Friday 8 April 2011

On the Bright Side of the Road.....

A rude awakening this morn, at 07:00.  Charlie, who had, for the first time in weeks, spent most of the night asleep indoors curled up on his 'own blanketty-thing' at the foot of the bed, slipped out for a feathered take-away.  On his return, he breeped a bonjour to Jack and promptly dropped the bird from his jaws for Jack to admire and inspect. To his surprise, apparently, the small Blue Tit acted like birds do - he flew off. Firstly beside the bed, then - we think - onto the bedhead itself. We think this, because Charlie promptly launched himself into the air, onto the bed and - rather unwelcomely - onto J's head in a bid to recapture the errant oiseau.

At the time, however, we assumed he had a mouse or similar, and having quickly looked around the room finding no trace of life - or bloody, mangled death - we returned to the land of nod. Charlie by this time had breeped a farewell and gone back out to find alternative nosh.

The Blue Tits wouldn't melt in my mouth look:



It was only a few hours later, at just before 09:00 when J had dressed and gone off to the loo, that the small bird took courage and flew across the room to try to make its escape through the - closed - shutters, thereby alerting us to its presence. It seemed uninjured and shot off out as soon as I partially opened a shutter. A rare surviver from Charlie's nocturnal feeding regime! Although that's two in one week -  a mole (which he wouldn't have eaten anyway) and a Blue Tit. Maybe he's slipping a bit; though I did later find the half-eaten remains of a lizard on the sitting-room floor. So maybe not!

It's another glorious Spring day here, with climbing temps (around 23 degrees at 13:00) and a cloudless sky. There are a couple of lizards climbing the wall in the window rebates, even as I plonk here on the keyboard. And thinking of plonk, a nice bottle of chilled Rose is just what is called for with a crusty French bread lightish lunch in the garden, I think.



I've just arranged to buy a SkyPlus digibox thing from a Brit nearby. We have a sat-dish with us and it will allow us to receive UK free-to-air Radio with better, steadier reception than internet, I hope!  Frankly, we know SFA about these things.....and we aim to remain that way as far as we can.  I've no interest in watching loads of crap and crappy television channels. But for Radio 4, 7 - now curiously rebrande 'Radio 4 Extra' it seems,  and odd things on R2, (Paul Jones, Blues prog & Whispering Bob Harris Country), it should be the dogs b8ll8cks!

In Sweden it was impossible to get these services. Largely because we were so far North. Instead we had innumerable, unintelligible (to us, at any rate)  German channels - stodgy and heavy, as you might expect - and a few genuinely dreadful Swedish offerings. Oh, and the truly terrible BBC World!  Here so far, we've managed comfortably with the French free-to-air stuff. It's good for my language wrestling to watch the news progs etc.

In Sweden, when we mentioned the possibility of buying a TV licence, our neighbours scoffed at the idea on the basis that Swedish TV was just so bad it wasn't worth paying for. And these were our Swedish neighbours. Who happened to be absolutely right in their thinking. In addition, most Swedish channel programming was predicated on old UK/USA repeats in English, subtitled into Swedish. This at least made them intelligible and helped with learning some basic Swedish - though not with the weird sounds that Swedes feel compelled to emit!

We have also decided to sell both our principal house in Sweden - hopefully keeping the Bagarstuga/cabin for odd - summer - visits, and the house in Andalusia, which we virtually never visit.
God knows how long this might all take in the current insane climate, though we think the Swedish place will sell easiest. We shall see.

Pssssttt....anybody wanna a buy a used house in Sweden.....?



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