Sleep and play.

Parent (wilting somewhat): ‘Aren’t you tired?’
Child (leaping around room): ‘No! I can sleep and play at the same time. Do you know why? Because I play in my dreams!’

Another bairnling

‘That one is actually a night-time jumper, because those flowers there are actually stars.’

Makes sense to me.

eruptions

Last week, Sunday 24 August, we had a gang of bairns round to test out the new trampoline. About mid-day on a hot day the shout went up: flying ants. I was delighted. After three years of woeful absence, I had seen a few ants wandering around the front garden—so we must have a nest somewhere nearby—and this means that the queen has perhaps bred and flown. I will be watching very closely in the next few days in the hope that we have’t lost our nest to the neighbours.

I honestly don’t know why there are so few ants here in Aberdeen, though my guess is that there simply isn’t enough solar radiation to sustain an underground nest. I’ve been trying to create a constructively messy garden, with trees and usefully lost bits of rubble for sheltering larger animals, but had no idea we might get ants in. These look like ordinary little brown ants, though I’m no specialist. Upcountry in the old Scottish woods we do have wood ants as well as slavers.

Yesterday, to add to the bounty, I found several new mushrooms. The Inkcaps that come up every year in the old Gordon Barracks have come up again, but I think I may also have found a Boletus sp. around as well as small rather spikey, globular mushroom that I haven’t yet identified. The small size of the N95 meant that I could actually get some great photos from ground level, “gnome’s eye view” so to speak. I’ll put them up over at Flickr later this week.

Pinball

From Ray, my son: ‘Was pinball the game where you launched a ball and then you had to edit everything really fast so that the ball reached its destination?’

Acquainted things have happened

Well, I’ve hauled the bedraggled blog from Blogger to WordPress. Why, exactly, is not quite clear to me; one of those fretful decisions arrived at through an accumulation of tiny reasons. Maybe just time to shake out the cruft.

Reviewing old entries I was delighted to recall dinner with Bill Woodcock last year, when I was in Berkeley for the Society of Ethnobiology conference. Turns out Brent Berlin was a friend of his family when he was a young ‘un. I don’t think we knew any anthropologists at all – biologists, yes, but not social scientists.

This will not be true for Eleanor or Raymond or Tanglewest, who will grow up knowing ecologists and anthropologists, lamas and priests, all sorts of people. There at least I’m doing the job right.

Today was such a fine day that I would be remiss not to make note of it. The bulbs are surging, the birds are singing, it was shirtsleeve warm for the first time in weeks, and it was even still daylight as we cycled home. Coming out of the Encountering Buddhism lecture I saw my first bee of the year and shouted ‘hello!’. I was so happy to see it. It promptly landed on a student’s face – and much to their credit they did not flinch.

more amazing phrases

From Eleanor.

I am a tiger. I want Tiger Food.

> Does tiger food look like chocolate?

No.

> Does it look like cereal?

No. It looks like this (points to foot). I want Chocolate Skin.

Reading with Tanglewest

Odd to think how old patterns repeat. I’m sitting in the front room with Tanglewest who couldn’t sleep; she’s reading a Gerald Durrell book. Bhavana and I have agreed to institute a reading hour before dinner and the bizarre thing is that I’m in a house crammed with children who all love reading. Raymond’s eating Tintin books like biscuits; Eleanor shouts for her Tiger Who Came to Tea. It may not be Rancho Escondido but it’s remarkably civilized nonetheless. The weather’s been blisteringly hot, though Donmouth being what it is the heat is invariably answered with a dose of haar. All in all rather pleasantly Californian illusion. Wonderfully, this is Scotland and we don’t have Ku Klux Klan rejects littering the streets, buffoon politicians whose only professional credential is their equity card, or endless landscapes of arid suburb linked by writhing, stinking gridlock. I do miss the burritos and the hummingbirds.