learning from experience

The birds have not eaten all of the seed bought from the farm shop.  It turns out to contain what looks like wheat, and some large round seeds I can't identify but which don't seem palatable to song birds, or even starlings.  I have encountered the same problem with what looked like a giant bargain bag of wild bird food I got in the feed store when I was buying layers' pellets for the chickens.  The Systems Administrator bought the current lot, believing that a bag of bird food for a pound was worth trying, despite my muttered warnings about the last batch of cheap seed.  Fortunately the farm shop bag is quite small, and a pound is not a costly experiment.  As we agreed, you only find out by trying.

The need to find out by trying seems deeply ingrained into human nature.  Tove Jansson, best known to many English readers for her Moomin stories (I still have my copies safely tucked away in the small spare bedroom) wrote for grown-ups as well, and one of her novels, The Summer Book, was serialised on R4 a while back.  I liked it so much I immediately bought a copy, and the unabridged original turned out to be even better than the radio version (not always the case, as with the memoirs of Robert Graves' son, which on the radio was an entertaining account of artistic expatriate life in the Med, and in full turned out to include the entire line-up of every jazz band he ever played in).  The Summer Book has also entranced everybody I've ever given a copy to, which hasn't always been the case with books I've liked and decided to share.  Not much happens, mind you.  A little girl and her father and grandmother spend the summer on the family holiday house on a small island.  That's about it.  One of the episodes which has always stuck in my mind as a universal truth is when the grandmother and little girl row over to a nearby island to introduce themselves to the new family there.  The recent arrivals announce their intention of building a landing stage, and the grandmother warns them not to do so, as the winter ice will saw through the legs and destroy it.  Rowing back to her own island she tells the child that they will build one, of course, because people always do.

I put out the last of the lard porridge, and put more lard in the Aga to melt to make some more.  Fortunately, given I forgot to mention it, this time the SA remembered to look in the simmer oven before putting the lunch in to heat up.  Look before you leap, in this house.  So never throw logs into a log basket before checking there isn't a cat curled up in it, and never sit on a chair in the dark.  The black cat has a tactful habit of purring if you come near him in the bottom of a basket or on a chair (black cat on black leather not the most obvious contrast), or squeaking politely if he thinks maybe you really are going to sit down.  His sister, the fat tabby, likes to lie in the middle of the steps between the upper and lower sitting rooms, which can be a trap to the unwary.

Today, for the second day running, I have taken the responsible course and stayed indoors.  This feels like (and is) a terrible waste of good gardening weather, but my cold has lodged firmly on my chest.  I would like it to clear up as soon as possible, and have to admit that staggering around the garden in a cold wind is unlikely to help.  The acid test is that I don't honestly feel up to it.  I picked up the camellia pots when I topped up the bird table, and watered them, and those few minutes outside were enough to convince me that this was not the right place to be.  I'd be happier if it were raining, because then I wouldn't feel I was missing out.  The cold can't be too bad, then.  The SA claims to only start seriously worrying about my illnesses at the point when I stop grumbling about them.  I try not to take the cold personally, and remember the words of Don Marquis (an early twentieth century American poet, unaccountably overlooked nowadays) 'Men curse germs, but a germ thinks of a man only as a swamp in which he has to live'.

Addendum  We watched Winter's Bone last night, one of last year's crop of films, about a seventeen year old girl from a desperately poor part of rural Missouri, searching for her father, who has skipped a court appearance for drugs offences after putting up the family house as bail.  It reviewed brilliantly at the time, and Dr Kermode regarded it as his third favourite for the Oscars.  It is a very, very good film at several levels, and I recommend it highly.  Admittedly, it is not very cheerful (the SA said it made Fish Tank look like Bambi, but I don't think it was that much more depressing), but it was that or an indie film about an Iranian rock band.