Category Archives: My Garden

by jfwknifton | January 23, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (11)

Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….

He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….

I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….

Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..

The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..

He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……

And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….

After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..

He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..

If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………

22 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as sausage, Sausageland, The Waiting Tree

by jfwknifton | January 11, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (10)

The garden behind our house is rather peculiar in the sense that halfway between the house and the end of the garden there is a drop of some twelve or fifteen feet down to a lawn and a few trees. The soil below this little cliff is alluvial and black and of a stunning quality just as if it had been brought there from elsewhere

Personally, I have always felt that during one of the Ice Ages some 10,000-12,000 years ago, a raging torrent brought ice cold water from underneath a glacier and carried it away to what would one day become the River Trent. As it did so, it left us our mini-cliff , and, a hundred yards beyond our fence, a much smaller, non-raging not-a-torrent, called the Daybrook.

I haven’t any pictures of this cliff, but I do have one or two which show clearly the almost sheer drop down to the lawn. Here’s the first….

The white lines in the trees (on the right) are the window ledges of the bedrooms of the houses in the street below.

In the next photograph, you can see the garage of a house in the street below…….

Because of this fifteen foot cliff, my friend Widdle was faced with a slight problem in that he had to find a viable route up to the patio where he would be given one or two of the free sausages he enjoyed so much.

There were perhaps three main routes up to the patio. The first and most difficult was to come round the back of next door’s garage where he had to negotiate a path only six inches wide with a drop of some fifteen feet to the ground below. The drop is very obvious in this picture where Widdle turns silently from his precarious perch to the safer surface of the patio, the location of our garage before we had it demolished……..

Did you notice that Wisddle’s paw is perched in mid-air, twelve feet or more above next door’s lawn ?

Alternatively Widdle could come across the lawn and then walk up the flight of steps which I myself had made when we first moved into our house some forty years previously. First of all, he might sit and wait on the luxuriant sward of a particularly damp lawn………

Or, he might just explore the grass, looking for anything interesting that he could take away with him…..

After checking the lawn thoroughly for discarded food, Widdle beats a determined path to the bottom of the steps…..

Once Widdle has made his way up to the top of the thirty nine steps, he can step out into Sausageland…..

Where, with a little bit of luck, somebody would be sitting waiting for him, sausage in hand……

He might even meet an old friend, Yin Yang, the Killer Kat…..

16 Comments

Filed under My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Daybrook. River Trent, sausages, Widdle

by jfwknifton | December 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (9)

Let’s remind ourselves of a typical urban fox. Let’s call him “Widdle”.

In December 2009, he arrives at the corner of our blizzard swept lawn:

The weather is unusually cold for Nottingham, and he is rather cold. And, as always, he is rather hungry. Lucky then, that he knows exactly where to go.

He makes his way up to what used to be the base of an old garage which was burnt down years ago in an insurance job fire, and prison time was served, I believe, (not by me, I hasten to add, nor indeed, by Widdle). He doesn’t have to shout out his order, but if he could shout it out, it would be “Sausages all round!” .

And then he settles down in the snow to sit quietly and wait for his meal. Just look at that fantastic fur coat. For winter, it is at its thickest. A luxuriant, magnificent warm fur coat:

Just occasionally, he changes his position so that nothing freezes solid:

He waits patiently until he catches that distinctive smell…….

“What’s that smell?

That meaty smell ?

That’s the smell of…..sausages!!!”

The best cheap sausages we could find. They came from the Iceland supermarket chain and contained 42% meat with no ash included, as many foods for dogs seemed to have. Widdle took what he could carry in his mouth, and set off back to his den to take it to his family:

And he ate one, and then he took another three back to his den, for Mrs Widdle and the rest of the family. Naturally, in such weather, Widdle left a lot of tracks. Mixed in may be a few domestic cat (felis catus) but I would be amazed if there were any dog prints:

Here’s an individual print. The claws are visible which excludes domestic cat:

Here’s another one:

The following day, the weather cleared up markedly and most of the snow quickly melted. Even so, I was more than a little surprised to see a butterfly sunning itself in the rays of the winter sun:

And even closer up, it is really beautiful. It’s a Small Tortoiseshell:

It looks as if it is injured but I don’t think it is. It seems merely to have twisted itself a little to make sure that it gets the maximum amount of sun.

