pcb

I just saw a Jay.

Not a Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata),but Garrulus glandarius – a name that sounds more interesting than it is, as it translates, I'm told, to the Acorn Warbler. That could be wrong, but the little buggers are known to have a thing for acorns and are blamed for the spread of oak trees after the last ice age, IIRC, so it's understandable – they like caching acorns, but don't always come back. Mind, there are other feathered maniacs and squirrels (who aren't feathered, but who are maniacs in their own right) who do the same thing with hazelnuts, if the FiL's lawn is anything to go by, so who am I to point fingers?

Anyway. This is the second time in my life I have knowingly seen one – the last one was flapping around in the quickthorn and crab apple in the back garden; this time, a couple of years later, it was passing between the bin and the cherry tree in the front garden. 

Jay's are not rare, but unusual outside of woodlands. We don't live in a woodland, so it was lost or stealing fruit, same as most of the other birds in the front garden right now.

Last time, the Panda was... not unbelieving, but doubtful. This time I had an image up on my phone and comparing the live creature to the reference; why didn't I take a picture? Last time, the thing took fright because I walked into the garden, this time there was no point because there wasn't a decent direct line of sight and I wanted my own visual proof and memory rather than a blur on a screen through a window blocked by plants.
But.
I saw a Jay. It was cool.

First morning with mist at this end of the year.
It's late!

However, jam making is full speed ahead, so there are hopefully some happy jam eaters about the place.

Ah.
Yet another uincomfortable day ahead.
Moist.
Moist is the word.
Sweaty also gets a look.
The Panda and I are starting earlier in the day because it's cooler. Now, compared to anywhere without a bland climate, this is probably a normal , well-within-parameter day, but we have one and it isn't.
Another few days of venting the house as best we can over night and then battening down the place when the indoor/outdoor temperatures match.
Yup. Whimps, all! It's never around long enough to get used to.

Pratchett had a fun idea of suggesting a state that was 'opposite'. So opposite, it didn't even come into the usual spectrum of whateveritwas he was talking about.

There's a concept car by Mercedes and Avatar, the Vision AVTR, I think it is. There seemed to be a secret fingerprint reader to gain access to the vehicle. It's in the wheel arch.

This struck me as so cleverly dumb that it was on the opposite side of the coin in which clever and dumb are but one side, yadda yadda yadda.

But.
If the idea is anti-clever (is that so sharp you'll cut yourself, perhaps?) anti-clever needs anti-dumb to balance out the clever/dumb continuum on the flip side of that bloody coin Pratchett was on about.

Anti-dumb. Is this Timothy Dexter territory? 
Dexter lived at the end of the 18th century; while undereducated, he became a very successful businessman. Somehow, he married a rich widow (twice his own age, at 32), then bought depreciated currency which was then paid for at face value at the end of the American Civil War. Rivals who wanted to bankrupt him suggested he ship warming pans to the Caribbean – where they were sold as molasses ladles for the sugar industry. He was convinced to ship woollen gloves to the Polynesian islands – where they were traded on for sale in Siberia. He sent a load of stray cats to... Indonesia, I think it was. They were having a problem with rats. 'Ker-ching'. His Coals to Newcastle scheme also paid well as there was a mining strike at the time and an accidental whalebone stockpile fed into the corset industry, again at a profit.

I'm not sure. 
I'm going to have to tinker with the possibilities though. The square root of -1, Euler's Constant and zero might have to be employed: e i e i 0...

After 40 years
One tune
Should
Not be
Capable
Of
Ruining your day.



And yet .. 😆

i would have given a lot, when I was young, to see a robin in our garden.
Inner city living meant sparrows, starlings, pigeons, a neighborhood blackbird and magpies.

There's a robin where I now live.
You can sometimes see it, loitering up a tree or on telephone wires.
How do we know it's there?
The little... Darling never shuts up!

Two in the afternoon or two in the morning, it's there, telling anybody in hearing that THIS IS MY TREE/TELEPHONE WIRE*, SO BUGGER OFF!

Isn't living somewhere with a bit more wildlife wonderful? Mind you, there aren't so many sparrows now.

 

*DELETE AS APPLICABLE.  THEN BUGGER OFF.

Dark Chapel.
They're talking about expanding the housing pool for the county, the smart new councillors with their mandates from Whitehall, about how the area needs to shoulder its portion of the residential burden.
But Dark Chapel doesn't gentrify. It swaggers, a crack-toothed vagabond in a festering frock coat.
The old planners know. They know, but they never tell and the new blood is its own sacrifice, the fresh faces that will become stiff as cheap leather when Dark Chapel Town is on the agenda.

Here's Plough Mary.
She wears a funeral veil and walks the alley behind the vape shop and the glue factory. Long dress, heavier than sin, dragged behind her like a yoke. She mutters as she walks: curses and confessions dribble between her cudding lips. People say if you hear her before you see her, you're safe. Nobody knows what happens if you don't, although the Missing Persons list at the police station has hints.

It’s the hour when the pubs spill their most broken; rain glistens on cobbles like spilled motor oil and a lurching figure in track pants is trying to sweet-talk the carpark ticket machine into leaving its post for a late night fumble. How lucky he is not to get lucky with a slot machine girl: behind the vape shop, the CherryHaze Lounge, shuttered and dark, though the “H” flickers bravely, there’s a service alley, a hazy maze of crates and bins to a door that leads nowhere, except on Thursdays. And the smell: butcher’s rot that never leaves, mingled with the sugary, fake fruit vape fog that clings like guilt.Listen.
She’s there.

Plough Mary.

Six feet of shadow-draped sorrow. Her breath is mist and mulch. Her veil trails in puddles that don’t reflect the sky. She walks like the ground owes her something and the hem of her kirtle is wet with time and regret.
They say Ken Beasley, 19 years and full of beer, stepped into that alley in 1998 to lighten the load. The only things of his to leave were his screams and his England football shirt, the one weaving into the dripping night across the gabled roofs, the other, blood crusted in an evidence bag, a heavy hoofprint over the heart.
A little later, bolstered by the success of The Blair Witch Project, Holly Swift, student film producer, received a white jacket with long, long sleeves and laces and 17 seconds of static on her crushed video camera, for her pain bearing efforts.

Third braai of the year last night. Nothing serious, just us with the cub watching the meat.
Being a weekday, we just went for burgers and sausages and cooked on gas, not charcoal, but a braai is a braai.

Speech to text is making it very difficult to Google Search for Sybil Wright. Even when it recognises the name after careful enunciation, something smart in the background decide I meant 'civil rights'.
So. Why am I searching for this person?
I wanted to know if there were any lawyers with this name...


Sometimes I just bring this stuff down on myself don't I?

 
i found a couple of old recordings at archive.org last night – a 1967 american rock station , where I recognised most of the artists, even if I didn't specifically know the records, and an Easter Monday 1984 blast of BBC Radio 1 of Steve Wright In The Afternoon. I lived the eighties and taught myself to listen to pop because I was completely out of touch with the kids in my school and even the small addition of current music helped. I didn't recognise the vast majority of the music or the artists 😁
I played some to The Panda, who was an Eighties Girl from perm to pixie boots and she didn't remember them, either.
Timewise, we're now the same as my Dad listening to 1940s tunes in the 1980s – except he didn't do much of that, unless you count German Army marching songs of the era. He was guarding a POW camp for a while (not by himself, you understand) and the German prisoners would belt out some good 'uns, apparently. He was a slightly off-beat gent 😊