Buzzards and Utter Bobbins....
I visited my father for tea today. We have a regular Wednesday night thing going on these days. He makes tea in his extremely precise fashion (75cl of water, two teaspoons of Darjeeling, three dips of the tea net and a Holyrood china cup) and we sit in his living room eating whichever fancy cheesecake he has managed to sniff out this week. This week he had a vanilla New York, I had an almond mascarpone and my mother (who also appeared for tea this week, although she normally doesn't) had a raspberry amoretto affair.
We sat at the dinner table and identified all the birds my father has recently spied in his garden, using the enormous AA Book of British Birds which I remember so very keenly from my childhood. He's been visited by a regular menagerie: three chaffinches, two mallards, a greater spotted woodpecker and a buzzard! The buzzard likes to perch directly to the right of his living room window, where he can eat his prey in peace.
He refers to the buzzard as 'his' buzzard. I explained that very soon he would be 'my' buzzard too, as Az and I saw him circling over the fields across the river from our new house when we viewed it last week.
We visited River Cave Cottage before we had tea. Although Az and I haven't got the keys yet (we get them on Saturday once we've paid the rest of the deposit) my parents and I peeked through the windows and picked our way down the side of the row, so that my mum and dad could see our river balcony. I forgot to take photographs of all the above, but did remember to snap a few while I was waiting for them to arrive. Here is the view east, upstream, and here is the back of the little row (or at least the bit of verge that leads up to the back of the row). Here is the mill yard outside our front (or back - haven't quite worked it out yet) entrance and here is the view across the river, from a little way down the bank.
It was rather chilly by the time we were poking our noses around, as the sun had dipped below the horizon - but it was easy (and lovely) to imagine what it's going to be like in summer, sitting by the river.
I was going to write about some of the strange and annoyingly smug things I've been typing up today at work - some brainstorm notes from a Creative Arts-therapy lecture on how wealth (or lack thereof) affects health - but I am too much craving the comfort of the sofa, my green stripy blanket and Wuthering Heights. Why did no one ever tell me Wuthering Heights was so good?
Well - I suppose they did, to be fair.
I may whibble further about the lecture notes at some other time. For now I shall simply leave you with the facts (yes, FACTS... according to the collection of affluent, ethno-boho Arts-therapies students) that "Access to competitive sports causes anorexia and eating disorders", and the rather damning (and faintly pejorative): "Working class males go into jobs that aren’t fulfilling their ‘masculine role’, so they are likely to carry out domestic abuse".
Oh and not forgetting (my personal favourite): "The media affects women’s health more than men’s - targets insecurities such as dental hygiene"
Man, these kids have some weird hang-ups these days...