Rest and recuperation

Today’s guest picture comes from my sister Caroline. She met this fine example of Halloween yarn bombing when she was out and about in Portsmouth.

We had a brighter and mostly dry day today, which was very welcome in spite of the fact that I couldn’t make the best use of it because I was resting my knee. As a good night’s sleep had helped it settle down well, I wasn’t going to give it the chance to get annoyed again. I had a very quiet day by and large, hardly moving after breakfast until I stood up to make some coffee.

I looked out at the birds while the coffee was brewing, and found a goldfinch looking accusingly at me because I hadn’t refilled the feeder yet.

I went out and repaired this omission, and the next time that I looked, a grateful greenfinch was tucking in.

It was not alone.

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Coffee seamlessly merged into lunch and then, as my knee felt relaxed and happy, I went into the front room and started organising my own music. I had finished cataloguing the boxes of music we inherited from our former playing friend Roy, so I thought that it would be useful to add my collection to the catalogue too. This involved taking everything out of my music cupboard, spreading it all over the floor, and sighing heavily.

To put off the moment of truth, I took my knee out for a very gentle three bridges walk, no climbing or rough going involved. The walk went well, and there were no complaints from my knee, though it is reminding me now, as I write this, that it still needs care.

Before I left our garden, I noticed that a Welsh poppy had come out to join the remaining nasturtiums, and the magnolia is quite colourful too.

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I walked down to the Esk and caught the last of the leaves along the waterside.

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I met a good selection of riverside birds too; a crow on the bank of the Esk, and our resident heron, with a mallard, a goosander and three gulls at the Kilngreen.

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I liked the variety of standing methods adopted by the gulls.

The ornamental white berries on the tree in the Clinthead gardens nearby are obviously not attractive to birds as hardly any of them seem to have disappeared.

There is still a bit of colour to be seen among the trees . . .

. . . and these two on my walk round the new path on the Castleholm were in surprisingly good shape.

I crossed the Jubilee Bridge and took the path round the Scholar’s field. A number of blackbirds were guddling about in the leaves at the foot of the fence round the artificial pitch, and they must have found something interesting as a great tit joined them.

The angle from which I was looking at the fence made its poles look much closer together than they are in reality, and when a siskin perched half way up the fence, it created a strange effect.

A blackbird perched on top of the fence to add more interest through the odd looking placement of its feet.

I was most entertained, but my knee mentioned about not standing about for too long, so I didn’t stay to see what would appear next and took it back home.

After a cup of tea, I got serious about the music lying all over the floor, and sorted it into more meaningful piles, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sonatas, trio sonatas and so on. And then I put it all back in the music cupboard.

It didn’t make the room any tidier (that will come tomorrow, I hope), but it was a useful exercise.

We rounded off the day with a family Zoom with my siblings, a quick evening meal, and finally a choir practice with the augmented church choir. All in all, it was quite a satisfactory day.

I have been so short of flying birds lately, that when I managed to get two half decent shots today, I decided to put them both in as flying birds of the day to celebrate.

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