Swanning about

Inevitably I was tired and somewhat anticlimactic today, after the huge energy we put into performing Elijah yesterday evening. My mood wasn't lifted by the weather, which was dreary, nor by the three hours that R and I spent at my computer, attempting to buy two specific items to complete our Christmas shopping. In my opinion there should be a law against merchants allowing you to get half way through their checkout procedure before informing you snottily that they only deal with registered companies, not with civilians - and the minute I'm elected Queen of the Night, there will be. The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart.

Anyway, half way through the afternoon we finally sealed an acceptable deal, and realised on looking up from my screen that the weather had cheered up. Ten minutes later we were in the car, heading for a Stratford river walk and some coffee. There was a massive Christmas market on in the middle of town, which made parking, and indeed walking, trickier than it might have been (second on the Queen of the Night's hit list is people who suddenly step into your path when you're walking fast in a straight line, and then come over all victimised if you fail to take evasive action and canon into them), but the light on the river was lovely and BTP was blissfully quiet.

The reason I've gone with a swan for this post, apart from it being a rather nice swan, is to mark the fact that I bumped into Cyril Bennis on the Bancroft wharf, and had a chat with him about avian 'flu that left me cautiously optimistic. He told me that he usually expects any outbreak to start in late November, but that so far this winter there have been no HPAI deaths along the Stratford stretch of the Avon, and he described the wider local area as "quiet". For comparison, by this date last year there had been thirty swan deaths, and by the same point in 2021 it was sixty. We then talked about the signs of immunity that are showing up in Gannets, and the possibility that Mute Swans and other birds may also be gaining resistance to this hateful disease. We can really only wait and watch, but the current signs are at least hopeful.