Mrs Blackbird has recquisitioned

a small glass tank in the garden. The Man had filled it with tadpoles  and was about to film them but when his back was turned the blackbird flew down, jumped in and splashed around, then she noticed the tadpoles and scoffed them.*

The tank has stayed there and she comes every day for an afternoon bath, the tadpoles have not been replaced but the Man buys fancy blueberries which he cuts in half and leaves them in a saucer by the tank so she can snack and swim.

*Coronovirus Lockdown has meant that all travelling filming work has been  cancelled, all the kit has come to live in our house, where it sprawls  over kitchen, dining room and garden and threatens to take over upstairs

Cornwall is made of sea and ice cream

I found the perfect beach with a perfect ice cream shoppe. I walked away with my 'strawberries-and-clotted-cream' artisan delight, vaguely hearing words coming from the ice cream seller's mouth

watch out ....

... my attempts to listen to him were interrupted by a seagull's foot landing on my ice cream.

Finding myself in a Hitchcock movie I hurried, hunched over, simultaneously trying to to shelter the cone with my hand and get as much ice cream as possible into my mouth. The bird made another pass under my hand slicing himself a small beakful in such an astonishing way that I dropped the guard hand allowing a third pass and now the gull got the entire double scoop and dropped to the beach, trying in his turn to scoff as much as possible while being mobbed by all the other thieving gulls.

I left them to it feeling foolish - not a single other person was buying ice cream

I returned to London

with a valise which turns out to be perfectly cat-sized, the black cat has taken ownership - the tortoiseshell sits on my knitting waiting until the black one has to go off for a drink or food, then she nips in and tries to assert squatters rights until chased off in short shrift.

The cat thing is to distract me from remembering that I was in Bristol yesterday getting a tooth pulled - last time I had a tooth out it was a lady dentist who just reached in and clicked the molar as though it was a light fitting and I barely noticed. Yesterday it was like the man was uprooting a redwood. By the time the grinding and scraping stopped I had gone transparent with shock.

I'm surprisingly normal today, back in London I took the 211 to Chelsea. On the Kings Road I walked past a man wearing a huge blue macaw on each shoulder like a pair of mardi gras epaulettes. He was quite a small man and the parrot's heads towered above his. He was walking in a way that indicated he hadn't noticed the birds but quite hastily and with his head thrust forward and furtive as though he thought someone was following him

Das Sein

I'm preparing for this new term that is rushing up to meet me,  ploughing through texts thick with references to the thoughts of dead men: French ones, Greek ones, Austrian ones and then those German ones and their very special words.

I've sought to lighten my load by interleaving the heavy boys with joy, such as a wonderful book called Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle. Also The School of Life chops the likes of Heidegger and Plato into bite-sized pieces for kindergarten philosophers like me.




The mother thrush is letting her son walk around in our garden, she's up on the fence keeping watch. His head is tatty with the remnants of baby feathers and he looks like a drunken uncle at a wedding party, an impression that deepens when a failed attempt to perch on a flimsy branch has him swaying ninety degrees in each direction before he flops back onto the grass. He doesn't fly away when I walk outside and I can see her bobbing around in panic in case I pick him up and eat him.



On Saturday I set off to meet my step-daughter for lunch, passing her father on my way out.

I was wearing one of my re-knitted woolens - it's hairy orange with a la-di-da collar

I said  I'm going to see your daughter

he said  and I see that you're going dressed as a mad woman

More Wildife Than Might Be Good For Me

I'm much worse at packing than I used to be, I pack far more these days and yet I have only a couple of wearable outfits - the other ninety per cent of my luggage might as well have stayed at home.

I had considered my pyjamas to be redundant, at bedtime I take a cold shower and lie on the bed hoping sleep will come before I reheat. This morning, when I went to the bathroom, I noticed all the gecko pellets stuck on my legs.

A lady sunbird* pecks for long periods on my window pane, I think she is attacking her reflection and imagines herself to be arguing with another sunbird but her persistence feels rather Hitchcockian.

* From Mssrs Wijeyeratne, Warakagoda and De Zylva in Birds of Sri Lanka

'The purple-rumped sunbird ... builds elaborate pear-shaped nests with a distinctive entrance roof over the entry hole. The nest is constructed from spider webs and other naturally-occurring soft fibrous materials, it is finished off with little chips of bark'.

The Babbler

At dusk the most extraordinary boinging and hooting noises erupt around my cabin. I think it's mostly birds. There is a dust-coloured bird that comes around several at a time, the size of a fat thrush, it is not at all sleek, they chatter away together and make a lovely sound - I am told that it is a Babbler. I look the Babbler up in Birds of Sri Lanka where Mssrs Wijeyeratne, Warakagoda and De Zylva inform me that it is a garrulous bird ... members of the flock help build each nest, which may be shared

sweet