A sign of the times

 

‘You are number fifteen in the queue’. The automated voice tells me as I wait patiently trying to speak to a doctor’s receptionist. Then there was the morning when I thought I would order my medicines online.

‘We do not recognise your ID and Password’

I usually remember all my passwords, so I tried again to no avail. I could not get in to make an order. I would have to take my request to the surgery. How reliant I am on technology and when there was an outage, we were all lost. I drive everywhere with the Sat Nav and would have to learn map reading again without it.

Of course, I simply waited and this week we are back to normal and some of my friends who have never trusted technology think they have proved their point. But things have changed and there is no going back.

I wish the moles on our lawn would go back underground though. They are active on our grass at the moment and it seems that every morning when I look out of the widow there are more and more brown mounds in ever increasing lines. At least it means that our soil is rich in earthworms which moles eat. So, we have healthy soil but a lumpy lawn. I have heard that one way to get rid of them is to put a child’s windmill onto their burrow. They do not like vibrations caused when the windmill turns, perhaps thinking it is a cat or dog to catch them.

When I last went to the coast I bought a sea-side windmill and we secured it next to a line of molehills. So far so good and the mole seems to have turned around to dig.

When we were at the coast, we saw that the little brown sand martins had fledged. There were hundreds of them excitedly flying around and round the clay cliffs which held their hollow tunnel nests. They rested on electrical cables, which had been exposed by erosion, and stretched their wings and preened.

Back at home there are house martins doing the same thing except they are flying around our house and cow byre. There about a dozen of them today slicing though the sky and ‘shouting’ as if in the pure ecstasy of flying. I sit in our fruit cage picking blueberries for our breakfast and they are overhead already catching their breakfast of flies. Their shadows skim over me like arrows.

We went for a meal the other day and outside, using an old trestle table, was an informal wedding party. Just like the old days, except for mobile phones, of course.

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)

Sand martins just fledged, testing their flying (and perching) skills