Wax dummy

I have aching arms. It's not funny. Over the last three days a nurse called Jenny has been injecting them with all manner of attenuated viruses and wiped-out bacteria, and last night I dreamt that my index fingers had to press small torn bits of cotton wool against my upper arms — if they fall off, my dream-self urged, I shall die. The best thing about vaccinations, it turns out, is the little cardboard booklet. The one the nurse stamps and signs after each needle-puncture. With the date. In biro. I have it here now. It is a magical little health passport. But the pages for rabies, tick-borne encephalitis, Yellow Fever and Meningitis are blank. I have a strong need, now, for them all stamped and signed. I want all the pages filled. I feel vulnerable with only half of them done.
So here's the state of play:
Vaccinations
Done.

Malarial tablets
Obtained, even though not strictly necessary. Steve's story in this book drove me to it.

Flights
Don't even ask. Driving me crazy. There was a theory a while ago that the interweb would make booking complex flights easier. I have disproved it with panache. I have smoked many too many cigarettes today, bitten my fingernails, got wired on caffeine and still I've not managed to work out where or what I'm supposed to be doing or how I'm supposed to do it.

Itinerary
Awaiting instructions.

Visa applications
Under way. Yesterday I sweltered my way to that vacancy of airconditioned melanine that is upstairs at Boots the Chemists and angled myself into a photo booth. I put three pounds fifty pence into the machine, clunk, clunk, clunk, and the ride began. It involved a disembodied female voice with that particular scottish accent known only from newsreaders and automated ticket machines. "Please centre your face in the circle on the screen" she said, and I did just that. And I assumed my most cheerfully inane and vacant expression, and out came the photo at the top of this post, x 4. Click on it! Isn't it the blurriest, most appallingly low-resolution photobooth print imaginable? Nation states use this for identification? Ha ha ha.

I don’t ordinarily look as if I’m made of injection moulded plastic with taxidermy eyes. I’m not altogether sure I look anything like this at all.

I carried these photos home hooting in derision, and while I was scoffing pompously about the lameness of modern passport photography to Xtin, she looked pityingly at me and said “Yes, but they don’t need detail these days. Biometrics." she concluded with a menacing inflection, and I felt all my fingerpads tingling in awe. Computers. Oooo.

Click to enlarge

fun fun fun

I'm back

for a short while! I've been in Islington on Sea:


and I'm off here very soon:

(photo by nighteulen)

and here:

(photo by beultruck)

More on what on earth I've been doing and what I will be doing soon! About thirty million emails to go through first ... and catching up on all the work still unfinished ...

Meanwhile, from last week:

Sea Kale

Shop window

Dominoes

Syd Barrett died on Friday, in his home down the road. Lyrical genius. Very sad story. Very sad altogether.

Moors

A day on the Yorkshire moors! Bliss.

Charles doing a Buchan:

Grouse poo!

Cambridge Animals

Here's our finback whale

Smelleken

Someone once told me big hawks are like sports cars. They make up for the inadequacies of their owners. It's nice to know us girls had it right all along. Empress Catherine the Great may have been a little ... eccentric, but she knew which hawk she wanted to fly. Mary Queen of Scots may have been imprisoned in a barren Northumbrian castle, death warrant readied to sign, but she knew which hawk she wanted to fly, too.

So what is it about merlins? Let me first dispel any thought that they are a lady’s hawk. There are plenty of chaps enlightened enough to understand that size isn’t everything when it comes to hawks. But it's a simple as this: I just love merlins. Always have. A tiny gyrfalcon, without the tantrums, without the fear of bumblefoot and aspergillosis. The same powerful flight, the same predacious intent, the same intelligence, fire and good humour, all packed into a six-ounce frame. Taymur Mirza, author of the Persian masterwork Baz Nama Yi Nasiri said "this little falcon is beyond all praise." True, true true!

My first day out with merlins was a special one. I was with Greg Liebenhals and Phil Hawkes on the DZ at Everleigh, on Salisbury Plain. Greg and Phil’s merlins had two classic ringing flights, one after the other. The merlins went up and up in purposeful circles, wings flickering, until drifts of cloud showed beneath them and they became bare specks in a looming, cumulus-packed sky. Eventually my eyes fizzled and winked with water, and I lost sight of the hawks, picking them up only later as they fell to earth in stoops so fast they were like scratches on the retina.

