A Morning Walk along Middleton Beach to Emu Point

Another Facebook photo album, of a two hour, three kilometre walk along Middleton Beach from Ellen Cove to Emu Point earlier today. As with previous Facebook photo albums of mine, it's public, and you don't need a Facebook account of your own to view it.

A Visit to Stony Hill, October 2015

Mere months after we actually traipsed around the Hill, I've finally put up a Facebook photo album of the afternoon. As usual, it's a public album, so a Facebook account isn't needed to see it -- use this link to marvel at the instructive captions, mordant wit, and other textual exertions in which one has to indulge when one is stuck indoors on a blustery day in Albany.

The Wugster does the Tapestrising

For the record, this tapestry kit -- a replica of one of "The Lady and The Unicorn" tapestries in the Musee Cluny in Paris -- was acquired little over twenty years ago, and although it was worked on for a little while back then it has languished untouched for many of those years. Retirement, however, seems to have prompted its being brought out of storage ("storage" in this case meaning "tucked down the side of Judith's TV viewing chair") to be worked on for an hour or so at least one day a week, and sometimes more than just one day. But at least it's being worked on! It may even be finished before another twenty years have elapsed!

FYI and ACTION: Enforced Change of Email Address for Joseph Nicholas

I signed up with Global Internet (as it then was) in 1998 or 1999, to access the internet via dial-up through a modem -- all that was then available. Global Internet eventually became part of Madasafish, which in turn became part of Plusnet, but through those changes -- and through our switch from dial-up to broadband internet access in 2009 -- I kept the same email address, josephn at globalnet dot co dot uk.

Two days ago, however, I received an automated email from Plusnet stating that all those who'd signed up under the old dial-up option would be having their accounts terminated with effect from Friday 9 January 2015, unless they transferred to Plusnet's broadband service. A phone conversation with them in response to this email has confirmed that use of another broadband service will not be acceptable. As you might imagine, a change of broadband provider is not something I wish to pursue (apart from anything else, our existing broadband service is packaged with our telephone service, a change of which would be far too much hassle).

I am therefore having to change my email address, and am giving you this advance warning so that you can amend your address books and commence using my new address before my current address becomes defunct next month. Please use my new address -- excellenceingardening at gmail dot com -- for all communications henceforward.

(Interestingly, Blogger doesn't seem to have any facility to allow blog authors and administrators to change the email address they use to log in, although they can change the addresses to which blog posts are forwarded. This is means that in one tiny corner of the internet, the old josephn address will continue to be used. Heigh-ho!)

Another Facebook Photo Album

I must be on some sort of roll....here's a another album of photographs from a day out this summer, of a walk in the Chess Valley, in the Chilterns AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), in June 2014. As before, this is a public album; go here to view the photographs.

Photographs of a Day Trip to Eynsford, 18 July 2014

Having had it on my list of Things To Do for, like, months, I've finally put up a Facebook album of photographs from our visit to Eynsford a few months ago, to see the remains of Lullingstone Roman villa, the 17th-18th century Lullingstone Castle (actually a former manor house) and the ruins of Eysnford Castle, a Norman fort. The album is public, and can be viewed whether or not you have a Facebook account; use this link.

Retirement -- A Progress Report

In the weeks before I retired from the civil service, at the end of March this year, work colleagues would ask me whether I had any plans for my retirement. Of course! I would reply, and would outline the four "big projects" that I expected to fill the next few years -- a reading backlog (three-quarters of it fiction) which would keep me occupied for about five years if I did nothing else; the digitisation of the residue of my once-huge vinyl record collection (the residue being stuff that hasn't appeared on CD and is never likely to -- 12-inch singles from the early 1990s by Ride, for example); albumising the photographs from varous foreign holidays, some of them (Southeast Australia, Andalucia, central Spain) dating back to 1998 and 1999; and the digitisation of my late father's enormous collection of slide photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s (some of which, from his trips to Australia associated with the subsequently-abandoned Skybolt project, could be of minor historic interest). There wouldn't be time to sit around doing nothing; why, I was retiring at 60 precisely so that I could get on with these things!

Needless to say (you're probably ahead of me here), I haven't started any of these projects. The fiction is untouched; the vinyl records are still taking up space on the floor of my room; nobody seems to make photograph albums any more (Boots and WH Smith both offered loose leaf formats to which pages could be added as required, but they are now incredibly difficult to find); and I have yet to actually open and view the boxes and boxes of slides. What have I been doing, that these projects have slipped so?

