Lockdown day 72 - Well, that was different!

It's nothing I usually get excited about, believe me, but we've just driven nine miles to Hilmorton for the nearest petrol station - and back, of course. It's the furthest we've been away from Kantara since the start of the lockdown. And everything out there appeared... well, normal; the old normal. There was a sign at the Esso station promising that the nozzles on the pumps were disinfected regularly, and customers distanced socially at the pay desk, but... I suppose I don't really know what I expected. We've been very isolated, I guess. Driving there and back really made quite a change!

For better or worse, our isolation has made fairly trivial things more important to me, as you'll discover from what follows.

Sow Thistles bordering the road up to the marina

"Stay in a nice, straight line, children!"

If my camera had a polarised lens, you'd clearly see a gathering
of large fish just a few metres out. Just imagine.

I have a thing about anagrams. I'm sort of forced to, the flipping things just squirm their way into my mind with great frequency, sometimes quite annoyingly. I tweeted this the other day...

"Retired" is an anagram of "tireder" and "retried". Just saying.

— NB Kantara (@NBKantara) June 1, 2020

and then realised that it might have made people think that I feel more tired now than I did when I was teaching, and that I'm still feeling as if I'm under the same kind of close scrutiny that teachers are used to. I can assure you that I am not either of those things!

A couple of friends of ours from church are currently locked down in a village school in India. Joanne is the principal there, and Kai is her dad. The school buildings aren't being used for educational purposes in the current situation, so they're being a hostel for around eighty immigrant workers. A baby was born there in the past few days - mother and child are both well - and the infant boy has been named Quarantino! I suspect he might be called Tino or Quaz by the time he's in his teens.

Doing my usual thing at the end of the jetty yesterday, I watched with some amusement a tern washing his face in the pond; repeatedly diving in, very briefly submerging his head then swooping up again. Well, that's what it looked like to me. On one occasion he seemed rather surprised when he came up with a fish in his beak. He didn't seem to know quite what to do with it, so he dropped it. Then, it seemed, he realised that he'd been missing the opportunity for an afternoon snack and set about doing some serious fishing.

Was it him who then decorated our cratch cover as only birds can? I shouldn't have laughed at him.

(photo - birdguides.com)

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