A delightful start to a showery Sunday by looking out of the window. Female Blackcap was the first bird I saw in the bushes close to our front feeders. As I peer out a Great Spotted Woodpecker appears a Coal Tit  dances in and out of a feeder when the coast is clear all within a couple of minutes. A little later the male Blackcap appears, I attempt to take his photo but he doesn’t play ball! How lucky we are to live in such a wonderful place.

Tomorrow I am hoping it is clear enough to see Saturn and Jupiter– I will take the scope out if it is clear because I am led to believe the moons could be visible. Will report tomorrow.

I apologise for my ramble through illicit card playing yesterday. I don’t think I conveyed the fun we had and how subtle our cheating signs were till we were rumbled ( we had got away with this for a long time). Our sixth form common room was a separate building from the main school building so we did get away with murder! Occasionally cards were hastily hidden when a teacher approached and a couple of times we got hammered! I don’t think young people today doing A levels are allowed such latitude!

Will try and do a quiz tomorrow or Tuesday.

I am sure all of you are depressed with today’s news so I am trying to be positive today and hopefully the rambling below might make you smile!

This year I have been in touch with some people I was at school with (having not been in touch with some of them for fifty years (yes I am old). We fondly recalled a game of cards we played as hard working sixth formers in our free periods and lunch time (we should of been studying). The name we called it was “Dirty Emma” and the idea was to lose the Queen of Spades (another name I’ve heard it called was Chase the Lady), we developed stylish flourishes for putting down the Queen. We developed this through our two years in the 6th form till so we split into two teams called the “Straights” and the “Curlies” -it referred to our hair nothing else! Our team (guess which one I was in) developed  an elaborate cheating system to give our team clues to the cards we were holding that the “Straights” had no idea about. We were winning regularly which they put down to bad luck. Then one memorable game one of our number starting scratching his knee vigorously (meaning lead with Hearts) which wouldn’t of been so bad until he said “How about some…..” and started scratching even more-so the cat was out of the bag so from that moment on both teams developed even more complicated cheating systems. Surprisingly none of us were recruited by M.I. 5  at least I don’t think so. All that waffle is so I can put in the picture below. There is also a picture of me just out in a School House Match- you might find it hard to believe I once had that much hair!.

I thought my football team played well today and could of easily won against a team that just came out of the Premier League.

Puncture repair day-yesterday’s puncture sorted and changed a faulty inner tube on my Mountain Bike. Just ordered new tubes and a new tyre to be on the safe side. As it was wet and windy it was doing lots of odd jobs sort of day.

Enjoyed watching the Great Spotted Woodpecker and the male Blackcap on our feeders.

Yesterday’s Quiz which I don’t think was that testing especially anyone who works with young people

a) Alex Schaffler is the wonderful artist who did the Gruffalo  b) Maurice Sendak wrote Where the Wild Things Are  c) Oxford is the city that features in Pullman’s books   d) The Lake District is where Swallows and Amazons is set  e) Mr Tumnus meets Lucy in Narnia.

Amazed that we have stayed in Tier 2 here in Gloucestershire we were expecting to go into Tier 3 as numbers have been rising. Not that it makes to much difference to us as we continue to be sensible with what we do.

Today has been a busy day a bit like what it used to be! Out doing a Bird Survey on the River first thing. A slow start but it soon warmed up both temperature wise and birds. 133 Snipe and two Jack Snipes was a particular highlight as well as five Pink footed Geese flying over, a couple of hundred Lapwings looked wonderful flying down the River in the sunlight. Many other birds to make it an excellent morning. A high tide and the picture below is just before it reached it we thought we had better not hang around!!!

I have mentioned the Tides and the Bore before the bank in the near foreground is being significantly eroded and we note it each month.

I did a decent ride afterwards almost forty miles developing a slow puncture, that needed some air on a couple of occasions!

Tonight we had a resumption of our Quiz League via Zoom first match since lockdown in March and in our match we scrapped home by one point!

Incensed reading about  Rees Mogg’s comments on Unicef what planet does he live on? Well I can answer that a very privileged planet! Marcus Rashford’s humanity towers over his spitefulness!

Finally a Tier 2 quiz but on Children’s Books as I mentioned them in yesterday’s blog . Yes I know I did one before!

a) Who illustrated the Gruffalo?  b) Who wrote Where the Wild Things Are?  c) Which English City is where Philip Pullman anchors his Northern Lights Trilogy and subsequent Book of Dust books?  d) Where is Swallows and Amazons set?  e) Who does Lucy have tea with in Narnia?

Thought I would share a lovely memory that was triggered by my Grandpa Joe question in the quiz. My first ever class I taught was what we now call Year 4 and my first class book was Charlie and of course at that time hardly anyone really knew the book or had seen the Gene Wilder film. It was a bit like the old fashioned Saturday Movies with the end of each chapter being a cliff edge. The children loved it and I remember them  absolutely living through Charlie’s despair and then ecstasy over the Golden Tickets. It gave many of the children that wonderful gift the love of reading. The class book was always important to me and was always a special part of the school day. It was great to see children anticipating where a story was going and occasionally bemused by the twists and turns. The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler was one story that memorably had children completely fooled at the end! many years I later had to give the author Gene Kemp a lift to the station and told her about it and she was genuinely touched.