14 Comments

Filed under My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Science, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Iceland, Nottingham, Small Tortoiseshell, Widdle

by jfwknifton | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes. On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

17 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Hackney Council, Kevin Parsons, mange, Ring Road, Widdle

by jfwknifton | July 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (7) or, more accurately, the Rise of the Urban Fox

After the First World War, London began to expand as a city, particularly to the north and west. What had been farmland was now purchased and then built on. Many, but not all, of the woods were chopped down, the trees and branches were burnt, and new houses were then built on the site. The people who lived in those new houses for the most part worked in the centre of London and new words had to be invented to describe what they had to do in order to get to work. They took the train. Suburban, local trains, whose only purpose was to carry people who were now being called “commuters”, on their way to work. What they did was called “commuting”, and it obviously paid them to do it. Their salaries must have been high enough to justify adding a couple of hours to every one of their working days.

The very best paid commuters lived in what were called the “leafy suburbs”. They could even afford to buy a detached house near the golf course, with four or five bedrooms and a large private garden all the way round it:

In some cases, the leaves of the new leafy suburbs were attached to trees which pre-dated the building of the new houses. Builders with a bit of vision had soon realised that they could save themselves a lot of cash, and finish up with a much better product if they kept as many of the mature trees as possible. All they had to do was to build the houses between them and to do the same with the streets, if they could. Look at the age of these trees:

That slight change in approach by the builders had quite an effect on the suburbs created at the ends of the hundreds of the suburban railway lines which linked the centre of London with the houses where their office workers lived. And, to their credit, instead of just moving on elsewhere, the creatures which had lived in the woods before the developers arrived, made enormous efforts to stay in their homes and not be forced out.

In some cases badger setts survived the building process and remained unnoticed behind the park-keeper’s new storage sheds.

Hedgehogs hunted slugs and snails in rockeries and vegetable gardens, just as they had in spinneys, copses and woods.

Mice, shrews and rats went unnoticed, as they always have. But above all, one animal benefited enormously. That was “vulpes vulpes”, better known as the fox. They carried on their lives pretty much as they always had done, taking little or no notice of human beings and their machines. If anything, life was considerably easier, and food more plentiful now that they lived in a city suburb, which was always a few degrees warmer than the bleak countryside. And very soon London had in excess of 10,000 urban foxes. And many other cities experienced the same process. Bristol. Birmingham. Sheffield. And Nottingham, the home of the most famous fox of them all…….

Here’s another of them, hurrying to the fish and chip shop to see if anybody couldn’t eat all of what are, hopefully, generous portions:

Foxes, like all undomesticated canids, are extremely intelligent. Once they have made a friend such as a big, fat rabbit, they always like to see if they can get even closer to him, perhaps by pulling a likely chain:

And here’s one of the very few photographs of Banksy Fox”…….

Next time, we take a look at the quality of the sausages available in the Iceland supermarket chain, exploring the views of one of their keenest consumers…………

17 Comments

Filed under History, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Science, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as badger, Commuters, fox, hedgehog, leafy suburbs, rabbit, vulpes vulpes

by jfwknifton | July 7, 2022 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (2)

As you have seen in the first instalment of this story, the best animal friend I ever had was a fox called “Widdle”. He taught me more of value than 90% of my teachers ever did. And Widdle, he also learnt a little bit.

Widdle, of course, soon learnt which way his sausage was buttered.

The usual scenario was that he would be out on “Lone Hunter’s Patrol”, looking for geese and turkeys, hurtling round the gardens at top speed:

And then he would hear me calling his name :

And then he would come up the path to the patio

And then he’d let you know why he was here:

And then he’d take a sausage or two from you. He was quite prepared to touch you and he wasn’t afraid :

If he was hungry he would often eat the first one, but otherwise he would put it on the floor and then come for a second sausage. He could always be trusted to carry two sausages in his mouth, and as he grew older and more experienced, he managed to carry three. Here, he seems happy to take just two. As we human thick-heads eventually worked out, neither of them were for him:

Now for the second:

A very tricky manoeuvre :

And then it’s “Up, up and Away !!!