One answer is that these are all things one does indoors, when the weather is too cold and wet to be doing things outside. In the past, "outside" has usually meant the garden and the allotment, which could only be dealt with at weekends, but giving up work has freed us to deal with them at any time, which means that we've been able to keep up with all the jobs that have needed doing (weeding, harvesting, cutting the grass, renewing bed edging, whatever) instead of running furiously behind them and never catching up. (So hooray for that.) "Outside" has now also meant, as I wrote in a couple of posts earlier this year on my LiveJournal blog, the exploitation of the weekdays that retirement has given to us to attend lunchtime lectures, make midweek visits to places outside London, and generally fill the days with activities that we might otherwise never have fitted in at all -- looking back through my diary for 2014, and reviewing the rolling list of places we've been (as we tick them off....as new ones are added), I find that we have had an average of two events a week since the end of the March, not counting the various things that we did individually because the other wasn't interested. (Weekly dance classes for Judith, day trips to the National Railway Museum in York and Bovington Tank Museum for me.)

Looking ahead to the rest of this week, I see that we have tickets for the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master at the V&A on Wednesday, followed by a trip across the road to this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum; on Thursday I have a lunchtime lecture on Germany: Floating Frontiers at the British Museum followed by a visit to the Museum of London for its Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die exhibition; and on Friday we have tickets for Late Turner: Painting Set Free at Tate Britain, with an evening lecture at the British Museum on New Discoveries from Ancient Egypt. The following two weeks each have another two BM lectures, then a range of local events....the week commencing 15 December is currently blank, but something will doubtless be added to it at some point.

Busy busy busy -- so busy that we both wonder how we ever had time to go to work. But that's retirement for you -- the best career move one can ever make!

A Visit to Eltham Palace

The joys of retirement....we awake on Bastille Day 2014 (yesterday), note that the weather is forecast to be dry, warm and sunny, and decide that it's the right day to make a return visit to Eltham Palace in southeast London -- somewhere we last saw in 1998 or thereabouts, shortly after it first opened following its restoration by English Heritage. As usual, I took lots of photographs; and, following previous practice, I have created a Facebook photo album of our visit which is available to anyone to view.

A Day Out at Chatham Historic Dockyard

Another album of photographs on Facebook for your delectation, with instructive captions, of a return visit to a heritage site we'd previously visited shortly after its opening some 20 years ago, and never since. As with previous albums, it's publicly available, so you don't need to be logged into Facebook or even have a Facebook account to see it; go here and revel in our thrillingness.

A Circular Walk to the Watts Gallery

Yesterday was dry, warm and sunny, so we went for a walk in the countryside west of Guildford, to visit the Watts Gallery at Compton, returning via Loseley House. I have created an album of photographs of the walk and visit on Facebook, which should be available even to those who don't have a Facebook account -- see here.

Butterflies and Mammoths

This afternoon, we went to the Natural History Museum to see the new (but temporary) exhibition on mammoths, featuring "Lyuba", a frozen mammoth calf which died when it fell into a muddy hole a month after its birth around 42,000 years ago; it was excavated from the Siberian permafrost a few years ago and (until any other turn up) is currently the best-preserved of any mammoth mummies. (Photography inside the exhibition is prohibited, but there's a range of images of the calf here. The Wikipedia entry for the calf contains details of its discovery, including some which the videos accompanying the exhibition completely omit.) We also went to the Sensational Butterflies" exhibition (another temporary exhibition) in the Museum's forecourt: a heated tent which has been set up every summer since 2008 to house tropical butterflies flittering about and (if you're lucky) landing on you. I wasn't lucky; but Judith was -- see the accompanying photographic evidence of a butterfly on her hair. (We were not able to identify the species of butterfly in question.)



This being half-term, the Museum was overrun with children (shriek, gibber, run away), being led around by platoons of harassed parents; the most enormous queues were for the dinosaurs, which are perennially popular. There were also large queues for the mammoths exhibition, for which an entry fee is levied (entry to all the other parts of the Museum is free); but we, being Museum Members, were able to flourish our membership card and jump straight past the head of the queue without having to pay anything at all. The paying visitors were left seething with jealousy, doubtless.

The First Weekend of May --

-- was the May Day Bank Holiday, a public holiday in all four parts of the UK and (for historical reasons stemming from the Anglo-Norman invasions in the 12th century) the Republic of Ireland as well. We were quite busy: on Saturday we went for a walk along the Lea Navigation from Markfield Park north to Stonebridge Lock and back across Tottenham Marshes and the Hale Village development at Tottenham Hale; and on Monday we attended the Tottenham Ploughman Mayfest event in Markfield Park. Copious photographs were taken of each jaunt, and have been assembled into Facebook albums with instructive captions. Both albums are public, and can therefore be viewed by anyone irrespective of whether or not they have a Facebook account: the walk along the Lea Navigation is here, and the Tottenham Ploughman Mayfest event is here. "Enjoy!" as I believe is now the preferred term....

