The teddy bears of the insect world

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“First of all nothing will happen and a little later, nothing will happen again.”

Leonard Cohen

Word of the day: oose – furry dust that gathers under beds (from Scots)

There’s a bumble bee nest under our tractor, if you watch the ground for a while, bees will bumble in and out of a crack in the ground. I was too inept to get a good photo, so I took one of them on an Eryngium as well.

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And then it poured with rain, I got a headache and fell over in a puddle, so the bumble bees were definitely the highlight.

Sorry for the short blog today, here’s another Eryngium to make up for it.

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Meeting the pigeon lady

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Word of the day: Engastration – stuffing of one bird inside another (I’m not sure why this word exists, but it’s beautiful).

Weather: patchy

Mood: patchy

I went out for a wander around London today. I like to walk under the railway tracks. I was walking towards one archway, when I saw a cloud of pigeons rise up, flutter about for a bit, then land again. I stopped to watch and this happened a couple more times. Then I walked closer and saw a woman was feeding them, whole bags of seed tipped onto the pavement. She was a bit hostile at first, but when I bumped into her five minutes later doing the same thing in the park, we gave each other a nod of recognition. It was good, I like to feel I have points of contact around the city. That I know what’s going on, the important things.

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Murder and the drama llama

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I took this photo by the river in Waterloo. According to a guy there, many bones lie scattered on the beach. It isn’t connected to the cat, but kind of fits with the mood.

Mood: I don’t even know

Weather: drizzly

Word of the day: Cataplexy – condition feigning death used by animals

The police came by to see the cat’s head. They deny it’s murder, since the famous Croydon cat-killer is a case considered solved, and that the killer never existed. ‘Could this be a different cat-killer?’ I asked. ‘No,’ the policeman said firmly. However, we still have a body-less head that looks to have been cut with a knife. I feel like we should do investigating of our own. But where could we even start? I’m sure I had a book about how to be a detective as a kid but I don’t remember any of it now.

Saw Hamoudi in the kitchen. He seemed pretty cheerful, not seeing dead people or receiving gifts from strangers. He was wailing about his lack of vegetables so I offered him a tin of sweetcorn I’ve had sitting in my cupboard for some time. He explained  he can’t eat yellow food – not pasta, yellow peppers, nor chips, and not sweetcorn. When I asked why he said yellow food always caught in his throat. He demonstrated with choking retching sounds. I’m starting to suspect he might be a little bit of a drama llama.

All in a day’s work…

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A pretty Melianthus flower to offset the disturbing blog

Miss Marple probably was a murderer.

Word of the day: psychagogue – conductor of souls to the underworld

Weather: blue skies

Mood: pensive

Bit of a grim day at work today. Jessica found a cat’s head in the kid’s playground. It looked severed rather than eaten. She threw it in the bin, but it turns out the police want to see it in case it’s murder. So work has gone a bit Rosemary and Thyme, for those who don’t know that’s a detective duo who work as gardeners, but keep discovering dead bodies. (Why nobody ever pegs these amateur sleuths surrounded by murders as the ones responsible, I have no idea.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure Jessica wasn’t responsible for the decapitated cat, but I’ll keep an eye on her.

At home, tensions haven’t ended, with snapping and glares between Jinjing and Neville. Neville’s sudden painting of the hallway left a few green footprints on the stairs, and he half-painted the skirting board.

‘Why even do it if you’re not going to do it properly?’ Jinjing said. She is mortally offended by his ineptness. I’m used to ineptness, it doesn’t really bother me.

My life is a kluge…

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…cobbled together from broken bits of other lives.

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Weather: perfect

Mood: sleepy

Word of the day: kluge – a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain.

We’ve got mice at work. We were sitting in the smoking area outside the mess room this morning when Mike went inside and let out a yelp. Apparently a mouse ran across the floor.

