Monday 29th September.
I am not scared of the dark. I go out in the dark every
night with Callie for her final walk of the day. I have a huge torch, not
because I am scared of the dark - I am scared of some wanker driver not seeing
either me or my dog and running us over. I have a torch that will melt paint.
Technically, this is not true; I used to have a torch that would melt paint. If
you shone it into the sky it would make a shadow on the moon. The only snag
with this torch was it weighed an absolute ton and was giving me muscles like a
bloody weight-lifter on steroids.
Two years ago I discovered LED torches. I now own one
with a 2W LED bulb. OK, it isn’t quite a heavy as Thor’s Hammer Torch but it
still picks out low flying aircraft in the night sky. In fact it weighs next to
nothing. I was so impressed I bought myself two; one for home and one for Dad’s
house, where I stay quite often. Dad still swears by his dead-weight, anvil heavy
jobbie but I just love my lightweight LED torch instead.
Where is all this leading, you might be wondering? Well,
the torch has an extra function, a double row of eight small LED lights which
don’t singe your retina when you look at them (unlike the main beam) but which
do light my way nicely round my dog walking circuit to the north of Sheffield.
If I need to warn an approaching car of Callie and my presence I simply switch
to the full beam, so that oncoming vehicle can’t help but see us.
This evening, Monday, I was walking through Hill Top
Wood, at Wharncliffe Side (part of our usual mile and half circuit) using my
torch’s small LED lights to find my footing on the path when I heard a barn owl
hooting. As we walked up through the wood the owl didn’t seem to be moving but
was sat in the canopy of a huge sycamore tree. I tried shining my torch into
the canopy to try and spot the owl but they are so well camouflaged I couldn’t
see it at all. I sat down on the dry stone wall, where there is a sticking out
rock and listened to its call. After a while I could hear a faint reply to my
barn owl’s hoots further up the hill towards Lumb Lane. These replies got
closer and closer until I guessed the calling owl must be in the ash tree just
to the north of the farmhouse on the edge of the wood.
I got off my perch on the wall and walked very slowly
towards the ash tree. The new owl was still calling to the one in the sycamore,
but wasn’t moving at all, any more. I shone my full beam up into the ash tree
but there was no sign of the new owl, just as there had been no sign of the
first one in the sycamore BUT, as I was shining the torch, the new owl flew out
of the ash, right over my head and headed straight for a branch in the
sycamore. I was able to follow it clearly in the torch beam right into the
sycamore and it perched on the branch where the first owl was sitting! I now had both owls in my torch beam in the
tree. The first one must have decided this wasn’t the done thing and it flew
off back into the woods. I followed its flight until the trees became too dense
for my torch to follow. I swung my torch back to the site to where the new
comer had flown and it was still there. Obviously it wasn’t bothered by me or
my torch because as the first owl began calling again, it started answering
back from its perch without moving.
I must have stood there for a good minute and a half
before it too flew off into the heart of Hill Top Woods and I lost track of it.
I stood there feeling so excited, I didn’t know what to do. So I called Callie
over and explained to her what I had just seen. She is a clever dog but hasn’t
really got past the few basic command words, so my speech to her was probably
wasted. She obviously sensed some response was needed though, so she began to
nuzzle and lick my hand!
Back home I was still elated about my own personal ‘owl
watch’ and described it all in breathless, excited tones to Laura. She was
disappointed she hadn’t been with me to see it too. Often she doesn’t go on
Callie’s last walk of the day with me. She is planning on doing so tomorrow in
case there is a repeat performance. I set off tonight at about 11.10, so she
should be back from her job at the restaurant in time for that, although she
may be too tired after a day at Uni and then a night of waitressing. We’ll see
what tomorrow brings. Tonight brought some softer noises of own in the front
bedroom as one of the local birds found its mate!
Tuesday 30th September.
Today was a full day at Uni and spent a lot of time
working on the Paston letters and their relationship to our cache. This is part
of the prep for my own teaching. I have got some examples of the Paston letters
prepared on a slide show and later I will put some of ours on the same Power
Point to offer a comparison of the two. I think I need to dwell quite a lot on
the content and significance of the Paston ones first before I draw a parallel
with what we have uncovered so far. I think this could be extended to give a
total of at least five, maybe six lectures etc based on the two different
caches.
Still no sign, or word, from Felice apart from last
week’s mad communique. I was expecting something by now, but none has appeared.
I was also thrown out of Felice’s office by a jobsworthian from the French Dept
who wanted to use her room because he knew it was empty and what was I, a mere
RA, doing in a French Dept teaching space interviewing students? I bit back a
tongue covered with choice invective because, although the guy was being an
absolute twat in his manner with me, I wasn’t going to lower myself to his
petty level before a sophomore. I did
whisper to the pillock, as I was leaving, that because I was recording my
conversation with the student I had his exact words recorded and might consider
playing them to the Head of Faculty as an example of the professional courtesy
shown to a colleague in front of a student. I waved my phone at him as I
departed! Do I dice with death?
