Not Just The One, Happily

"Dee-diddley, dee-diddley, dee diddley." I could hear the "tinkling of a fairy bell", as The Observer's Book Of Birds has it, from the front hedge above the noise of the traffic this morning. A darling little goldcrest that didn't sit still for a second, so no decent pics. I also shot the heron flying up from the lake for the third day running.

A walk at Lodge Farm this afternoon. The wind was getting up and the sky looking a bit wild. I missed Kes dropping out of the box on the barn and photographed the Epping Green deer crew in the distance. I stood and watched a flock of magpies chattering and swooping around the farm buildings. As I walked into the keen north wind back to the car my eyes were streaming - the cold snap is on its way.

The Self-Unseeing by Thomas Hardy is today's poem. Hardy's father was a brilliant fiddle player, his mother fell in love with him when she saw him playing in church. Hardy loved music and learnt to play the violin as a young boy. In the poem he visits the family home as an adult after his parents have died.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

He laments the fact at the end of the poem that he didn't appreciate it at the time. I lament the fact that my sisters and I weren't close to our maternal grandfather, a fiddle player, owing to Plymouth Brethren weirdness.