Keeping safe and warm

 

Why do we do it? Sometimes it is accidental as it falls from our pocket and sometimes, we just throw things away into the hedge or roadway. There is litter on our road and in the gateway. People seem to stop and have a sandwich and a cup of tea as they pull off the road for a break. Sometimes they leave their litter. A cardboard cup and a plastic wrapper sit there in the mud for us all to see. Mind you just recently so many potholes have appeared that I am sure the traffic is avoiding our little road. You have to swing out into the middle otherwise your car gets a surprisingly massive jolt.

The astronauts had a surprise recently at the International Space Station during a spacewalk when they accidently dropped a tool bag. It is brightly coloured and so they could watch as it fell and then went into orbit. If you know where to look you can see it with binoculars almost as bight as a planet. As it falls it will eventually disintegrate, I wonder if it will take as long as the plastic wrapper in our gateway, which could take hundreds of years to rot.

On a lighter note, we have moved our bird table. Our sunroom is too cold in the winter and we cannot sit there now. We have always fed the birds so we can see them from the sunroom window, but now we have moved to our ‘winter quarters’, we do not see them. Then, at last, I had a good idea; we could put the bird table and the feeders to a position in front of the sitting room window. Now sitting in the warmth from our log burner we can watch the birds’ antics again. The birds fly nearby and then they stick like fridge magnets to the feeders pecking the nuts all day long. Sworn enemies are suddenly friendly in the battle for survival. Two robins eat together which they would not normally do and the stabbing starling is eating alongside the bully blackbird.

Have you seen the new Street Rangers yet? They are in some of our Shropshire towns, wearing bright id. tops and trying to keep us safe. We saw an altercation on the street the other day. One person was shouting very loudly and another person trying to explain to the Rangers what had happened. Everyone else sloped by; none of us wanting to be involved. We kept our eyes to the pavement, the Rangers listened. How could this end? The shouting got louder. Well, it ended when a police car came as back up. Peace was soon restored.

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)

The robin got there first this morning just as the sun was rising