‘It was the size of a guinea pig!’ wailed Mike, ‘It was huge! With fangs!’ By lunchtime he was saying, ‘It was the size of a Yorkshire Terrier, and it had murder in its eyes!’ and by home-time it was getting on for the heft of a Great Dane.

Back at the flat, I was dashing for a packet of crisps I’d accidentally left in the kitchen, when I encountered Neville. Within a moment he’d blocked me in with a lighthearted series of complaints about the flat. From the flimsy floor that isn’t properly attached in the kitchen, to the shower that goes cold, to the stains on the lounge floor.

‘I grew up poor, I mean really poor, but I’ve never seen a kitchen floor you could cut with a pair of scissors before.’

So cats eat blossom?

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These pictures show my neighbour’s ginger cat, sitting in a small tree, licking the blossom. He was up there for ages, shuffling about, slurping away. Very odd. Have any of you seen this before?

‘Sometimes even the wrong train takes you to the right station.’

The Lunchbox.

Weather: sunny

Mood: good

Word of the day: Cowcat – person whose function is to occupy space

Coming home tonight, all trains going my way were cancelled. So I just grabbed the first train leaving the station and tried to work out where it was going by looking it up on my phone. There were signs up – on the platform, in the train, but they all said different stops to each other, so that didn’t help. My phone stuttering in its connection wasn’t ideal. Then the tannoy announced ‘Ignore all the signs saying where this train is going. They’re all wrong! This train is going to mumble mumble mumble.’ So that didn’t help either. I made it home by sheer luck. You’d think that train companies would have learned how to deal with a crisis by now.

Jinjing and Hamoudi were in the kitchen cooking up soup. I made some toast, hoping that Hamoudi would elaborate on the dead people tales. Instead I listened to Jinjing slagging off Neville because he never cleans up after himself and leaves plates of meat lying around for days.

‘I mean, has he ever done any cleaning since he’s been here?’ asked Jinjing. Hamoudi nodded, keeping his head low as if he could duck beneath the anger. Anyway I got a bowl of soup out of it.

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Picking up skills and massacring animals

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Look at those eyes! They have seen horror.

Monday is a shock it takes me all week to recover from.

Weather: a bit iffy

Mood: hermit crab in a bucket

Word of the day: Decarnate  – denied or deprived of physical bodily form

Really enjoying my new connection to Mateo. Today he taught me how to make a simple bomb using a bolt, two nuts and some match heads. ‘For if you ever need to fight off the police,’ he explained.

For his birthday, Dan brought in a selection of cakes. One of the cakes was a large cute hedgehog (in pic). So cute that nobody could bring themselves to cut it.

‘I can’t do it!’ cried Mike. ‘Just look at his face!’ Over break everyone was milling in and out of the room, looking at the delicious cake sadly, unable to take a knife to it. Finally, somebody greedy enough (it may have been me) cut off the arse end. Slowly, everybody took a slice, reducing the cake bit by bit, leaving the face. Nobody could cut the face, so it now sits in the fridge. I’m told this is the only time a cake hasn’t been completely eaten in one sitting.

Frogs and Caterpillars

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Today was a good day for wildlife, so I thought I’d share. I hope no one has the heebies jeebies about the above animals, ‘cos here are some…

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Tropical Caterpillars
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A Caterpillar with many horns and spikes

I saw a dark shape sitting amongst my orchid roots…

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Mysterious blob

I was a bit alarmed, then saw it was a frog, frogs are great.

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Beautiful Creatures

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Continuing my celebration of Monday good things…

I took this photo at work.  We have a tropical butterfly event on at the moment, and I saw this one just sitting on a flower with its tongue out. I think it may have got drunk on the nectar.

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And below are some pictures of the butterfly pupae after we stuck them onto canes, ready to go into the puparium to hatch. Some look like leaves in order to hide from predators. Sometimes I find the butterflies can be annoying, smelly and a bit icky; so it’s good to remember that they are also beautiful and fascinating.

 

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Please tell me about a good thing on your Monday, no matter how small.