looking at the map of the coast, I noticed that between the Forth bridges and the Premier Inn where we stay at Newhaven Quay, is Cramond - and suggested to Greger that we pay a visit to its famous island. Cramond has cropped up in my reading several times over the years, notably in Kidnapped (R.L. Stevenson), in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark), and most recently in one of the Jackson Brodie books (One Good Turn) by Kate Atkinson - where Jackson nearly gets caught out by the incoming tide (apparently, quite a few people really do get cut off, and have to be rescued by Queensferry RNLI). Where you walk down to the causeway, there is a large noticeboard with tide tables on it. 


Turnstones walked about on the causeway, and the shining sands held loads of gulls (including two lesser black-backs, my first for the year), curlews, redshanks, and dunlin. On the island:


When we returned to the car, it was then a drive of a few miles to the hotel - along a more pleasant route than the faster one on main roads that we usually take. The following day we had a successful shopping trip to Ikea and then drove home, with me noting loads of dead pheasants on the verges in various places, I think mostly in Perthshire. We've seen the same thing in Norfolk, and long ago, in West Berkshire, as we drove home after a Ridgeway walk. The last was possibly the worst - there were coveys of young birds scuttling about everywhere, and an unbelievable number of corpses on the road. And the game-shooting "industry" at that time was pushing for a cull of buzzards as they posed, they said, a threat to game birds!

No rants from me, though. I haven't got the energy. There is so much to rant about at the moment that it all seems to cancel itself out. What's the point of ranting about Trump, for instance, when it just raises my blood pressure, not his? Suffice it to say that Trump subverts everything that is good and decent, and champions the ignorant, the nasty, and the downright criminal.  

// posted by Christine @ 6:05 AM
Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?