Vote for Judith Hanna!

Well, you can if you live in Haringey's Tottenham Green ward, where The Wugster is one of the Green Party's three candidates in the local elections later this month. (Standing primarily to help make up the slate and not expecting to actually get elected -- we've both got enough to do as it is, thank you very much....)

Apple Blossom Time

It's a cool and overcast morning here in Tottenham, North London, with the promise of rain later (just when we plan to go to the allotment, of course), but the apple blossom in our garden is booping merrily along....



(Judith just visible in the conservatory behind the tree, doubtless engaged in some important post-breakfast numberwangs.)

A Visit to Kew Gardens

Today is grey and damp, with the weekend promising more of the same and the temperatures trending downwards (chiz chiz as N Molesworth the goriller of form 3B would sa). But yesterday, when it was mostly fine and occasionally sunny, The Wugster and I went to Kew Gardens, for which she has purchased an annual pass allowing her and one guest an unlimited number of visits; four such visits, and the pass has paid for itself (especially as ticket prices may have to rise to make up some of the continuing cuts in government funding). (Which of course government spokescreatures claim are not actually cuts at all.)

The Wugster was interested primarily in the displays of azaleas and rhododendrons, which are currently in or coming into bloom; I was interested primarily in photographing things, and doing a spot of birdwatching in between: Emirates Airlines Airbus A380, Malaysian Airlines short 747, numerous British Airways 737 and 767 variants, and so on....because Kew Gardens is directly under the approach path to Heathrow Airport, and it seems that crossing the garden boundary is the signal to the pilots to lower the aircrafts' landing gear: you can see the wheel wells open and the undercarriage extend, and hear the pitch of the engines rise as the pilots have to increase thrust to compensate for the extra drag. Hours of fun, for those who might be interested in such things.

Anyway, here are some photographs of the azaleas, together with a photograph of The Wugster taking a photograph of some rhododendrons. Then we strolled to the end of Syon Vista, walked along the lake photographing coots and coot chicks, and went up the treetop walkway before exiting via the gift shop where one or two new plants for the garden were acquired.

The Chicks Have Fledged!

I was making my breakfast coffee just before 8.00am this morning when I noticed a sudden flurry outside the kitchen door: a new bird had appeared on the shelf above the nest. It was a speckled brown colour, with a yellow beak and tufts of down above its eyes: the first chick had fledged!

It had gone in the minute it took me to get my camera; but it took almost an hour before its nest-mates followed. One chick climbed out of the nest onto the gardening clutter immediately adjacent, but then sat there for some time while the parent birds brought food for the other two....at which point, perhaps realising that the parents weren't giving it anything, the chick clambered back into the nest. One of the other two chicks subsequently clambered out of the nest in the other direction, promptly falling into the gap between two sprayer bottles, and had to clamber back. All three then took turns to stand on the edge of the nest, flexing their wings, until just after 9.00am when -- one after the other -- they decided it was time to go. But they didn't go very far: they left the nest, but then took up positions on various adjacent spots -- the rim of the shredder, the lid of the worm compost bin, a stack of flower pots on a shelf, a curl of hose outside the kitchen window, the handle of a spade....this was the big wide world, but what were they making of it?

At this point, however, with all the chicks out of the nest, the parent birds' behaviour changed -- they would fly in with food in their beaks, but largely to show it to the chicks to tempt them to travel further. But these three, unlike the first to leave, were very reluctant. For the next couple of hours, while we had a late breakfast and kept watch, all three remained in our side passage, with the parents feeding them occasionally but mainly trying to encourage them to move out into the garden. Two of them eventually did so, but the third seemed very reluctant, almost trying to hide itself away -- between the rear of a window box and the glass of the dining window, behind a collection of plastic saucers for plant pots, under the worm compost bin....at one point, it flew down into a bag of garden sand, requiring me to go out and rescue it. Finally, sometime after midday, the chick got up its courage, flew out from under the glass roof of the side passage and up onto the roof of next door's rear extension, where one of its parents rushed to greet it with a beakful of choice morsels. Next thing we knew, they were all gone, parents and chicks together.

The garden is empty of robins now but, before they left and while they were still encouraging the chicks, the parent birds went into what looked a lot like a courtship display, with the female atop the wooden arch in the garden cheeping furiously and the male flying around with a worm in its beak. Did they mate again before they left? It is the male alone who takes responsibility for feeding the chicks after they've fledged, while the female concentrates on feeding herself up to be ready for the second clutch of eggs normally laid each year; if they did mate, will the female return to re-use the nest outside the kitchen door?

We may (or may not) know in a few weeks' time. Until then, here are some pictures of this morning's fledging excitement.

