1 April 2024

Garden Journal

1 April 2024

This morning’s visitors include (around, or in the trees and on the wing) 10 species of birdlife. Green Finch, Wren, House Sparrow, Carrion Crow, Red Robin, Starling, Blue-Tit, Goldfinch, Chiffchaff, and the Long-Tailed Tit.

It is 9.15 am, fine but very cold with 10°C, but feeling like 9°C. This is more or less the same throughout the day and across the British Isles.

The steam trains run today ~ always a joy to hear that reminder of an age long gone, but in which I grew up and was formed by, and into the man I am today.

Heavy rain is forecast by early afternoon, from 2 pm on, in this part of Gloucestershire. The weather is more severe in Liverpool and Lancashire today, and I still miss those wet wind-blown, gale-battered walks along the Waterfront or on Liverpool-Crosby Beach, crashing rollers and those beautiful orange cruisers emblazoned PILOT, surging through the Mersey’s treacherous reverse tide, out to sea.

Carrion Crows are beautiful to observe in flight overhead. Graceful. Pleasing to the eye.

This weekend of religious observance bypasses me.

Instead, I concentrate upon the only subject that has any meaning – NATURE. Yesterday, I replenished four of the five birdfeeders that hang from the branches of my tree in the garden’s corner. A house sparrow sits feeding just two meters from me. Very tame.

It is cold now, and my coffee needs topping up, so I’ll pop back into the garden room.

Well, that was my intention!

Just as I was about to go in, a very confident Blue-Tit bounced in. Spellbound, I delayed. What joy! And I know that this excitement, this awe, this wonder, is replicated on a balcony in Urbar Koblenz, Germany. Rita and I love to compare notes and whilst this journal will not include images of our home locations – in this vicious social media age such privacy can be blown apart with the force of an IED when trolls and stalkers do their dirty work. To me such people I still call criminals, because that is what they were in the long past era I mentioned earlier. But images from wider locations round and about, well, that is a possibility.

We both live in two very beautiful countries.

Monday, 1 April 2024 9.42am

1 April 2024
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LIVERPOOL


© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb

Digital Art © 2024 KTW © 2024 IBM unless otherwise credited

Die Gallerie ist mit freundlicher Genehmigung meines Freundes in Deutschland

The figurine is Svetlana, a daily reminder to me of the plight of the Ukrainian People and what Ukraine does on behalf of us all, as we did for the world in another equally dark time in 1939-1941 when we, too, stood alone.

Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.

He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.

Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.

In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.