Today is Monday, and I got out for a cold blowy birdwatching walk to Harbourside, where I wondered, not for the first time, why it is that I always remember that I’ve got thermal underleggings in the drawer when I'm halfway through a walk! It didn’t really matter though because we saw so many birds, including this gorgeous little Turnstone, who find names by doing… guess what? Congratulations!

The sun shone a bit, and I got this gorgeous atmospheric shot

And while I’m thinking about it, here is a rearranged bit of the garden in the golden hour just before dawn. Please note, that I never say finished. It’s alive, so finished means dead if you think about it, and these plants aren’t. They’re coming into growth, in one case with the bulbs growing sideways because I hadn’t realised that the plant pot had blown over. It’ll be interesting to see if they straighten up or if I end up with an art installation-style slanty flower display. I do like modern art. If it doesn’t work quite how you expected it to, then that’s part of it.

I’m typing now as I warm up while we use old bits of a children’s construction toy and zip ties to get the solar panels right on the garden fence so I can have shell solar lights lighting them up. Other people buy expensive brackets, but this is cheaper by far and more fun and environmentally friendly. Besides, I married an engineer who insists on keeping things in case they come in handy and it’s amazing how often they do.
Gardening and walking both do something for and to me and the best way I can describe it is that it’s like hitting a mental reset button. It may only be 20 minutes weeding or sweeping up, or better still a good long walk but my body and brain seem to get back to where they should be. Ideas I’ve struggled with sort themselves out, I sleep better and I can indulge in guilt-free chocolate afterwards. Or at least less guilty chocolate depending on how much I decide to eat. All I can be sure of is that I wasn’t meant to be indoors for long periods of time. I was born for the wind in my hair and air that smells of sea and winter or spring, summer and autumn on my face instead of traffic fumes and pollution.
I think that’s why my Windy Bay series comes from somewhere deep down inside of me, which meanders me around to the point. (See, I always get there in the end.) Stopping to chat to a couple of dog walkers I said happily that on Wednesday we’re on the second half of winter, so spring is on its way. She said I was just like her husband, and another and another person chimed in to say that sunrise is getting earlier too and the flight patterns of the birds are changing, which I hadn’t noticed but will from now on.
I don’t wish the days away. How could I when I’ve learned the hard way how precious every single one can be? But my heart still lifts as the days get longer and the birds start to sing, and especially the starling who was extracting crumbs with charm by sitting on a wing mirror of a van that was parked in Harbourside One car park and singing his heart out while admiring his reflection. He got some sandwich crumbs and I’ll take a bag of mealworms with me from now on because I like birds and some of those who find shelter down on our Site of Special Scientific Interest are on endangered lists so I’d like to do a bit to help.
Right now though, I like warmth because it isn’t warm at all out there. Realistically, it won’t be for another few weeks, but isn’t that all the more reason to get out when I can?
And when I’m indoors I can read, which brings me smoothly on to this week’s special offers, at 99p in the US and 99c in the UK
This week we have all 3 of the current books in the Esther and the Professor series, which are A Very Private War, A Very Personal Invasion and A Very Different Kind of War These are all set in World War Two Poole, which I was surprised to find was a hotbed of spies because the Harbour hosted the flying boats which for a while were our only air link with the rest of the world. It was also on the flight line from Cherbourg so it tended to be where bombers dropped the last of their bombs to lighten their load before heading for home. So, and I am honestly not kidding, what did the Government do? Put top secret establishments down on what was the Parkstone on Sea, near where Ian Croft, who was one of the creators of Dad’s Army lived and where he served as an Air Raid Precaution Warden and is now posh and expensive Sandbanks and evacuate so many children that local schools went one half of the day and evacuees went the other.
Esther isn’t a modern woman. I don’t like the books where we assume that people were just like today. She is however a tough lady doing all she can and juggling working, bringing up her children and driving a Woman’s Voluntary Service Canteen Van. The Professor is James Lomax, former Oxford don, TB survivor who resents not being fit enough to fight and is brilliant but irritable and learned to watch people while he was in a sanitarium.
There are also three from the Christians Cross series, which are Nature Strikes Back, Away with the Faeries and No Place Like Gnome. They’re set deeper into Dorset in one of the places that not so much hasn’t moved with the times as has said, “Actually no. Not for us.” In this case, it’s because the picture-perfect village is set on a crossing point between universes, so those who are called there are fighting some very strange fights with some even stranger allies.
As far as I know, it doesn’t exist, but there are a fair few unchancy places, so who can be sure?
All I’m sure of is I hope you enjoy them and, with fair winds and following seas, we’ll catch up on Sunday. I’m praying that by then the fires will be out in Los Angeles and that all those who need peace will find it. I hope you’ll do the same.
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