Robin Chicks Update

We noticed last weekend that the female robin had ceased mothering the chicks overnight; since then, unless she's bringing in food for the chicks and removing their faecal sacs, she's not spending any time at the nest at all. We speculate that this may be attributable to the parasites which the chicks have acquired from the nesting materials, a speculation reinforced by the time spent by the female preening herself last weekend: perched in the apple trees outside the conservatory, she would work methodically through her wing feathers, under her wings and down her breast, clearly removing (and eating!) ticks and mites. (Leaving the chicks alone in the nest overnight may also be a simple survival strategy: if a predator gets the chicks, the parents will live to breed again; conversely, if one of the parents is taken out, the other will be able to continue feeding the chicks.)

There has also been a change in the robins' behaviour around us. On the one hand, they now clearly associate the provision of mealworms with us, even to the extent of anticipating my appearance in the garden at 6.00am to replenish the feeders (an open tray on a pole and a ground tray in a cage on the lawn) -- I barely get back inside the house before both parents are stuffing their beaks with provender (in the case of the open tray, because they have to get some in before the bigger starlings arrive and scare them off -- the ground tray is newer, and it took the robins a few days to recognise its existence....although they have to compete for the feed therein with a pair of great tits, flying in from a neighbouring garden). On the other hand, they respond quite differently if they think we might be threatening the chicks. Robins are famously tolerant of human proximity; were that not the case, the female would never have built the nest so close to our kitchen door. Although we currently use that door as little as possible to avoid disturbing the chicks, there are occasions when we need to open it to add stuff to the worm bin; the noise of this immediately prompts the female to fly in and take up what looks very like a "guard-attack" position on an adjacent shelf until we've closed the door and she can resume her food-gathering duties.

The chicks have also been growing fast. Below are three photographs, taken (respectively) on Monday, Friday and today (Sunday), showing their development -- from the tip of a beak poking above the rim of the nest to juveniles within a few days of fledging. What the photographs don't show is how active they've become: they have been generally inert and huddled down in the nest when the parent birds aren't there with food for them, but at other times have begun to raise themselves in the nest, stretch out their necks and exercise their flight muscles. This activity is the reason for the slight blurriness of the third photograph: the chick at the back looks larger than the others, but that's because it's pushed itself up in the nest and a few seconds later was scrambling over the others to take up a new position at the front. Fledging must be imminent....

A Much Better Photograph of the Robin Chicks

I can't imagine why I didn't use this one instead of that attached to the previous post. Perhaps I just wanted to spam you with robin photographs....

Robin Transactions

Yesterday (Saturday) we caught our first glimpses of the chicks in the nest; and this weekend marked a change in the parent birds' feeding behaviour.

The chicks are just visible (if one knows what to look for) above the rim of the nest as fluffy dark bundles which wobble about a bit -- at less than a week old, they are clearly very unsteady on their feet. When a parent flies in with some food, all rise up, their yellow beaks agape; we count four of them. They're very difficult to photograph, both because they keep crashing into one another and because they're partly screened by the parent bird; but below is the best of the many photographs (all the rest even more blurred or out-of-focus) that I took. We also saw, for the very first time, the female bird carry away a faecal sac -- a soft white pellet -- from one of the chicks, which perhaps suggests that (contrary to my previous robin post) she hadn't been eating them after all.



As to feeding: hitherto, the female has spent the bulk of her time on the nest, receiving food from the male for both herself and the chicks; this behaviour was so ingrained that on the rare occasions that the female had left the nest the male bird would usually await her return -- perched on the plant hanging bracket outside the kitchen door or on the shelf above the nest -- rather than deliver his beakfuls of grubs and small worms directly to the chicks. But sometime on Saturday, that changed: the female started leaving the nest to forage for both herself and the chicks for longer and longer periods, until by the end of the day she -- like the male -- was visiting the nest solely to feed the chicks. She was still active until very late, not returning to sit on the chicks until it was almost fully dark.

Today has been rather less mild, and more windy, than the past couple of days; both birds have nevertheless been active foragers, in our garden -- it's notable that there are particular patches of bare soil they like to investigate -- and (presumably) others. (The two gardens either side of ours are not particularly kempt, and so are doubtless thronged with small invertebrates.) Below is a photograph of the female robin, sunning herself in the fresh air on Saturday.

Some Close-Ups of Mrs Robin

Taken this afternoon with 30x and 38x digital zoom, using the top rung of a step-ladder to keep the camera steady. The female is definitely sitting higher in the nest, as to be expected when she has a clutch of chicks under her; she raises herself from time to time to look down at them, and occasionally thrusts her head down to pick up something which she then appears to eat; the likeliest item, disgusting as it sounds, must be the chicks' faecal sacs. Presumably it's all protein....