His wife, Mrs Widdle, will get her share of the two sausages, but only if the cubs, up to four of them usually, have had their fill. I was always 100% sure that in the rather extensive fox family, Widdle, the individual who provided all the food, was always the last to eat any.

A lesson for us all. And not just in sausage eating.

17 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as fox, geese, sausage, sausages, turkeys, Up up and Away, Widdle

by jfwknifton | June 12, 2022 · 6:17 am

My best friend, Widdle (1)

One summer’s day in 2007, I was sitting out on the patio when all of a sudden I looked down and there was an animal standing right next to me. It was a fox!! Latin name “Vulpes vulpes” for anybody who lives in a country where foxes are not known.

I said to him “What do you want?” “Are you hungry?” “Would you like some food?”

He looked back at me and I said, “Just stay there and I’ll go and fetch you something.”

And he stayed there and I went into kitchen, opened the door of the fridge and looked around.

Some milk. No, that’s cats.

Just a piece of apple and some cooked sausages.

That’s it. I’ll take him that. I picked up the apple and went out to feed him.

He was still there. I offered him the apple which he initially sniffed and then gave me a look of such disdain, as if to say,

“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”

I went back to the fridge. I got a sausage and I took it out to him. He sniffed it and I put it on the floor. He picked it up in his mouth and off he went. Back into the beautiful green world of flowers, bushes and trees.

That sausage would be the first of literally thousands, with the occasional lump of beef, pork or chicken to stop him getting bored. I soon became an expert on sausages, their make-up, their price, their value for money. We used to buy them in some quantity. I remember once going through the checkout at Iceland (the frozen food supermarket chain, not the island nation). I was buying the usual six packets and the woman said “Do you like sausages then?” and I replied “Not really, I feed them to a fox”.

And she looked at me with complete disdain as if to say….

“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”

Little did she know, though, and little did I know, that very soon I would value our fox at ten times the value of almost all human beings. Being with him was like being with an extremely wise child who was always steps ahead of you. Somebody who could do amazing things that were as if he knew magic. Somebody who was always on his best behaviour. Who never hurt a fly. Who was a damn sight closer to God than I ever was. Here’s his four stage method to being given a sausage:

Stage 1 Look as if you’re hungry:

Stage 2 Reach for the Food of the Gods: sausage fried with extra fat :

Stage 3 Make that strange gesture with your lower jaw that is a basic part of “Talking Fox” but one which we never managed to understand :

Stage 4 Show the kind humans your lovely brown eyes, and they’ll probably give you more sausages next time :

Sometimes, though, our new friend was nervous and he showed this by cocking his back leg against anything available, and squirting a tiny quantity of fox urine. He only did that when he was not 100% certain of our intentions, because we were human beings and potentially not as well behaved as he was. It gave him his name, though. We called him “Widdle”.

Over the next few weeks, we all grew to love him.

He was a gift from God. A wild creature who let us into his world for a few short years. We fed him morning and evening, day in, day out, and we saved his life several times. When he could not hunt because of injuries we saw to it that he was fed. Thanks to us, he had five lives.

We fed too, all of the minimum of 15 fox cubs that he raised. With a little bit of help from Mrs Widdle, of course.

25 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as fox, Iceland, Mrs Widdle, sausage, sausages, vulpes vulpes, Widdle

by jfwknifton | August 27, 2021 · 6:17 am

Poems in “The Nottinghamian” 1922-1946 (4)

The author of the following poem which appeared in the Nottinghamian of December 1940 was Robert Norman Walters of VI Classics. Robert was the son of a “Master Fruiterer” and lived at 159 Cinder Hill Road in Bulwell. He was in the High School from 1930-1941. The winter of 1940-1941 was legendary for its severity and was excellent practice for anybody thinking of taking a winter break in Stalingrad a couple of years later.

SNOW

Snow shall fall and ice

Shall bind the lane in slithering shields

Of white and whitish blue.

Winds shall blow and howl and roar

And tiles shall fall.

