Autumn Clean

 I’ve been caught up in the grip of an urge to give the house a jolly good ‘Autumn Clean’ which is a bit like a Spring Clean but with more spiders and sneezing. I started on Saturday and have been a-scrubbin’, a-dustin’, a-sweepin’ and a-polishin’ ever since. I’m almost done to my satisfaction and have only sworn once which was this morning when I tackled the TV corner and was almost strangled by the plethora of cables and wires that lay therein. I shall ask His Lordship Malarkey if they really are ALL necessary...

Yesterday, I was up on a stool, turfing out and re-organising the contents of what I call ‘the Baking Cupboard.’ It’s located above the built in oven and the top shelves require me to stand on a stool in order to reach them. Anyway, there’s nothing quite like a good delve into a baking cupboard so I unloaded the contents, threw out a couple of things that had ‘Best before’ dates in 2017 - cornflour and semolina - and as I dismounted the stool in order to get myself a soapy cloth to wipe the shelves clean of floury detritus, these had suddenly appeared at the window...

Sheep! They are Texels, which are ENORMOUS, like the size of a sofa. I’ve been tracking them for several weeks now, advancing towards us as they’ve been moved from distant field to distant field for grazing. And yesterday they arrived in the field opposite. A very welcome change to the view they make, too. Every now and again, one will spot me watching it through the window (not that I spend a lot of time sheep-watching, honestly I don’t...) and it will prick up its ears, stand really still, and stare back as if to say, ‘Wot you staring at, eh? Come over ‘ere, if you think you’re hard enough.’ The rams are positively ‘Ronnie and Reggie Kray’ in appearance. Shudder.....

I’m hoping the next port of call for the flock will be in the field that surrounds our garden on three sides. The last time this happened, some of them ventured into our drive (electric fence? What electric fence??) and mowed the grass verge for us. And the grass verge definitely needs a trim because it is being gradually taken over by a selection of bird feeding stations. 

Oh yes! The bird lady outside St Paul’s Cathedral from the film ‘Mary Poppins’ has nothing on us! If only the food was ‘tuppence a bag’ though, because we are spending a not inconsiderable sum of money keeping those feeders filled with sunflower seeds, peanuts and fat balls. However, we haven’t been eating out much this year, if at all, so the birds may as well benefit from our entertainment budget. Every day we see goldfinches, greenfinches, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, wrens, robins, blackbirds, collared doves, sparrows, nuthatches and woodpeckers. I’m sure there was a brambling out there the other day, too, because it looked too red and too stripy to be a chaffinch.

And without fail, every day Fat Clive is there. This is Fat Clive. He is instantly recognisable to me. Apologies for the quality of the photo. The zoom on the iPad isn’t great...

Can you see him? He’s a bit difficult to miss, really. He is the most enormously massive greenfinch ever known to the greenfinch fraternity. Seriously,  when he is there with his greenfinch mates, they pale into size comparison against him. Andy is convinced he is, in fact, a baby golden eagle, and will emerge magnificent and triumphant, like the swan in ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ Clive stakes his claim on the feeder - always the same feeder and the same perch - and nothing will budge him. Sometimes he sits in the grass beneath the feeder; we wonder if it’s because he is too hefty to make it into the air, and he really can’t be arsed to make the effort. 

You can also just see in the first picture that he appears to have a white beak. That’s NOT a white beak, my friends. Oh no - that is a beak CLOGGED up with sunflower seeds. Sometimes I think I ought to go out and offer him a napkin, he looks such a messy pup. Sometimes I wonder how easy it would be to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on a fat greenfinch choking on a surfeit of sunflower seeds. 

He causes me no end of entertainment, does Clive. Well, they all do, really. Being entertained by birds on their feeders is better than TV. I’m especially fond of the nuthatches, wrens and blue tits. They’re like little avian Ninjas, darting in and out to retrieve their nutty quarry. The next installation will be a low level table for the flat feeders - the doves, blackbirds and thrushes. Currently they are scavenging for the bits that fall from the feeders, but I reckon they deserve a serving table of their own. 

I hope you are all well and ticketty boo? The weather continues to be mild and mostly dry and sunny. I continue to count my blessings that all is well in my world. And that, despite everything else, the sheep and birds carry on regardless in their worlds, too. 

Sensible things.