They’re very effective, and extremely sticky. If you do decide to buy some yourself, though, don’t hang them anywhere near your computer: they might not be very good for your files.

Kevin was in the shopping basket, nestling down between a medium-sized box of All Bran and next week’s tv listings magazine. A voice from over the other side of the shop revealed the presence of a mother and child somewhere around the Pets section (a very small section, admittedly) and the freezer aisle. Presumably the child had taken a shine to one of Kevin’s siblings, because we suddenly heard an unmistakable grunt.

“Stop doing that. Put it down!” snapped mother.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist reaching for Kevin, who responded with a grunt of his own. Back came the exasperated voice of mother: “You’ve done it again!”

Although we didn’t see either child or parent, it was odds-on that a quick clout around the ear had been delivered, but there was no way either Shana or I were going to own up. We were too busy laughing our cheeky little faces off.

If we were looking for a career change, professional criminal — more specifically, thief — would not be a good option. Forget breaking into locked cars and buildings; we probably couldn’t even break into an unlocked one, at least not if our efforts to break into our groceries this morning was anything to go by.

Our fortnight’s shopping was delivered this morning by Asda. Although their online shopping service is second to none, today’s order did pose us a challenge, especially a pack of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades. These are, owing to their relatively astronomical price, presumably the impecunious tea leaf’s fave shave, which is why you tend to see them in sturdy bulletproof plastic security boxes. In store, the checkout assistant usually unlocks the pack for you. With online deliveries, though, the process is different and sometimes one’s blades can arrive still in their protective packaging.

Which is what happened this morning.

After half an hour (at least) of my attacking the packing with tools ranging from a hacksaw to a screwdriver and finally a pair of round-nosed pliers, I finally managed to make the outer packaging even more dangerous than the blades inside. Shana eventually succeeding in prizing open the top of the pack, nicking her thumb in the attempt. Hmm. Maybe she could still have a promising future as a safecracker, after all.

It’s funny though: this must be the only magpie in the country who, barely five minutes after settling down for the evening, has had his pic splashed — thanks to Shana — all over Facebook. What will he say to his fellow magpies tomorrow? ‘Hey guys. Guess what: I’ve been poked!’

At the time, I thought Stanthaket must be a contraction of St Anthaket, and assumed this to be some obscure Saxon monk. So obscure, in fact, that the blessed Anthaket is not listed in our Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

The answer to the puzzle is in the book Medieval Lincoln by Sir Francis Hill [Cambridge University Press]. As Hill explains:

The Old Scandinavian steinn, a stone, appears in a few names; the church of St Peter, which stood at the foot of the modern Michaelgate, was St Peter Stanthaket, the stone-thatched church.

Other books on local history point out that in the Middle Ages many churches had roofs of wood or straw, which were vulnerable to fire. A stone roof such as St Peter’s had, was unusual enough for it to be given the extra ’stone-thatched’ epithet in its name.

Confusingly, Hill mentions later in his book, in a list of churches inside the city walls, the church of St Peter at the skin market (Stanthaket). Personally, the stone roof explanation is far more convincing.

Although we never reveal in our blog posts exact details of where we live, you can find out easily by strolling round the outskirts of Lincoln in the wee small hours and listening carefully. First you’ll hear the distinctive too-whit-too-woo call of the one and only Strix aluco. Seconds later will come a blood-curdling shriek of Shut up!!

Just follow your ears. And, if you can, please bring a spare set of ear-muffs — Shana will be most grateful.

All we’ve done is replace our library’s net curtains (or, to be more precise, our tab-topped voiles) with venetian blinds. The library curtains have caused many an annoyance. First, though, I should explain what I mean by ‘our library’. It might sound like one wing of an Elizabethan mansion, with six-foot-thick stone walls; however, it is roughly ten feet by ten, full of books and, since it is also full of a table, also doubles up as a breakfast dining area.

The window is about eight feet long by two feet high and you have to stand to be able to look out of it. Strange as it may sound, though, we like it just the way it is. It lets in plenty of light, but if it were much bigger the library, being south-facing, would get too hot and bright in the summer, so we’d end up having to part-close the curtains anyway.

The only real problem with the library window is its length, which meant we had to buy three sets of blinds; and we shall still have to make a couple of adaptations to finish the job (about which, more to come soon — with photos). For privacy, we tried fixing a net curtain last year, but, after a few problems with attaching fixings to our crumbly 1950s walls (that and a good helping of drill-incompetence on my part), opted instead to hang a couple of voiles. The only way to hang them (or so it seemed to us at the time) was to thread them along an eight-foot length of heavy-gauge green gardening wire and loop the ends of the wire over our ’stylish’ aluminium curtain rail. I know what you’re thinking: It all sounds a bit tatty.

Guess what? You’re right!

Only a fortnight ago, we were all set to put up a set of vertical blinds. Proper fixing instructions never arrived from the suppliers, despite repeated requests, so we eventually returned the blinds and got a refund. The country might be in a recession but it seems some companies don’t care about losing a sale. Their loss, not ours.