Wood shall burst and split

Like statues known of old.

Rivers may cease to run

When snow shall whirl and swirl

And formless roofs gleam white.

Yet when this comes,

Let our strong, deep affections

Unfrozen, freeze not.

But with winter seen afar

Retain the burning heat

Of mid-June’s torrid air.

Robert left to go to Jesus College, Cambridge to study Classics. In the section of his poem :

“Winds shall blow and howl and roar

And tiles shall fall.

Wood shall burst and split

Like statues known of old.

Rivers may cease to run”

Robert has come remarkably near the words of Wace, who was possibly Robert Wace, a Norman poet, born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy.

Wace was the first author to speak of the Round Table and the Court of King Arthur :

“Eventually

All things decline

Everything falters, dies and ends

Towers cave in, walls collapse

Roses wither, horses stumble

Cloth grows old, men expire

Iron rusts and timber rots away

Nothing made by hand will last.

I say and will say that I am

Wace from the Island of Jersey”

Wace lived, approximately, from 1100-1180.

James Theodore Lester was the son of a Leather Factor & Manufacturer who lived at 42 Bedale Road in Sherwood and then at Castleton House at 5 Castle Avenue in Arnold. The poem occasionally struggles for a rhyme, but the last verse is lovely.

“When I was six”

“When I was six I’d play at boats

And build a fort with many moats

Which I’d replenish with my pail

And put my little boats to sail.

Round and round and round they’d go

Till the water ceased to flow.

Then back home I would repair

And sit upon my rocking chair.

When it was time to go to bed,

Upon the pillow I’d put my head,

And think and dream of things I’d done,

And call the day a happy one.

We’ve already seen Frank Alan Underwood of 51 Charnock Avenue in Wollaton Park with his poem ““Evacuated”. This poem is a lot deeper and a lot more chilling. It was published in April 1943.

THE MIRROR

The dead man lay upon his bed

In the pause at dawn ere the Soul had fled,

And the Lamp burned dim as the East glowed red.

The Soul rose as the man had done

For twenty years at the beck of the sun:

But as yet it knew not that Death had won.

Then still as man and not aware

It looked in the mirror to brush its hair

–Looked in the mirror and found nothing there.

Ivan Keith Doncaster wrote a poem in The Nottinghamian in March 1937 which was pretty good:

THE FISHPOND

There’s a fishpond in our garden,

Not very big or wide ;

But fish just love to dart about,

Among the rocks inside.

And if you sit there on the bank,

You’ll see a sudden flash—

A big fat frog has just dived in,

And made a dreadful splash.

The frightened fish swim swiftly round

In search of safe retreat,

The frog looks at the golden line,

And croaks his sad defeat.

When ice seals up our gold-fish pond,

Neath winter’s frozen spell ;

We just catch golden gleams below,

To tell us all is well.

In summer when the fountain plays,

And sends forth silver rain,

The fish all frolic in great glee,

As cooling showers they gain.

We feed the fish with large ant eggs,

And when the days are warm

They jump to catch the flitting flies

Which o’er the pond do swarm.

Some happy moments there we spend,

Watching the fish at play ;

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter too,

They move in swift array.

Ivan Keith Doncaster only lived from 1923-1944 but he had already succeeded in the previous year in writing the most beautiful piece of poetry by any High School boy, bar none. It summarises how much we love our oh-so-beautiful lives, yet all the time are well aware of the price we will all one day pay as the distant bells toll our inevitable doom.

Keith paid his price in the mid-upper turret of a Lancaster over the German city of Kassel on October 22nd 1943, five days after his 20th birthday.

This poem appeared in April 1936 and had Keith lived, he would have been a great poet. He has a masterful touch and is capable of the most astonishing subtlety.

GATHERING SHELLS

“Along the silvery beach we run,

Gathering coloured shells.

We think that gathering shells is fun.

Along the silvery beach we run.

And as we go beneath the sun,

We hear the distant bells.

Along the silvery beach we run,

Gathering coloured shells.”

I have read that poem literally hundreds of times and I do not even begin to tire of it.

