Well-relaxed Wednesday

There's been at least one hoopoe around The Bungalows since we got here. They are lovely looking birds. Molly will appreciate them when she gets here because they feature in a musical scene in In The Night Garden; (or maybe not - she tired of that programme quite quickly: it's very repetitive and essentially vapid; students on cannabis no doubt love it, and I do wonder if that is the intended audience).

I spotted one in the garden this afternoon, and watched it pull out a grub from beneath the ground with it's long beak, and then, to my delight, saw a young bird run up with beak open to receive it's dinner. I watched them for a while, both parent and child probing the ground with their long beaks. The juvenile wasn't having any luck but every time the adult found a fat grub, the bairn would get it.

A late night last night, mostly acting the fool in DMU. And then a long, long lie in this morning, (the first time I've stayed up past two, and slept past 11 since, oh let me see now... Can't remember!) This because it's a holiday for the Prophet's Birthday, God bless him! They buy gaudy artificial "christmas" trees as part of the celebrations. Apparently, this is all the rage amongst teenaged girls: they decorate the tree and read verses from The Quran to it. There's a PhD in comparative anthropology and cultural studies there, I'd say.

I had a pipe in the early afternoon, I'm going to have another one now, and probably a third before bed. It's my only vice, true enough, but I do worry that my old nicotine addiction is looking greedily at me from the clouds of mint flavoured tobacco smoke...