Really cluttered

Fellow-blipper Bluebell pointed out to me on yesterday's post that my shot of the play-park could be considered "busy" rather than "cluttered", but whatever the case yesterday, today's morning was taken up with sheer ... clutter. Clutter in a tidy, what's more. Said tidy, a neat little carved wooden thingmy for holding letters that you might want to see again soon (or that sort of thing) sits on our sideboard, which for some unfathomable reason I was dusting. Even more unfathomably, I was impelled to clear it out - something I all too obviously hadn't done for several years, judging from its contents. (The extra photo shows it before I started). It took me two hours, at the end of which there was a massive pile of fascinating *stuff on the floor for binning and much smaller piles to be neatly returned to honourable places in the tidy. I also polished the sideboard, dusted all the photos, and moved on to the windowsill before lunch. (Glows with virtue)

In the afternoon we went a slightly grumpy walk at Ardyne. For the first time in ages we made it as far as the estate owned by Yevgeniy Strzhalkovskiy, whose multi-millionaire father Vladimir is a close associate of Putin. The gate was firmly padlocked, but the gardens had recently been mowed, unlike the ornamental pond (main blip) which was covered in water-lilies. We watched a duck force a channel from one patch of clear water to the other before disappearing between the bullrushes, but nothing else stirred. On the way back a huge heron rose from the edge of the woods beside the road - they look dramatically dinosaur-like as they take off. 

That tweet of mine about Rory Stewart's using "I" when it should have been "me" turns out to be my most visited tweet in all the years I've used them - it's been seen 25,505 times in the last 24 hours. More irritating was the bloke who took issue with me, insisting that the original was correct because "you can't change the rules of grammar'. 

I sent him a link to buy Fowler's Modern English Usage ...





*Stuff such as  a plastic wallet containing my video library card for a local shop that used to rent out videos - remember?