19 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, France, History, Literature, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, The High School, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as ant eggs, Avro Lancaster, Blockheads, Bulwell, DJ Hitchin, FA Underwood, fish, fishpond, Forest Recreation Ground, Frog, gathering shells, GEC Woollatt, Ian Dury, IK Doncaster, Jack ****, JT Lester, Julius Caesar, Kassel, Latin, Master Fruiterer, NE Stebbings, philatelist, PJP Middleton, Prefects, Prefects’ Room, Pythagoras, RN Walters, Robert Wace, Stalingrad, the Court of King Arthur, the distant bells, the Round Table, Wace

by jfwknifton | October 31, 2015 · 5:45 pm

It’s the Witching Hour : Story Number Eleven

Number 11

“E pur si muove” : “And yet it moves” (Galileo Galilei)

When my father, Fred, died in hospital at the age of eighty, his wristwatch was found to have stopped at 11.04. I went round to his house a couple of days later to check everything was all right, and I found that the old brown wooden clock in the sitting room, which had been a wedding present some fifty or more years earlier, had also stopped at that very same time of 11.04. This is like his sitting room clock, but the time is wrong:

Towards the end of his life, Fred had been both blind and bed ridden and his house had become very neglected. During the period after Fred’s death, both my wife and I spent a lot of time cleaning and redecorating all the different rooms.

As we did this, day after day, on more than one occasion, we both smelt what we thought was my mother Jean’s perfume. It was as if she were watching over us in approval as we dusted and hoovered. I suppose that if that were the case, then it should not have been too surprising, given that Jean was a typical 1950s housewife, always cleaning and re-cleaning, and immensely house proud.

At this time, my brother, Ken, who had always been so firmly convinced that the house was haunted, refused to go into the empty property on his own. He had always had the idea that spirits, whether good or bad, are pushed into the background by human activity, but that when potentially haunted houses are empty, then the ghosts will begin to claim them back as their own. Ken certainly believed in the story of the little man who had lived there in the 1940s.

Similar feelings were expressed by my daughter Lauren. As I mentioned above, during that period immediately after Fred’s death, my wife and I were readying Fred’s house to be put on the market. We were spending all of our time cleaning, painting and decorating. Meanwhile, Lauren sat upstairs in the smaller of the two bedrooms revising for her imminent GCSE examinations. She spent all of her time sitting with her back to the wall, scared stiff as she worked. She felt that there was somebody else in the room with her, but that they really did not like her being there. These disquieting feelings only came when she was on her own. As soon as anybody came into the room to see her, all her fears disappeared.

It is easy to dismiss ideas like these out of hand, but it is a little like the difference between walking through a graveyard at three o’clock on a sunlit afternoon:

as opposed to three o’clock in the cold, dark depths of a winter’s night:

With this idea in mind, on the very last evening before the contracts were exchanged and Fred’s house passed out of my possession forever, I decided to do an all-night vigil in an effort to experience something ghostly.

To cut a potentially long story short, I saw or heard absolutely nothing. But, at the same time, though, I was, throughout the entire night, so scared that I never did manage to switch the lights out. I really was very frightened. And, just like Lauren, I too spent all my time sitting with my back to a wall. Read into that what you will.

There were other strange happenings as well as the stopping of the wristwatch and the old wooden clock. We were experiencing them, I suspect, because we were clearing out Fred’s house after his death. It is very frequently said, for example, that building work, and many other types of physical change such as painting or wallpapering, are extremely good for provoking a strong reaction from any ghosts that may be present.

One day, I had been cleaning and painting the living room. This was the downstairs room where Fred had spent the last two, painful, years of his life, except for his stays in hospital. He had a bed, an armchair, a commode and a television, so he was self-contained in a sad, forlorn sort of way.

That particular day, we had reached lunchtime, and my wife and daughter were outside in Fred’s old summerhouse, finishing off their fish and chips from Renée’s Fish Bar. For some reason I now forget, I was alone. Suddenly, I had the strangest feeling that Fred was there in the room with me. I called out to him,

“Are you there, Dad? It’s me, your son, John. If you are there, give me a sign.”