And so we gravitated towards venetian blinds. We bought three, used two in the library and will use the third on our upstairs landing, where we currently have a thick chocolate brown curtain. Meanwhile, we also found some blinds we bought over a year ago — when we had an under-powered drill that wasn’t much use for doing DIY work. This means the kitchen will finally be getting blinds as well.
Compromise, hack and fudge we might, but eventually we do get round to getting those little jobs done. Honest!

(Eh? Oh, you had guessed. Well, how perceptive of you.)

This morning, though, we set off on a long-distance journey. A round-trip of a whole two miles; probably nearer to two-miles-and-a-bit, if you want to be really precise about it, although personally I couldn’t give a tinker’s hoot for all that metric nonsense. Since Shana’s fall down the stairs (or rather, the bottom three steps of our stairs, where they turn ninety degrees to the left) last July, she hasn’t felt fit enough to do much walking, apart from going to the Co-op and back. More recently, her reluctance to venture out has been due to nervousness and feelings of panic. She’s felt much better during the last couple of weeks, though, so we decided today would be a good day to try going a bit further afield.

Besides, we had a Mother’s Day present to post and, we agreed, the sooner that was done (bearing in mind how lackadaisical the British postal system can be) the better. Our nearest post office (now that the Gowt’s Bridge branch on Lincoln’s High Street is closed) is in Rookery Lane, just over a mile away.

Shana’s navigation skills were useful right from the start — unlike my own talents for dithering and daydreaming. I was so busy looking out for unusual brick walls that I completely missed a short cut she had found. True, it is interesting, albeit briefly, to notice a single course of Flemish bond in the middle of a wall that is otherwise built entirely of stretchers; but if it hadn’t been for Shana’s spotting a gap between two houses we’d have had to walk all the way up Henley Street to the High Street, along past the Co-op and back down along the south bank of the river, which would have added easily an extra half a mile of walking. Take a trip with me and you’re sure to get plenty of exercise — whether you want it or not!

Our walk was accompanied by a continuous soundtrack of birdsong, punctuated by intermittent moans about aching calf muscles, creaky hip joints and totally unwarranted suggestions made to each other along the lines of ‘perhaps we’re not quite up to it’ or ‘maybe we’re a little bit out of shape’. On that basis, I have personally ruled myself out of the London Marathon this year, although if they have a marathon meat pie eating competition I might decide to come out of retirement for that.

After entering the dimly lit interior of Rookery Lane post office (and realising it was only dark because I was still wearing my sunglasses) and sending our parcel on its way, we stopped at Curtis, the butcher’s in the little row of shops nearby. We sat on a low wall in Boultham (pronounced ‘boot-em’) Park and had a cornish pasty each followed, after only the shortest of intervals, by an eccles cake, after which we figured it was time to set off home. The return trip was full of architectural interest from garages with mock Doric columns to the modernist exterior of Lincoln Indoor Bowls Club on Hall Drive. “It’s just like the Pompidou Centre,” I said. “See how that big air conditioning pipe and those extractor fans are all on the building’s exterior? If that ain’t modernist, I don’t know what is!”

“What’s the collective name for a group of swans?”

Strange time, I thought — it being just after midnight o’clock — to be starting an ornithology question and answer session. I decided, however, to at least try to give a serious reply.

“Dunno,” I said.

“Oh, that’s really going to annoy me now. It’ll take me ages to get to sleep.”

Shana was clearly not best pleased. We’d already mentioned a handful of collective nouns: a parliament of rooks, an unkindness of ravens, a hootenanny of owls and a murder of crows.* But now we’d gotten to the difficult stuff.

The conversation had started with Shana’s asking about the name for a group of geese. “It’s a skein, isn’t it?” she said. “Only if they’re flying,” I said, grinning smugly, before realising that, in the dark, a smug grin — or any other kind of grin, for that matter — is invisible. Perhaps a small torch or even fluorescent lipstick** would be useful at such times.

“If a group of geese is on foot rather than on the wing,” I said, “then it’s called a ‘gaggle’.”

“That hasn’t helped me to remember the name for a group of swans, though.”

“No,” I said, “but it has given me an amusing idea. How about swapping around a few of those collective nouns? So, for example, you could have a gaggle of vultures. That should make them sound less scary.”

Shana liked that idea and suggested a parliament of budgies.

“I know where there’s a huge list of collective nouns for birds,” I said. “We’ll see tomorrow how many we got right.”

So, how many did we get right? Find out at this page of collective nouns for birds.

* I once considered writing a blog post, a sort of riddle: “I saw a murder this morning, but nobody was hurt and no-one phoned the police. How come?” Readers would have been required to leave their answers via the comments section and would eventually have been let in on the secret that what I had actually seen was a murder of crows, i.e. a group of them sitting in a tree.

For some reason, I never wrote that post.

** WTF? ]]> http://dotsey.com/876/bird-brains/feed 0