Olga and I went to Fortune Green not once but TWICE yesterday. (Basically, I couldn't face schlepping all the way to Hampstead Heath.)
Our morning walk took us on our standard route around the neighborhood and then on a wider loop along the Black Path (aka the Trash Path, though it looks better these days) and up Gondar Gardens, where the author Doris Lessing used to live. From Gondar Gardens it's just a block or so along the wonderfully named Agamemnon Road to Fortune Green. (There are also roads named for Achilles, Ulysses and Ajax in that little neighborhood -- they're known as the "Greek Streets.")
We found a very autumnal scene with a red bicycle. And I've been meaning to tell you that the meat-bag litterbug seems to have stopped (or at least greatly scaled back) his or her (probably his) dumping. I haven't had to report any dumped meat wrappers for weeks now. I still find baled cardboard from the same offender, but that doesn't bother me as much and the recyclers pick it up pretty promptly.
At Fortune Green, there are some large wooden sculptures. There's an owl...
...and a fox.
When our morning walk was through, I cleaned and vacuumed. I paid special attention to the corner near the windows behind the avocado tree. It's kind of hard to get back in there because of our profusion of houseplants, but I pulled them out and cleaned the floors. We had a whole little ecosystem going on -- some aphids seem to have colonized our amaryllis, which are about to die back for the season, and we had a few spiders too. I am all about wildlife, but not in the house. Now the aphids are gone (or at least greatly reduced) and the webs have been scaled back. I did turn a blind eye to a few escaping spiders out of the kindness of my heart.
Then I worked on transcribing my journals for a while, and Dave and I decided to go out for lunch to a cafe on Mill Lane. I had a spinach omelet with baked beans and toast on the side. Fab! Baked beans are under-appreciated by Americans as an excellent breakfast/brunch food.
Then we picked up Olga and took her back to Fortune Green and to the cemetery. She encountered a squirrel along the fenced path and threw herself against the bars so violently that Dave got alarmed and put her back on her leash. (She was fine. She just gets excited.)
Someone went home very happy! Well, we all did, actually.
"The kindness of my heart"!? Like the American invasion of Vietnam, you have just decimated the population of your Vietnam corner. The aphids are still counting their dead while in dark corners the spiders mourn their own lost ones and the ruined webs they had taken months to construct. In my book, allowing a handful of traumatised spiders to escape does not constitute kindness. It's surprising that you didn't spray a canister of Agent Orange.
ReplyDeleteWow! You're feisty this morning, YP!
ReplyDeleteI'd rather be feisty than a mass murderer... (Put it down to changing the clocks!)
ReplyDeleteYP made me google when we change the clocks back. It's next weekend for us here. And WHY are we still doing this?
ReplyDeleteAnyway...
I love that last picture SO much. I love all of these shots but Fortune Green is so lovely. IS that Fortune Green? Is that an adjoining neighborhood?
The fox and owl are delightful too.
Couldn't agree more on the baked beans. I had a breakfast program at one school and baked beans were on the menu once a week.
ReplyDeletesuch wonderful parks there. I don't mind a few spiders in the house as they take out the flies and gnats and mosquitos that get in but recently daddy long legs have moved in. sorry, those guys have to go even harmless as they are.
ReplyDeleteI love that carved owl!
ReplyDeleteReally nice walk. There is something about the streets there that I love. A charm that seems to be missing here.
ReplyDeleteI tend to let the spiders hang out in their webby little enclaves, unless they are in the bedroom, then I move them someplace else. Other critters I try to catch and release, except for the invasive ants, they get killed.
Something about that last photo made me Google Van Morrison's "Coney Island". Right: that song is about Autumn sunshine and a Sunday, ending with: "Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?" That song gets to me, and that photo of Olga, a very good dog,looking back at you, does too. More than a thousand words in that one.
ReplyDeleteThose wooden sculptures are great!
ReplyDeleteI wonder what Olga is thinking when she's looking at you taking pictures with that mysterious black box (silver? grey? brown? I don't know what colour your camera would be!) . . .
The spiders have built homes here, too, and I'll have to get on that pretty soon :)
That sounds like a great Saturday! I enjoyed all these photos!
ReplyDeleteI feel kind of bad, but I told Mike that after Halloween we need to clean off the spider webs on our porch banister. Might be off-putting to company. :)
ReplyDeleteI love that last photo. So atmospheric.
ReplyDelete