After Uni we headed straight home and took Callie out for
a stroll round Agden. The weather was good and we had decided to eat in the Old
Horns pub instead of cooking for ourselves. We are quite well known in there to
the staff but the turn-over of customers seems pretty high. We hardly ever see
anyone in there that we know. We are able to snag the best seat in the bar, the
window seat which looks out across the Strines Valley to Derwent Edge in the
distance. You end up just gawping at the view if you aren’t careful. Through
our meal we couldn’t help notice two drongos at the bar looking across to our
table. They looked like trouble and, to be honest, rather scruffy. The barman
came over with two glasses of wine for us from these two idiots. We told him to
return them to the guys. They were not happy bunnies.
They came over with the glasses and asked if we were too
stuck-up to drink with them and we told them we never accepted anything from
strangers. It was too dangerous. They thought we were engaging in banter, I
told them to go away and let us eat our meal in peace. (Why does this happen to
me at this pub? It has happened here before!) We just ignored all their
attempts to talk to us and continued eating and chatting to eat other. Luckily
they seemed to get the message and wandered back to the bar. When we finished
we could see they had honed in on two other unsuspecting women but were
laughing and joking with them. I had to feel a bit sorry for all four of them
really.
Back home we sat and chilled out for ages, drinking some
of our own wine, chilled to perfection and listening to the new BBC Music CD.
We both walked through Hill Top Woods tonight, for Callie’s last walk but there
was no encore of the owls’ performance which was disappointing.
Wednesday October 1st
Our usual routine continued unabated today; we walked the
dog; swam; breakfasted and then whizzed off into work in Laura’s little car. I
have put my parking permit onto a piece of card and laminated it so we can
switch it between both vehicles. No doubt some University jobsworth will tell
us we can’t do that at some stage, but today we met no-one to object.
Still no Felice and no supervisor at work, I wonder
what’s going on? I feel a bit out on a limb. I have just kept my head down and
got on with what I do. Laura and I switched locations at lunchtime and spent
the afternoon at XXX & Y earning our crust in a different way. Mrs Briggs
had seen us arrive in Laura’s little car and asked about it, so I explained
about its age and low mileage and she reminisced about her first car which was
an old Volvo 340. I have no idea what one of those is like. She loved that car,
apparently, but had it written off when a lunatic in a Renault pulled out from
the central reservation on the A1 and didn’t speed up. Even slowing down as
though there was an infant in front of her couldn’t stop her from running slap
bang into the back of the car.
I was amazed that they let vehicles join dual carriage
ways like that, she said they don’t anymore. Some clever soul at the DoT
obviously worked out how dangerous that idea was and so those central crossing
points have almost all been closed up. Yet another example how of dangerous
practices from the past have lingered on into the present day. Our society was
full of them.
Our evening meal was at Mum’s. She wanted a de-brief of
Molly and Eric’s visit, so we obliged. They left for Cumbria on Monday morning,
BTW, at the same time as we drove off to University. Mum was so pleased to have
seen Molly again, and to pick up on more of her family news. We had a lovely
meal of venison from Chatsworth House (on sale in their farm shop) and a long
old chat about what our plans were post Uni. I think she is worried that Laura
is going to up-sticks and leave me in the lurch when she graduates, so she
checks up on us both just to reassure herself that her little girl isn’t going
to get hurt again.
Having driven in Laura’s car she declared it was a
bargain and she loved it. (We took a quick spin from Mum’s across to the Fox
House and back. We didn’t stop, just had a drive round.) The use of Loll’s car
meant I was not driving so I had more wine than was perhaps sensible. I was
definitely woozy as we drove back home and although I planned on only doing a
short walk with Callie for her last walk of the night I was out for almost an
hour as I sat down on the bench on the Onesacre Road and nodded off! It’s the
booze. I told Laura we’d gone looking for more owls, which was why we’d been a
long time. The annoying thing was when we started up the Onesacre Road I could
hear the bloody owls in the distance! Ah well.
Thursday 2nd October.
We really have got stuck into our routine with a
vengeance. We did the whole gamut of repetitive actions today and it was really
a Radio Stars’ Song Day for all that. I suppose that when you aren’t whooping
it up on your holidays, but are busy with your ‘nose to the grindstone’ nothing
much actually happens to upset your pattern. I suppose if I really felt it was
like a grindstone then I wouldn’t enjoy what I am doing. Sometimes the very
routine of doing your work can be the reward in itself.
It is a good job the sex isn’t routine. Tonight we played
with the double-header again. This is a truly amazing experience. Those will be
all my comments, except to wish that Laura hadn’t been at the restaurant all
night, I was so hot to trot when she came in…
No comments:
Post a Comment