All Is Right In The Garden.

It's a sunny day. I'm sitting in the room where I do my writing, watching jackdaws tear the shit out of fat balls on the bird-table in the garden. They love that meal-wormy goodness, mmm. Pigeons and starlings skitter about, picking up the crumbs - corvids are messy eaters. They must be fledging, because they're running off with as much stuff as they can carry. It's hard to read glee in the face of a pointy, wooden lipped bird, but perhaps there is something in the mad glitter of their black eyes. They can't believe their luck with this constantly replenished magical oasis, and they pay Susan and I back by shitting down our windows and over the car: fat white stripes of tribute, like the bridge of Adam Ant's nose, or the deviated septum of Rick Parfitt's. 

I'm listening to The Durutti Column and writing about Oul Lammas Fair, which takes place in the Northern Irish town of Ballycastle every year (except this year and last, because of Covid). Lammas means "Loaf Mass", and it's a sort of proto-Harvest Festival. In the past there would have been games, buying and selling, match-making and the eating of Northern Irish delicacies (though you wouldn't want to be too delicate to consume the plain food of the Ulster people) like dulse (an edible seaweed they sell in plastic bags on the counter of my local Nisa. I haven't tried it) and, cough, Yellowman, which has nothing to do with Albino Reggae Toasters or, indeed, racism in general, but is a chewy, toffee textured honeycomb. However, like the black-faced Morris Dancers who are definitely not racist, merely reflecting hundreds of years of Cornish folk tradition, it might be time to re-badge your big, lumpy bags of sweeties. Am I being all "woke" again? Of course I am. And good. 

I was hoping to tie Lammas Fair in with the Celtic feast of Lughnasa, as they take place at the same time, and both feature games and feasting and begin with the letter "L". But it would take a level of self-deluding sophistry that only a 19th scholar desperate for a Celtic tradition could invent. It's a shame - I'd love to drag in Crom Dubh and even the unchaining of St Peter for that matter, but it would be coincidence Jenga. It might be good enough for an editorial meeting on "Ancient Aliens", but I would like to be just slightly accountable. 

It's a beautiful day. Yesterday, when I went for a walk I saw the remnants of a car accident - a white BMW ripped in two, the roof torn off and some fifteen feet from the rest of the carcass. There was a chorus of bluebottle-green police officers* cordoning the area off, with candy-striped bunting. Because I'm dim I assumed the car's occupants must have died. It didn't occur to me that they'd been cut from the vehicle with "the jaws of life", but so it proved. The news told me there had been four people in the car, all were alive, all hospitalised, none critical. Still, I hope I can get through today's walk without a major police incident. 

I need a walk because I've managed to kink my back lifting weights while watching "Tawny Pipit" - who is not a porn star, but a 1944 film about a plucky Cotswold village defending the eggs of a rare bird. I need to walk off the grumbling stiffness in my spine. I have been exercising a lot and feel as though I'm getting fitter and stronger, if not noticeably thinner. It will happen, though. My plan was to be as thin as I was ten years ago, but over the weekend I had reason to see some photos of me at forty and I was fat then too. So, thinner than that then. 

The long term scheme is to become a sort of leathery, crows-feety caricature of myself at 18, as though I'd gone to a festival and fallen asleep with my face resting against some chicken wire, with far too much lemon juice in my hair. I want to be one of those rancid old crow men whose bowl of porridge arse doesn't quite fit his leather trousers. Whose new teeth shine out of his wrinkled face like a vicar's collar on a month old Jack O' Lantern, and his jaunty neckerchief barely hiding the wattles that got him the nickname "Ol' Fanny Throat". That is the dream. It's not much of a dream. But it's my dream. 

When I was at art college I once drew a cartoon of myself at fifty. I was fat and camp and was trying to impress a button eyed puppet sat on my lap. My hair was thin and black in the portrait, like Ray Reardon's, which means it wasn't entirely accurate! I still have an impressive amount of pale wool - like low hanging cloud over Mount Fuji. Which reminds me of another cartoon - in Cheeky comic there was a character called Gloomy Glad, who literally had a rain-cloud hovering over her at all times. Well, Gloomy Glad is the picture I take into the hairdressers'. 

The birds have gone now. There doesn't appear to be a scrap of food left. The sun is still brilliant, the shadows longer, a bird shaped smear on the window more clearly defined in the late afternoon sun. Are they trying to get in now? It's all gone a bit Daphne DuMaurier. Still, it's time. I've written enough rubbish here. I shall go for a stroll. Susan is out enjoying the sun in town. She appears to be in some species of pub garden. 

Fine. 

I certainly won't be straying anywhere near the off-licence on my stroll. No matter how thirsty I get. Honest. **

*one of whom was a very attractive woman. Something I found unsettling in a manner that's hard to describe. 

**Amazingly, I didn't.