Grapes and blackbirds

Inspired by my friend Paddy, who has a close friendship with the pair of blackbirds nesting in her lovely walled garden in Chichester, I have started putting out grapes for my nesting blackbirds. They have moved into the ivy (on the house wall in this pic) and get very narky when I have my breakfast outside, believing themselves to be the ruling monarchs of this small green patch of Liverpool. They make their presence felt, I can tell you. More of this later.
Last year I tried a grape or two, and these were carried off with glee. So I draped a small bunch of grapes over a branch of the viburnum, and watched the blackbirds attacking these with more glee, delighted to find a grape tree all of a sudden.
Yesterday's bunch of grapes was too feeble to withstand the weight of a great greedy blackbird, so I put the grapes on the table below their nest instead.
An hour later, half the bunch had been shunted to one side of the table, and the other half had presumably dropped through the hole in the middle, as it was now on the little circular ledge half way down the table legs.
This morning this bunch had completely vanished, stalks and all, so whether the birds had been keen as mustard, or it was a rat, or a gnu, or a grape-eating giraffe, I have no clue. But someone's had 'em.
The point of putting out food for wildlife is so one can enjoy said wildlife having it away with the comestibles. Sneaking off with them behind one's back is not cricket. I might have to have a word.
I speak excellent Chicken, and pretty good Seagull, but as yet haven't mastered Blackbird, so I will have to rely on tone of voice to get the message over to the recalcitrant yellow-beaked miscreant.

TIME

If you have too much, and want to be rid of it, then here's an excellent way of doing so.

http://www.kwikgames.com/sheepinvaders.htm

Ignore the irritating banner ad, and shoot down flying sheep. Moronic old-fashioned simplistic fluffy ovine murder. Completely unfair as what did sheep ever do to you? But even for strict vegetarians this is a guilty pleasure.

Rush hour blues

I caught the 6am train from Runcorn yesterday, to get to the London Book Fair for 9am; I had composed a letter to the editor of my local paper about the ghastly ordeal of the rush hour before I'd got to Euston, so confident was I that the tube at 8.15am would be hell on earth. Wrong. It was really quite civilised - no shoving, even room to read the paper in comfort. Where was everyone? Was it Sunday? Was it Christmas? Was it a parallel universe?
No - just late. When I lived in London, most people got to work for 9am. These days only London laggards and country mice are still commuting at such a decadently late hour. This became clear at the end of the day when I caught the tube back to Euston at 7pm and the place was crammed with worker bees released from the hive, a good 90 minutes later than the 1980s norm.
So I can still write my hurrah-I-don't-live-in-London-any-more letter to the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post. For a while there I thought I'd have to revise my prejudices about my erstwhile and unlamented home, but I'm safe after all.

Clairvoyant genius

I'm a genius, I tell you. I should be on telly as a racing pundit.
I have long maintained that when it comes to picking winners, I'm the nag's knees. When I pick a horse for the Grand National, and back it, it falls/goes backwards/heads for the beach. If I pick a horse and don't put any money on it, it wins.
I didn't put any money on Silver Birch on Saturday. It won. Ditto Lucius in 1978, and Amberleigh House; unditto the winning non-winner Esha Ness and a string of losers in past years. Ipso facto, QED, I obviously have a spooky superconscious link to the future.
How much is it worth to trainers (let alone bookies) to make sure I don't back their darlings next year?
Maybe I should test my extraterrestial sensitoritivitiness on other races.
I smell a fortune coming my way.

Spring clean

Feel very smug as spent much of the Easter weekend clearing two rooms - one the smallest bedroom, and the other the scullery/boot room/whatever one calls the space at the back of the house with garden stuff, kitchen stuff, rolled up rugs, jamjars full of picture hooks, copper nails, plumbers' oddments...
The bedroom was stuffed full of boxes of books, boxes of old accounts, boxes of old 78 records, bags of wrapping paper and cards, bags full of linen sheets and curtain hooks...
In other words, two small spaces full of chaos.
And now, clean, tidy, and either half empty or completely empty.
sigh. Utter bliss. Am using Freecycle to find new homes for as much as possible, otherwise it's the charity shop for anything usable, or the dump as a last resort.
Whether or not you credit Feng Shui with any logic or sense of experiential rationality, the act of clearing chaos and getting rid of STUFF is both therapeutic and fun, and the resultant clean space is balm to the soul.
Why don't I do it more often?