I wrote about how our road had been chosen by the BBC to be the first car free street in Britian here. And how the filming was done over a week and included both me and my family. Well, it going out daily on BBC1 at 09:15 – 10:00 starting on Monday. Here’s one of the pictures I posted of me talking with Dominic Littlewoood.
It was just before 09:00, I’m running late because the traffic is awfull, and the young lady asks for a Megarider (a weekly Winchester city ticket costing �10). Great, these are quick and easy to deal with since it’s always a �10 note handed over, or just occasionally two fivers. At this point she tips the entire contents of her purse into the cash tray! Apart from three 50p coins everything else is 20p’s, 10p’s or 5p’s. “You are joking?” I say. “It’s OK, it’s all there, �10” she says. I’m late already and now I’m feeling really pissed off so to hell with it I’ll make ’em all even later and start to count the coins. It takes several minutes with the young lady watching and everyone else wondering why the bus hasn’t moved off. Finally I’m able to announce “That’s �9.20, may I have another 80p please?”. “I don’t have anymore” was the young lady’s reply. I told her that I couldn’t sell her a �10 ticket for �9.20, either she couldn’t use the bus or maybe she should buy a single into town. She agreed to buy the single which was �1.50. I immediately grabbed the 3 x 50p coins and left her to scoop up the tons of stuff left in the tray.
And on the next run I get a fit of the giggles! A rather large lady started to board at the Railway Station, she somehow got her walking stick between her legs, tripped, and fell onto the bus most unceremonially. She hit the floor pretty hard. I couldn’t get out of the cab to help since she was jamming the door shut. But she got up and proclaimed that she was fine. “Where are you going I asked?” finger poised over the ticket machine. “The Hospital, please” she said. I immediately thought to myself ‘Is that a revised destination or was that her original destination?’ :-)
I’m on a day off today and was in my study booking what will be our next holiday, the Canary Islands at the end of April, when I heard a lot of noise from the garden. I went out into the garden to see what was up and the chickens were shouting their beaks off! On the other side of the garden from them were three magpies in a tree also shouting at the top of their voices. I wondered where the cat was because my first thought was that the magpies were going for the cat (they’ve done that before) and maybe the chickens were joining in for fun. Then in the shrubs between the two sets of birds there was a lot of flapping which I couldn’t really see what it was and some feathers flying into the air! Next thought was that a daytime fox had got a chicken. But my chickens are brown and these feathers were grey. More flapping in the shrubs and then out into the open comes a pigeon with a Sparrowhawk clinging onto its back. Amazing! I find myself 6 feet away and I’m staring at what I’m seeing and the Sparrowhawk is staring at me. Its golden eye with black pupil is staring at me trying to read my mind ‘Does the upright want this pigeon or can I keep it?’. I didn’t move which I guess told the Sparrowhawk I wasn’t going to go away. Eventually it let go of the pigeon and flew off.
Here are two pictures, the first I found on the internet and what’s what would have been happening in my garden if I hadn’t gone out there. The second is of the pigeon which still hasn’t flown off – I show it because its taken from the exact spot I was stood on when the Sparrowhawk was there – that’s how close I was.
Can anyone help explain the following to me.
My webstats today showed a visitor who’d been referred from Facebook – the exact referrer being http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=51690947713&h=kTKIr&u=cnKjv Clicking this link takes me to the Facebook website where I’m warned about certain things and if I’m happy click ‘Continue’. Clicking continue takes me to this website! I notice that I’ve a total of 4 referrers from Facebook.
I joined Facebook but don’t have anything about this website in my profile. Doing a search on Facebook doesn’t return anything for megabusblog etc. Where is the link to this blog in Facebook?
Although I joined Facebook I’m not exactly sure what I should do, or what happens. Maybe I’m too elderly to understand this type of site :-(
Things are happening fast on the frog spawn front! The idea to take a picture every 7 days wasn’t a good one, they are developing at a rate of knots. It’s now day 5 and I’m posting two pictures taken this morning. The first shows the eggs which are left and are unlikely to hatch, note all the little bodies on the floor, the mortality rate appears to be pretty high. I did a google on this and came up with www.froglife.org where it says “An often quoted statistic says that in a frogspawn blob of, say one thousand eggs, only three or four will make it from being eggs, through to tadpoles, through metamorphosis and finally to adulthood. Where competition between individual frogs is high, this number may be lower still”.
The second picture shows a couple of the hatched and healthy tadpoles.
PS I’ve just noticed that a visitor arrived here having typed ‘spotting frogspawn 2009’ into google.co.uk This site gets the top postion on this search term :-)
My route from Winchester to Salisbury takes me up a hill before descending into Salisbury. There’s a cafe at the top of the hill, naturally it’s named The Hilltop Cafe. When we had the snow, which I wrote about on 2 February, the cafe car park had the snow shoveled to end of the car park. As the snow disappeared from the fields I kept my eye on the ridge of snow in the car park and there was still some remaining today! But it will have been my last sight of it since I now start a 5 day break and the little that’s left wont last that long. Anyway, over three weeks must a record for mild Southern England.