The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.
Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
Continue reading “scheduled water fights”
It’s 4 a.m. and you stand on the lawn,
knees slightly bent, head back, facing
infinity, scanning for meteors. Come on;
it’s time for bed, I Zebedee, but you beg,
Just one more. And so I watch you
watching for falling stars, diamond scatter
from the Milky Way, and think of the tip-tilt,
star-gazey hare in the moon. There! look!
You point skywards, but the pointing finger
roots me firmly to the earth. Come on,
I say, but you are galaxies away, determined
to wait for Just one more.
It’s that time of year again: time for the Perseids, which I saw for the first time lying in Battersea Park two day’s after I had my wisdom teeth out. Although I was with a couple of radio hams who assured me they were ‘meteor scatter’, even some thirty years later I still wish when I see a shooting star.
Last time I was in the UK I noticed a copy of the magazine Practical Reptile Keeping in W H Smiths. I’m not sure whether the reptile in the picture is practical, but I made no attempt to keep him other than as a photograph.
The photo is for anyone who thought it a pity that yesterday’s lizard came to such a dusty end. (If the cats found this one after the photo session, ‘dusty’ won’t have described the ending.)
(Click here for a picture of male and female kiwi flowers)
As I’ve mentioned before, when I first saw kiwi fruit back in the Seventies, they were called Chinese gooseberries. But, although the fruit are greenish and furry and have tiny seeds, they aren’t really anything like gooseberries.
Or so I thought until we started growing them.
Continue reading “christmas in May”
don't confuse the narrator 