A day of snow and fire

 "The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow" says the sixteenth century nursery rhyme....and so it did last night.

I woke up to a wonderful white and grey land with snow everywhere.

The rhyme goes on ...

"And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing."

 There were no signs of the robins we have seen here for years, and I hoped that they had found somewhere to shelter in one of the barns that are dotted around our village.

There's another variation of the rhyme which says
"He'll sit on a twig,
And we'll feed him some bread,
And he'll sing to say 'Thank you, my friends',
Poor thing!"

Well, the robins weren't perched where they usually were  and I'd seen neither hide or hair of them.

My dogs Boo and Eric didn't care at all, they were having far too much fun racing around the garden.

And I'm afraid I wasn't going out to look for the birds. Although I'd admired the wintery cloak of white everywhere through the sitting room window, I stayed inside all day by the fire.

Ah, the fire...one of the few pleasures of my least favourite season. There's something about the ritual of building a fire that I love. Scrunching the paper, laying the twigs on top, then adding the logs  - it's addictive.

But today all I had to do was light a match and watch as everything began to burn. Mr Thinking of the days had set the fire earlier before going out, and it sprang into life, drawing well.

By now the dogs were lying in front of the fire too....Eric asleep on my knee and Boo by my feet. They were both fast asleep until a hiss, a crackle from the fire woke them up briefly every now and again.

I sat there quietly....mesmerised by the flames, toasting my warm toes with no sounds to interfere with this special time.  My book lay on my lap unread, I sat there doing nothing , just thinking. And the beauty of it all was that I wasn't  expected to do anything and I wasn't  sitting there feeling guilty because I wasn't doing anything. After all, I'm supposed to be resting and recuperating.

Which I was doing ! Apart from looking outside to see if the robins had put in an appearance -  which they didn't.

Simple pleasures......



Nesting days

At the back of what was the outside loo of our cottage in days gone by,

 is a wooden and wire storage space. It's covered with ivy and virginia creeper and houses various bits of paraphernalia such as plastic garden pots, some logs etc. It isn't pretty and may look pretty awful to you, but to me it's a very special place.

At the moment this space is acting as a maternity home to not one family but two.

At the top amongst the ivy is a little wren's nest and we've been watching this little songbird for a while now in the garden.

She's been flying around for a week or so, but it was only a few days ago that Mr Thinking of the Days realised that she had a nest so close to the house. There are eggs waiting to hatch.

Meanwhile in the profusion of ivy underneath the roof, there is also a robin's nest. We've always had robins around  the cottage, they're quite cheeky and like to perch on the wooden fence outside the kitchen window. And when it's cold, they pop onto the window ledge as if to say "Hello, any chance of some more seeds or nuts?"

But there's frantic activity at the moment with a robin constantly flying in and out with food, so we know the eggs have hatched. And as robins have two broods a year, this could be the start of a new robin dynasty.

Meanwhile, I hope to see all the chicks when they're old enough to fly, and luckily Boo and Eric our trusty terriers will protecting the birds by ensuring no cats come close by.They don't like cats, but do like to lie on the patio in the sun idly watching the birds fly above.