Heaps of Earth

So there they sit the heaps of earth. AND STILL NOTHING HAPPENS. That's the way of it here. And here Granny sits, at her desk, in her office with heaps of earth in full view beyond the window. She contemplates sad fact of life; that it's perverse. Eager visiting natural historian psychotherapist came longing to see birds. Birds weren't having it. No hoopoes on the land, few if any of expected waders on the mud flats. Granny ran the Beautiful Wimp down down at the latter the day after nice guest departed. Mud flats were TEEMING with birds. Of course. Yesterday even the mad spoonbill had returned. As for the hoopoes, crazy birds, they fly up in front of her every time she walks down to visit baby goat. Which is growing; jumping. And still has two names.

She herself contemplates new book between excitement, gloom and TERROR. Another sad fact of (a writer's) life - or anyone's for that matter - creating something out of nothing; a painter friend of her 's once described looking at the empty page you are supposed to fill as like "looking at a hole in the world." Which explains the terror possibly.

Off to clean the fridge. Which is not an empty page, let alone a hole in the world. Would that it were thinks Granny, uncovering one dubious looking bowl after another. 'Beloved, what are you keeping these for?' 'It's for the dogs/goats/chickens.' etc. All very virtuous, not to say ethical. Didn't the BBC this morning quote a report saying that a third of all food in the UK is thrown away, so is clogging up landfill sites? Whoever is filling local landfill site here with thrown-away food it isn't Granny and Beloved. This isn't to say that coming from the generation Granny does - as her Beloved does -both growing up during rationing when throwing food away was a crime of crimes - that her fridge hasn't always been full of dubious little bits of this and that. Now at least they get eaten; mostly. Granny has, too, after much nagging, succeeded in banishing vegetable peelings/pods etc to the dairy outside, where she doesn't have to encounter them directly. Nevertheless the more perishable stuff lingers. And care, has to be taken among other things, that the omnivores - the chickens - do not get fed anything containing chicken fat, stock etc; no cannibalism here. It wouldn't do the chickens any harm probably. But it offends all her instincts. Remember the ground-up bones in the cattle feed? Say no more. Get to it, Granny. Get to it.