The swifts are here.
I heard their first high-pitched bubbling this morning, and when I looked, they were there, circling and swooping and hurtling after one another.
Oliver and I watched some grumpy crows chasing a buzzard away from their patch the other day, and it was a bit like that, except without quite so many mid-air collisions.
It is wonderful to see them, and even more wonderful to hear them, there is hope that we might have a summer after all.
It seems a bit unlikely at the moment, actually, I wore my thickest jersey today, and wished that I had not discarded my thermal vest in such a reckless hurry. I did not go over the fells with the dogs. Oliver, who is practising sprinting up hills in order to audition for the Paras in a couple of months, took them, whilst I stayed at home and rushed about hanging up the washing and organising everybody’s nutrition for the day.
Mark watered the garden and hoovered, employing extreme caution, just in case, but there were no obvious Guffy-related disasters, and I am beginning to hope that she might be recovering.
We are not going to take her to the vet, for very obvious pecuniary reasons, she is a very nice cat but I would be disinclined to spend a couple of hundred quid on my own healthcare, never mind the cat’s. In any case, since she is very obviously not unwell, and has been thoroughly wormed, we think that her misfortunate poo problems have been caused by malnutrition in her earliest days, causing her digestive system not to develop properly.
There is nothing whatsoever that a vet can do about this other than make pretend-knowledgeable noises and charge me seventy five quid.
We have force-fed her some Imodium, after a dreadful leaky disaster on our bed, we have forgiven her, but we had to remind ourselves quite forcefully that she is a tiny sick kitty and not just an inconvenient revolting nuisance. This should slow everything down as it passes through her, so that hopefully she will absorb a bit more nutrition from it. Also I have purchased some kitten milk, the sort usually fed to orphan kittens, in the hope of restoring some of the lost dietary benefits that she missed.
We will see how she goes on.
If she leaks on our bed again we will be issuing her with a cork.
After all of that fuss, Mark went off to purchase the solar panels, and Oliver and I went off to Kendal to purchase some new trousers for him, because his old ones seem somehow to have become too short.
Neither of us enjoy shopping, except today’s shopping was marked by an exciting surprise purchase.
The picture is below.
Oliver sighed deeply and carried it across the shopping centre for me, where he buckled it into the back seat of the car and then laughed a great deal.
I think I might add a head and a mermaid’s tail and turn it into a figurehead. I thought at first it might go on the camper van, but my second thought was that I have long wanted a figurehead for the garden, to go underneath the pirate flag, it will look splendid when Mark gets round to building the cannon.
It will have to wait until we have finished building the camper van, of course, but it is nice to have something to which I can look forward.
We have put her at the back of the shed for now, underneath a shopping bag to protect her from the house martens who are nesting just above her head, and Mark and I had a determined effort to get the last of the frames in for the van’s lovely new windows.
We have almost finished, if we get on with it tomorrow we might start getting the window holes cut.
I am looking forward to that as well.