Had some good news about my story Pig the Legend today so hopefully I will have some news about publication in the New Year.

Disappointed with the football tonight.

A surreal experience today Story Telling on line with Baguley Hall Primary School in Wythenshawe. As a Story Teller I feed off my audience and will adjust my telling in full flow as I gauge reaction. With young people I will often make the story interactive and it is not so easy on a computer but we all did our best today. I am hoping to more next term with schools because I can’t see live performances any time soon-so my normal flurry of Story Telling around World Book Day is likely to be online!

In my mid break I went for a walk with my binoculars and camera up to Splatt Bridge pictures at the end are I couple I took. I do take other pictures than just birds but that seems to be what I take most of the time in the present circumstances!  I did take hundreds of pictures of my delightful Grandson yesterday.

Thought you might like the blur of the Kingfisher (I did take several on the wire as well but thought the blur was more interesting), The Kestrel was just sitting almost asking for me to take it’s picture and I like the Fieldfare (there are many around at the moment along with the Redwings)

Yesterday’s Grandparent’s Quiz (another quiz around the end of the week.)

a) President Obama was raised by his grandparents  from the age of 10  b) Grandpa Joe went into the Chocolate Factory (more about that tomorrow) c) Victoria had 42 grandchildren  d) My Grandfather’s Clock stopped short never to go again  e) Clive Dunn sang Grandad

Short blog today as we have had a busy day travelling up to see our Grandson hence the title! We were even allowed to have a cuddle with Owen which we were not expecting! Wonderful!

Tomorrow I am Story Telling online during the day.

Quiz questions with a link to Grandparents

a) Which Post War American President was raised by a grandparent?   b) Who went with Charlie into the Chocolate factory?  c) How many Grandchildren did Queen Victoria have?  d) “It stopped short never to go again” comes from what song?  e) Who sang Grandad?

Should of been the title of the blog last night referring to yesterday’s superb performance by the Hatters. However today it could be Hats On it is so wet perhaps I should of put Soggy Sunday!

Have been busy relearning a couple of Christmas Stories for a virtual telling this week. Always find it slightly amusing to relearn a story I wrote but I only tell my Christmas Angels at this time of year! maybe I will get around to getting this story published although I may need to write another one to go with it.

I will try and think of a subject for a quiz tomorrow. We hope to see Owen David Church in the flesh tomorrow (sadly from a distance) so fingers crossed.

Apologies that the blog “Christmas Lights” which I wrote yesterday I forgot to publish yesterday so it has only just been published. So today’s blog or is this the second blog of the day will be a brief one!

It has been a job day including gathering up leaves from our front garden so the back feels it now! This afternoon was a social bird watch looking over to the River Severn-kept bumping into friends so there was more talking than birding! Funniest moment was my friend Gordon and I got very excited because in the far distance we spotted not one but three Green-winged Teal a bird that only rarely appears in Gloucestershire. We got very excited until we got suspicious that the birds looked like they had bright breeding colours in December and were not moving! sadly they were decoy ducks because sadly we have a lot of shooting of wild fowl in this area.

For the first time ever we put up our lights in the apple tree at the start of December- normally we wait until schools break up. It takes some time as you unravel the lights and then have to climb the ladder several times as I thread it through. When finished it looks simple but effective. So some early light to cheer us all up is working well at the start of December. Then disaster struck! Someone who will remember nameless managed to pull the lead out of the sealed plug so it was beyond repair! So on impulse we went and brought up the last decent string of lights at B and Q. Now it was a matter of getting the original string down; climbing up and down, up and down, up and down for what seems to be a 100 times!!! New string is then carefully unravelled and arranged in the tree-more ladder climbing! It looks comically as you thread 500 small lights through many branches. Finally we are pleased with our efforts and we symbolically switched on-great stuff! Satisfied we turned it all off to wait for darkness, well so we thought. We didn’t notice that we managed to shear through the lead when pulling down the garage door. When we went to switch on and we baffled to discover  NO LIGHTS again! Eventually we worked out what had happened. I was ready to ride off into the sunset but I was tired from my continuous ladder climbing!

Finally after purchasing a connector and insulation tape plus much jiggery-pokery we managed to reconnect the lead and as I write we once again have delightful lights twinkling outside. I have to admit I couldn’t face climbing up into the tree yet again and threading through all those lights.  Feel like calling ourselves Botch It/ Botch It!!!

We had an enjoyable evening last night at Book Club sharing a wide range of cartoons we had each chosen. I do like it when we do these different type of Book Club Evenings and I am always in awe of the breadth of imagination of my fellow Bookies!

Yesterday’s Cartoon Quiz answers

a) Woodstock is the little yellow bird from Peanuts  b) Bambi was the film and it came out in 1942  c) Nick Park created Wallace and Gromit   d) Benny is the blue cat from Top Cat  e) Clifton is Postman Pat’s surname.