Carriageway news
It's all go here today. Came up to crank up Footling's Nature Diary and do a gentle waffle about pretty birdies in the trees. (List may follow for those who like that kind of thing.) But it turned out not to work that way. There were some distractions.
1) A B&Q artic stopped dead on the inside lane of the dual carriageway for no apparent reason. Other drivers were not impressed. Much screeching and honking ensued. Naturally, I gave up on Footling's Nature Diary and went to look out of the window and laugh.
2) Screaming sirens seemed to be hurtling this way. I expected police arriving to tell off B&Q man, or maybe to hurtle round onto the motorway for a high speed chase. Instead, it was a fire engine.
It did a U-turn. It didn't bother with the filter lane and slip road designed to help you get from one side of the dual carriageway to the other. It just pulled onto the tarmac bit of the central reservation. You know, the tarmac bit. Otherwise known as the footpath. No-one was on it at the time, I think. If they were, they're hanging onto the underside of the big red engine even as I type.
3) Fire engine went, very quickly. B&Q man went, rather slowly.
4) I thought, 'I'm supposed be doing a nature diary. I wonder how the pretty birdies are?' So I went to the other window to check (a window that doesn't look onto the dual carriageway, incidentally). Just as the big ginger cat that's moved in next door but one caught a bird.
Slight problem. Bird that it caught was a crow. A fully grown, Omen-type, peck-your-eyeballs-out crow.
Much catterwauling and cawing ensued. Cat's mate came to check proceedings. So did crow's. I kept well out of the way. Cat brought reinforcements. Crow beat a retreat, rather injured I think, but not at all inclined to accept help.
Footling's Nature Diary, sadly, is somewhat less lively, but here goes: so far today I've seen chaffinches, robins (a pair, nestbuilding!), bluetits, great tits (no sniggering, please - oh alright then, if you must), greenfinches, a wren and - my favourites - long tailed tits. It's peculiar, most of them come into the yard at the same time, then all leave at the same time - it must be a sort of avian pub crawl. Except now there are really dodgy bouncers on the prowl and we all know of at least one bird that should be in A&E but it's disappeared.
That's all. For now. And most of it should be behind an lj-cut but I couldn't get it to work. Sulking now.