Gredos – Page 16 – don't confuse the narrator

a prowl of cats in the night

I was woken in the wee shall hours by cats growling on the verandah. It wasn’t the wailing and wauling of the queen calling the neighbours’ toms – no need, she’s already pregnant again – and it sounded quite unfriendly, so I got up to check there were no forasteros about.

No one ran when I opened the door: the shadows were apparently all members of our own semi-feral tribe. But the growling continued.

Then I identified the sound as the possessive crooning they make when they have caught something and are warning the others away.

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a woman’s work

I get very irritated about all the different ‘international day of this’ and ‘world day for that’ events. Particularly when there seems to be so little consensus about the celebrations. (I’ve commented before on how the UK celebrate an entirely different World Book Day from the rest of the planet and I always miss it – though I do remember the one on April 23rd. )

Be that as it may, Google has reminded me that today is International Women’s Day, and I find from clicking their commemorative logo that it’s the 100th anniversary of the event and that women around the world will be standing on bridges to celebrate. Continue reading

dewi sant

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daffs outside my window for the last month and wondering if they’d make it out in time.

In the end, despite showing colour for a week now, they haven’t. Perhaps later on today, if the sun keeps shining, they will unfurl their yellow flounces in celebration of St David’s day.

Mind you, they aren’t real daffs, anyway, as they are multi-petalled, double flowers, not the clear bright-trumpeted kind that line the road down to South Wales.

(For information about the wild daffodils of Britain, check out the I Hate Daffodils! website.)
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hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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fur tree

lichens on oak tree trunk — I'm lichen it

“The times they are a-changing.” Or, at least, the weather is. And in Spanish, of course, tiempo is the word for both time and weather. (More about that in the ‘having a good time’ post.)

Yesterday, I sat outside sun-bathing and watched the very first swallows of the season sitting on the phone wires apparently tidying themselves up after their long journey.

Today the wind is howling, and the sight of the the billowing tree tops through the window is enough to make any one feel sea-sick. Perhaps the oak tree in the photo will be pleased to be wrapped up warm in its furry green coat.