The chair

The elderly lady is very pleased her delivery from Tesco Online has changed to Sainsbury's. She thinks it's more upmarket and she likes the orange bags; "We used to have one in Gerrards Cross when I was a girl," she says. She doesn't know that Tesco is suing three Thai journalists for criticising it's expansion in that beautiful land, and will probably bankrupt them and have them in jail if it wins. She doesn't know that a group of leading British authors described Tescos action as "Deeply chilling". She doesn't even know that she is boycotting Tescos, but she is; or at least I am, and it's me that orders the food.

The chair (dream)

The elderly lady's won the battle, and no carers are going upstairs to clean (her sons can do that). But she slept in her chair today and had a dream that all the carers came at once and sat around the table for a conference, and it tired her so much that she rang to say she didn't want any more conferences at the house, and could I stop them please?

Hawk

Wood Pigeons perch in the ash tree, bombarding the paving stones beneath 'til they're splattered with slime of different colours, depending what the fat birds ate. A Sparrowhawk took one out yesterday, double its own weight, and carefully plucked every feather and left them in a neat circle on the ground.
Bon appétit, Sparrowhawk; come back soon.

The chair

The elderly lady's well spoken, but shouting "Bugger off!" in the background as the carer talks on the phone. He's come to clean, but she believes she still cleans her own house. I reassure him. In the afternoon she rings, "I'm so ashamed; I've been asleep all day in the chair and done nothing. I had terrible dreams and nightmares; a man kept coming to the house with his own hoover and tried to clean."

The chair 01

An elderly lady, struggling to make sense of the little that remains of her life and her mind, slid to the floor in her sleep this morning and had to be lifted by carers. She had so much stored behind the cushions of her chair that there was no longer room for her elderly bottom. There were tea bags, cutlery, chocolate bars, her husbands clothes, tinned fruit; all the things that she feared would be stolen. She's my Mother.

Wild Geese

Twenty years ago Little Egrets lived in places like the South of France not in the bucolic greenery of central southern England, but now two live in Hungerford, this one flying over Freeman's Marsh in the late October sunshine today.
Nor would I expect to see a Greylag Goose here; I always associate them with wild empty saltmarshes and the call of the curlew, but thirty plus were honking their way northwards over the River Dun this morning in a great diagonal line to who knows where.
And Stonechats - I thought they lived on Cornish clifftops, but now we have at least three clacking away on the same marsh, two males and a female.
Needless to say West Berkshire Council have given permission for a marina and hotel to be built on this Site of Special Scientific Interest, and the owners are busy advertising for investors. It beggars belief.

Rat

I had to kill a rat today. At first I thought it was an oversized dormouse shivering on the concrete by the washing machine, scrunched in and fluffed up. But it was a young rat. It had eaten poison. I picked it up by the tail and its legs cycled as if it was running slowly in a nightmare. I smashed it's head against the corner of a brick wall, but it's eye was still open looking at me. I smashed it again and it died hanging in the foetal position, paws pulled in, eyes closed. And it wet itself. It was a girl.