Despite their Miltonic satanic aspect, merlins are frighteningly amiable birds. My first parent reared hacked jack merlin would patter across the floor while I watched television; he liked to sit on my feet, his feathers covering both our toes, his chin feathers puffed out and his head the shape of a cheerleader's pom-pom. But take him out in the field, and he was transformed. All sleek energy: fine little toes gripping the glove, head flat and nape raised, eyes scanning the ground, horizon and sky all at once, looking for all the world like a miniature goshawk in yarak. After an unsuccessful flight, he’d speed back to the glove; and a hawk, even a miniature one, returning to the glove from two hundred feet up and a quarter of a mile away, is a particularly cherishable thing. They are just the friendliest of hawks: one imprint female I flew won a place in my heart by carrying her quarry two hundred yards uphill to my fist. Lord, I was glad there was an audience; falconers' tales are far worse than those of any fisherman...

In Britain, merlins breed on upland moor and sheepwalk. The jacks are easier to spot than the brown females. You’ll see a granite outcrop, or boulder, and a little blaze of pepperpot-shaped fierce blue on top where a jack merlin sits, head sunk into his neck, and through a telescope, you can see where the fog has draggled and darkened the tips of the tiny blue feathers on his crown.

Down here in East Anglia, we have wintering merlins. They’re nomadic, dramatic, and every time I see one my heart swells with love and regard. You’ll be driving through the uneven, sinking asphalt roads, car rocking from side to side like a boat against the swell, and you’ll pass a merlin sitting unconcerned in a blackthorn bush, her yellow toes bright against the wet black twigs and her head turning to watch you go past. Hello! Or you’ll be wandering across the world of drains and ditches, sugarbeet squeaking underfoot, breathing that oddly underwater fenland air — truly, this land smells of water, as pervasively as if the tide had only just gone out— and you'll hear the seep seep seep of alarmed pipits, and a slur, a ripple in the air, and past you speeds a merlin. Merlins in fast, low-level flight fall, rather than fly; they fall horizontally across the landscape as if gravity came from the west or east, rather than from below. They clip and burn across ground. It's as if they find a crack in the wind, like splitting slate, and they cleave through it. An old falconer friend of mine took a trained merlin to Sweden to put in an wind-tunnel for Saab aeronautical engineers. The merlin apparently took all this in its stride, and flew unconcernedly through the entire Beaufort scale from 0 to 12 with an ease that completely freaked the boffins out. They couldn’t work out how it was possible.

Smelleken is Dutch for merlin, by the way. Meep!

Hasselhoff Tennis Ejection Denied

What is going on with this man? Has anyone any ideas?

Abstracts

It has been a horrid, ninety degree week of migraine-addled days and nights. Haven't been able to write a word, which is hateful. My brain's still curled and papery and aches at the edges, but at least the hot weather is breaking. Such a relief. The storms have come! Witness the prospect from the window:


Limes in glorious, drenching, smoky summer rain! Can you see the rain? Not really. Hang on, let me go and try again; I'll use flash this time:


Can you see what I did there? Yes, there's a camera in the house! So now you can see what the adopted pigeons look like — this is the house's very own ex-racing pigeon, who spends most days with the love of his life, a similiarly-marked town pigeon, on top of the garden wall:


And the inimitable birdoole, sitting on the top of my laptop as I type:


And here is the Sidney Sussex blue porcupine, which I've been wanting to photograph for yoinks.


Proper writing soon, I promise.

Hasselhoff in bizarre chandelier injury incident

True!

But baffling.

Can you reach the autistic hippo?

I am off to the Varsity Match at Lord's today. Expect sunburn, heat exhaustion, huzzah. Talking of exhaustion, last night I spent a ridiculous amount of time psychoanalysing stuffed toys. No, really, I did. Look:

Psychiatrie für misshandelte Kuscheltiere

Forget the scary introduction. Go straight through to the patients lounge, choose a patient and start the therapy! Ah the triumph of reaching the autistic hippo and reuniting him with his family...