It's been a while since I last updated the blog, but with good reason. This being July/August and the school holidays we have been away ! After the wetness that was the first two weeks in July I was crossing everything I had that the sun would shine for us in England, you see this year we had opted to join my parents on their canal boat, cruising the inland waterways of Great Britain, (you can actually follow them
here) As Mum has discovered, rain, on a canal boat, is fun for all of half a day, we were staying two weeks. My prayers, it seems, were answered, and while we did not enjoy blazing sunshine for the entirety of the holiday, it did beam upon us for a substantial part, and the rain held off until the very last day.
The canals in England are something of a family love affair, although having now spent a winter and very wet Spring and Summer on the boat Mum is maybe a bit less enthusiastic now- it is also her job to do the locks........ But for us on a two week only break they are fantastic. I love the bridges; (577 photos taken and a weighty proportion are bridges - I am not alone in this, Dad has hours of film of them, no really.) the locks (no honestly, I like doing them, for a fortnight) and I love that within the space of a few minutes you can move from the uber modern 21st Century cities into the rural idyll of England (although this is actually just a clever illusion sometimes, the boat doesn't travel very fast and you are pretty much still in the city centre, you just can't see it) You get to travel through factories, tunnels that drip on your head and under the most secret parts of the motorway. The flowers and lilys pour into the water and crowd over the boat fighting each others colour and smell, the days are spent dreaming away at the front of the boat as you drfit through networks of water, never seeing and often never hearing anything other than the chugging of the boat. We enjoyed it - here are a few photos from the 577 taken.....
I like Chickens. I like their egg production, their lack of neediness, their ability to put themselves to bed and their quiet clucking and scratching as I garden next to them. However, I have never really admired them for their intelligence. I have seen them come in through my kitchen door and them flap around in panic unable to go back out through it when I wave a broom at them. They also don't seem to have remembered that they will be chased by a maniac female with a broom as soon as they put their beaks into the kitchen. But be that as it may I am being bettered by a chicken, a hen a Gallus domesticus.
The story so far; I wanted chickens. I wanted them scrapping and pecking round the garden, I wanted free range happy hens who could come and go as they pleased. My neighbour didn't. She wanted tulips. And a lawn. And open french windows, without the risk of chicken dropppings in front of the television. Bizarre I call it but hey, there we go. My chickens did not confine themselves to my garden and therefore needed to be penned with a run. All was well, relations with neighbour were restored to their pre-chicken state and my hens were happy enough in their shed and fenced off field. Until a chicken went AWOL. Just one. She disappeared one morning and returned that evening. Neighbour one made no comment, I stayed quiet and hoped that the children had just left the gate open. Then it happened again. And again. I re-fenced higher, I doubled the wire round the gate, I blocked up the tiny gap between the fence and the wall. Hen went happily to bed dreaming of tulip bulbs no doubt and I relaxed. The next day she had gone. Neighbour two (a chicken lover I am relieved to report) has now christened her Charlotte and Charlotte makes herself quite at home over there during the day, coming quietly home with the dusk. The only problem with this arrangement is that neighbour one returns from holiday next week and I need to find out where Charlotte the Houdini hen is getting out. I have watched her (but she sits contentedly in her garden while I observe her) I have set other spectators to check "but watch discretely" I find myself saying to them "she knows that you're spying on her otherwise". They are similarly baffled. There are no remaining holes, the fence is too high to fly and I'm pretty sure that they haven't been tunnelling. I would now believe that she could open the gate except that even I can't do that from the inside! And it is securely shut in the morning. The chicken is looking smug and I am looking a fool. Any ideas as to how the hen does it would be gratefully received.
