Virtually no traffic

comes through the village but most days I hear a parping horn that signals the arrival of a van that stops and then people come out of their houses and buy things from it. 


Today I heard the horn and ran out - determined to buy whatever was on offer - it was fish.

A man was also buying fish - I recognised his blackandwhite pointer dog that had followed me home in an elaborate game of Grandmother's Footsteps yesterday.

During the fish transaction we established that I am neither the sister, aunt nor cousin of the lady who owns the whippet

No Pets Please ...

I tell Lola about the dog woman

Lola says 

all animals are trouble even the little ones…

I got given two fish right but then I had to go away and so did my flatmates so I had to put the fish in a bag and put the fish tank on my back and carry them over the other side of town to my friend and I told her she had to use old water for the tank it has to be two days old or the tap water kills them but the water wasn’t old enough and the fish died and she was so sorry that when I came back she bought me two fish but one was bigger than the other and he bullied the little one and I called my mother who told me to separate them but while I was on the phone I watched the little one die he just went over on his side like that while I was watching …

Road Trip. 2: In Which I Purchase A Spiny Balloonfish

Headed into the depths of Yorkshire and found a suitably scary-looking inn to stay for night. The sort of place full of people who all go silent when I walk through the door.

Barman says that in this part of the world one drinks Baileys with Brandy, wanting to fit in, tried a few of these ... rather good actually ... don't remember much of the rest of the evening.

Needed a Hair of the Dog to get going the following morning.


Continued drive towards Scotland, stopped in small town to investigate curio shop with large, dried Spiny Balloonfish. Request to purchase item. Take surprisingly long time to wrangle what is effectively a brittle, fragile, balloon stuck with sharp spines out of shop and into car. Next stop I see that the beast has thoroughly embedded itself in my upholstery.

Fish and Cabbage

10th May
A comment on my last post from Mr Dilo in Romania indicated that I might not have explained the butterfly/cabbage thing adequately. Earlier this year I started a vegetable patch so that we would have a context to film some of our insects, I planted all the usual stuff including some flouncy green cabbages, I kept a few of the plants in pots - they don’t like being confined. The butterflies may well turn their noses up at my pathetic cabbage stubs but if there is no other option, they might lay their bright yellow eggs on the leaves. (I nicked the egg pic from here, where there are also some nice shots of the young hatching and a Cabbage White pupa)


Fishing on Friday didn’t go down well, none of us have wielded a rod (and to be frank, I've never seen the point of all that standing around) but there is a lake on the land that we rent and it is teeming with fish, fishing is the sort of thing a father does with his son ergo etc...

The chaps came back after less than an hour in a state of distress - a fish had responded to the baited hook with such gusto that it entirely swallowed the hook, it all ended very messily, the fish not being the sort of size to bother eating.

The fish are very friendly, they will come if I call them because they know that I have bread. My neighbours have dug a reservoir and want to stock it with these fish so yesterday I went to the lake, and once they were feeding I just dipped a bucket and Hey Presto!





My favourite fishing method is to creep up on the herons, they catch the big fish by stabbing them, if I surprise the birds just as they have made a catch they usually drop the fish as they fly off.








You've probably been irredeemably traumatised by that vision of my unmanicured toes, tomorrow, unless otherwise distracted, I'll tell you about Brenda's party.

Things That Swim, Things That Fly

30th August
Last night, when I opened the door of our white-tiled bathroom, the light was on and the room full of moths; they coated the walls, the white porcelain, the soap. There's a broken pane where they've come in. Beautiful but a bit unnerving. I switched off the light and backed out without cleaning my teeth. This morning there were still a few who’d refused to go home – hiding determinedly in the lavatory bowl

A neighbour's child came to visit, I took her to the lake to meet the fish. Bribed with bread, little roach come in big shoals and swim around our fingers. A gloomy perch lurks near the feeding frenzy. The child was so absorbed by the event that, squatting in the shallow edges of the lake, she’d ended up sitting on her teddy bear which became soaked and muddy, unconcerned she held him close and sucked at him all the way home.