Straightaway, the curtains in the window looking out towards the garage and the concrete drive where Fred had parked his cars for so many years, began to shake and move. Then they stopped. I waited a few seconds and then called out for a second time.

“Is that you, Dad? If you are there, then make the curtains move again.”

Without delay, the curtains again began to move. I went outside, and called in my daughter, Lauren. I told her to come into the living room and just to stand still and watch, and not to say a word. I called out to Fred for a third time,

“Are you there, Dad? This is your granddaughter, Lauren. If you are still there, give her a sign. Make the curtains move like you did for me.”

Immediately, again the curtains began to move, and then stopped. I turned to Lauren, and asked her if they had actually moved, and that it was not just a coincidence. She replied that she had seen the curtains, and that, yes, they had moved, and that apparently, it had been in response to my request.

So, for a fourth, and final time, I called out loudly,

“Are you still there, Dad? If you are, make the curtains move again.”

And sure enough, they did. I have no explanation for these events other than the supernatural.

There was no window open. No door was open. The central heating radiators underneath the window were switched on throughout the entire episode, but this would not explain the fact that the curtains actually came to a fairly abrupt stop on four separate occasions. Neither was it my imagination or wishful thinking. That was one of the reasons why I asked Lauren to come in and be a witness to events. And to this day, she maintains, Galileo-like, that, yes, the curtains did move.

.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, for quite a while afterwards, Fred was to appear in my dreams. There was one that stood out among the rest.

This dream took place on a huge luxurious ocean liner, standing around a grand piano which stood at the meeting point of several long and wide corridors:

Fred was standing there, listening to the pianist who was tinkling away at the ivories in rather desultory fashion. I was talking to Fred, and was trying to trap him into giving me details about the afterlife.

“Where do you live now then, Dad?”, I asked.

“You know that already.”, he said with a slight smile.

“And where you will you go tonight ?”, I asked. “Where will you sleep after we’ve left ?

He did not offer any reply.

“Well, Dad, will I be able to come and see you sometime?”

“Of course you will come and see me…..one day,” he replied, with a strange, wry look, and then walked off for ever down one of the corridors.

I have had no real contact with Fred since, but deep down, I am sure that this will not be the end of the story.

6 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, My Garden, My House, Personal

Tagged as And yet it moves, Fred, Galileo, Galileo Galilei, GCSE

by jfwknifton | October 11, 2015 · 10:55 am

A peaceful dove in the garden

One regular visitor to our garden is the “Stock Dove” whose scientific name is columba oenas. This bird is a kind of pigeon, but a very unusual one for a city.

Normally, Stock Doves live out in the countryside and may congregate in their hundreds to feed in fields or on stubble which has been recently harvested. They also like to live in the parkland which surrounds large country houses. In England there are some 260,000 breeding pairs of Stock Doves but they are certainly an unexpected bird in a city suburb full of traditional 1930s houses like our own. Apparently, there has been an isolated colony of Stock Doves in suburban Sherwood for at least the last seventy years. They might even date back to the period before the houses were ever built:

First of all, let’s eliminate the Wood Pigeon with the prominent white mark on its neck. This bird is a fantastic flier. It is the Lockheed Hercules of the bird world:

It can easily manage sixty miles an hour or more, and it can easily do vertical take-offs, but its facial expression is permanently that of a slightly apprehensive, brainless, gormless idiot:

Stock Doves are not feral pigeons either. Stock Doves have dark eyes, whereas the feral pigeon’s eyes are often red. Feral pigeons frequently have diseased feet. A group of feral pigeons will never have any real uniformity of plumage. Any dark marks they may have on their wings will be a lot longer and more extensive than the markings on the wings of a Stock Dove:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The markings of a Stock Dove are consistent. An iridescent green patch on the neck and two dark marks on the ends of the wings. As well as dark eyes, they also have pink legs and feet:

Like all birds, they have a nictitating membrane to protect the eye, in this case as the bird feeds with potentially harmful plant leaves to contend with:

These are probably male and female. In birds of prey, the female is larger than the male, but otherwise, in almost every other species of bird, the female is 15% or so smaller. You would normally not notice this, but when the two are together, it can be quite obvious: