Home thoughts

Despite having had a perfectly good afternoon's wander yesterday I'm still wound up about the train cancellations. Which surprises me because I thought that after two decades of this crap it would be water off a duck's back save a bit of venting. I think it's because I've been seeing reports and photos of the king eider at Redcar daily for the past couple of months and the only reason I haven't tried my luck is Transpennine Express cancelling its Transpennine trains at the drop of a hat. There are no guarantees in the birdwatching world, I could walk up and down Redcar beach and have no joy whatever but that would be down to my bad luck or my bad fieldcraft, not because a company that we taxpayers subsidise to an eye-watering degree can't be arsed doing its basic job. I think I'll just have to give it up.

I'm as stupid and bloody-minded as the next man but there are days when I've no fight left and today is one of them. I could have had a bit of consolatory sea duck watching on the North Wales coast but I just couldn't be doing with it. Which is a shame as the weather forecast doesn't reckon much to visibility for the next few days. Instead I spent the day licking my wounds and tackling the pruning of the hazels and the rambling rose in the back garden. The rose fought back savagely so by the time I'd finished I had more wounds to lick. Progress was hindered by half a dozen spadgers, which refused to get out of the way while I squeezed past the bird feeders, and a pair of long-tailed tits which kept alighting on the branches I was trying to prune to see what I was doing.

And for all that I ended up with a pile of prunings five feet high the garden doesn't look I've done anything at all. I notice the crows and magpies are gathering sticks for their nests. I'll have to chop some of these into a size they can carry.

Prunings