Anyone

Who would you like to talk to soon?

Well, that’s pretty sad, isn’t it?

I did want a less stressful life away from that  band of hooligans in the other half of our semi-detached. I wanted not to have their choice of music/computer gaming imposed on me day and night. I wanted not to hear their rows, the “yet-another” baby bellowing and the toddler kicking the skirting boards.

I wanted not to look “out the back” at what had once been a nice garden, with trees – now a jacuzzi, a giant shed (with green and purple disco lights for the tweens) and an illegally large conservatory.

I wanted not to look “out the front” and see one or other of the extended family’s cars yet again parked in my parking space. I’d waited eleven years for them to win the lottery and move on – to splash out on some naff mansion in Surrey and fill it with fake chandeliers and football memorabilia.

It was a vain hope. They just bought more sheds, and held more barbecues on their extra-high patio so that their sozzled guests could stare vacantly down at me doing the washing up at my kitchen sink.

So here I am in the far north. My current neighbours are quiet and pleasant but – as indeed was the case “down south” – I spend most of the day indoors, feeding my dwindling population of cats, knitting, watching detectives on TV and “borrowing” those free Amazon eBooks to read.

I ought to go out, make a start on exploring this huge, beautiful county now the sun is – once in a while, anyway – shining. I have pencilled in “Silloth” for tomorrow, just because I like the name and there is supposed to be a good fish and chip café.

I miss the sea. Wherever I am I seem to need a place to go to sit and look out at the sea. Spiritual replenishment, I suppose. Maybe Silloth will be that place. Or, of course, maybe I’ll find some reason not to go just yet. I rather drained the tank, courage-wise, getting up here.

Well, I do at least have the birds. Last time I wrote about birds it was a magpie – or possibly two magpies – and that was all. Northern birds didn’t seem to want to venture into my wilderness of long wet grass and dandelions any more than I did. I sensed them lurking just out of sight, up in the trees or on the rooftops, suspicious, critical and probably wearing battered tweed jackets and tiny little flat caps.

However, this afternoon my slate-roofed full-size bird table arrived with the courier, in two big boxes. In theory it was fully -constructed, only needing the “house” to be affixed to the stand with four long silver bolts and four wing nuts. Some male reviewer on Amazon wrote that he had had no problem affixing it but a lady might struggle. Grrr..

Though actually he was right. There were no instructions, of course, but it was pretty clear that the long shiny bolts had to go down through the pre-drilled holes in the splintery wooden plinth, with the wing-nuts fastening underneath. But of course they wouldn’t. The “house” section weighed a ton, what with all the slate, and the long shiny bolts would only go upwards.

I thought about asking my neighbour, who constructs garden furniture as a hobby, and who is a man and would therefore be able to whisk the thing together in a jiffy. But I decided that as the bolts were blunt and these tough Northern birds were unlikely to care, I would leave them fastening upwards. 

“And you can be quiet too,” I admonished Inner Ex. Only of course I call him by his real name when engaging in inner conversation. He just couldn’t have left those bolts done wrong. It would have been like Sheldon Cooper and the untidy closet.

It’s good enough, I told myself. And amazingly, within ten minutes of heaving the new slate-roofed bird table out into the garden and filling it with goodies I got sparrows, greenfinches rooks or crows – I’m never sure which – and the old magpies back.

“Oh there you all are.”