I read in the papers recently that Easter has now become almost as great a non-religious celebration as Christmas, with gifts and cards, crackers, candles and floral wreaths.
Personally, I won’t be celebrating in any way, except inasmuch as today being Easter Sunday has influenced the choice of photos for this blog post.
Continue reading “Easter day”
Well, not actually a cuckoo as such, but a cuckoo flower.
March went out like a lamb and it’s been gloriously warm recently – so much so that I am afraid we have already had our summer – so I had begun to wonder what had happened to the April I know and love who provides us with such constantly changing weather that we are never short of a topic of conversation.
Continue reading “the first cuckoo”
As I am too busy to write more than a few words, I thought I’d just post a photograph and this seemed the “busiest” picture I’d taken in a while.
Then I stopped to wonder what the plant was and it occurred to me that if every one of those flowers turns into a fruit of some sort, it must be one of the shrubs that is covered in tiny berries through the autumn and winter. I don’t know many shrub names, but it seems likely it’s a variety of cotoneaster.
My pronunciation of that is something akin to KO-tun-ee-aster, but having written it down, I’ve remembered my mother’s humorous referrals to the cotton-Easter plant. Which makes it almost topical.
I’ve said before that when we used to go on family holidays my parents always found room in the suitcases for a few books.
Specifically, there was always the Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds and the Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers, and I must have spent hours identifying and listing the new species we found. (Perhaps it wasn’t just me who had this task – it may have been a more familial activity, or perhaps we even had a competition to see which sibling found the most – but my memory is only of my own lists.)
Continue reading “educational”
Well, it’s Mothering Sunday and we altered the clocks last night, doing the old dear out of an hour in bed.
I’m not sure that these two dates always coincide, but my mother first drew my attention to it when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, saying that she thought a woman PM could have organised things a bit better. Of course Thatcher was supposed to only need four hours’ sleep a night, so I don’t suppose it mattered much to her.
Continue reading “more mothers”
don't confuse the narrator 