Birds and More Dumpster-Diving

I bought some "robin insect mix" bird food at Waitrose and the birds are crazy for it. It's a mixture of seed and mealworms, and it seems to have an advantage over the suet balls in that the bigger birds -- pigeons and parakeets -- don't monopolize the feeders like they do with suet. The little birds come in swarms and though they throw a lot of the seeds on the ground, the pigeons stay below to mop them up, so they get fed too.

I filled that entire feeder and it was empty by the end of the day. And the lid stayed on, so squirrels weren't to blame! I saw lots of coal tits, blue tits, great tits and robins. I even made a video so you could see how busy it was:

It's a bit shaky, for which I apologize -- I took it from a distance using my big camera and zoom lens, and that thing is heavy, and it makes even the slightest inadvertent quiver look like an earthquake. (Here's a stabilized version if the shaking bothers you. I don't care for it because the stabilizing software gives the video a shimmery effect, but at least it's not moving around as much.)

It was also rainy and downright cold yesterday. I went out at 2 p.m., taking my neighbors' cast-offs to the charity shop, and it was 56º F (or 13º C) on the high street. The low at night was supposed to be 49º F (or 9º C). Is it winter?! I'd put away all our jackets and blankets and we've had to take some of them out again. It's supposedly going to warm up over the next few days and I'm hoping that's true.

I confess I did survey our trash bags to see what else the neighbors discarded in their move. I retrieved some new-looking clothing, a couple of plastic and glass refrigerator containers that I can use for my slide project, and a few other odds and ends. Any bags containing food or kitchen debris I just closed right back up again. Now I can sleep soundly knowing what's going out in the trash really is trash.

Of course, just as I pulled the bags from the bins and opened them up, someone drove up in a blue minivan and went into the apartment above us -- not the neighbor moving out, but perhaps the one moving in? I said hello as he passed. Way to make a great impression, right?!

Dumpster-Diving, Hungry Foxes and a Huge Cat

Our passionflowers are awakening from their winter slumber. The first blossom appeared the other day and there are plenty more buds. This vine really needs a trim job. Frankly I'm impressed it survives at all, since it's crammed into the same pot as our olive tree (where it grew of its own accord from a seed).

Yesterday I took out the trash and found a bunch of stuff in the bin, apparently discarded by our departing upstairs neighbors. Some of it was in a nice reusable fabric bag from John Lewis, so I grabbed it and brought it inside to salvage the bag. I found another reusable Waitrose bag and some rather fancy clothing -- pleather pants, a heavy pleated skirt, a jacket, some trainers (running shoes), even some earrings in a red box from Valentino. Who throws away earrings?! I couldn't put all that stuff back in the trash, so I folded it up and put it in a bag for the charity shop.

Also...

...a perfectly good Raggedy Andy. I don't really want a Raggedy Andy for myself, so right now he's in the charity bag too. I did wash him to brighten him up and I think he may find another home.

I shudder to think what's in the other trash bags in our bins, but I'm not going to dig through them too. Let's maintain some semblance of dignity.

I keep wondering what will happen if I take that stuff to the charity shop and it appears in the window, and the neighbors walk past and see it. Would they be surprised? Would they be angry? Is it a gross violation of their privacy for me to pull their stuff out of the trash and try to give it a second life? Hmmmm...the ethics of dumpster-diving.

I realized yesterday that Dave's birthday is coming right up in 11 days. Yikes! I have some ideas for things to get him but I haven't moved on any of it and I guess I need to do that. I was going to make us a dinner reservation but when I asked him about it last night he seemed unenthusiastic about going out. This is a bit of a surprise, coming from him, but it may stem from his recent medication changes and the fact that he hasn't been feeling all that great. I told him to tell me if he wants to move ahead on that and I'll arrange something.

Maybe I could give him Raggedy Andy?

(That's a joke.)

I cobbled together another wildlife video with the almost two weeks' worth of footage I've collected. We start with some nice daytime images of one of our foxes, including at 0:14 where it is clearly hunting. (And it ate something, so whatever it hunted it apparently caught!)

-- At 0:56, Pale Cat walks by.
-- At 1:09, a fox gives us a quick drive-by.
-- At 1:17, two little bouncy birds. (Dunnocks?)
-- At 1:25, I put down some pork chop trimmings for the foxes.
-- A couple of hours later, at 1:36, Crooked Tail shows up and spends the next 15 minutes eating the pork. (Don't worry, I condensed the footage so you don't have to watch all the chewing, which isn't all that interesting.) By the way, sorry this part of the video is so dark. That branch in front of the camera was reflecting infrared light back at the lens. I trimmed it the next day and the images got much better.
-- At 3:51, the next night, the foxes are back, first Q-Tip and then Crooked Tail.
-- At 4:17, who is this cat?! I've never seen this creature before. It's huge. Is it pregnant or merely overweight? Henceforth to be known as Huge Cat.
-- At 4:39, an amusingly hyperactive squirrel.
-- At 5:11, the proverbial early bird. (Not getting a worm.)
-- At 5:24, GET OFF THE CAMERA!
-- At 5:35, a little bird lands and spreads its wings to sunbathe. Another bird shows up and they have quite a violent tussle!
-- At 5:50, another treat for the foxes, fish skin this time.
-- At 6:01, an hour and a half later, Crooked Tail shows up and eats it.
-- At 7:02, Sharpie shows up but the fish skin is long gone.
-- At 7:54, Huge Cat is back, also entranced by the smell of the fish.
-- At 8:28, a quick drive-by from Q-Tip.
-- At 8:43, more spazz squirrels.

Tiny Dramas All Around

In the garden yesterday, I noticed that a minuscule blossom from our olive tree had fallen into the middle of a seed head on the clematis. That's a design worthy of a jeweler, isn't it? Or a fireworks display.

Dave wasn't feeling well yesterday so he stayed home from work. The school year is basically over anyway -- his last classes were Monday -- so "work" at this point is just a matter of tidying up the department and filing and that kind of thing. Instead he stayed home and camped out in his chair. He plans to go in today.

In the morning I heard a lot of thumping around above us and on the stairs and realized our upstairs neighbor is moving out of the Russians' flat. Apparently his family is back in Israel so he's downsizing to a smaller flat closer to his office. I'm sorry to see him go because he's been a terrific neighbor, and I told him so. He said another family is scheduled to move in at the beginning of July. We'll see what that's like.

In the afternoon I took a long walk and spent some time looking at the bugs in the butterfly garden at the cemetery:

You'll see some thick-legged flower beetles, Oedemera nobilis, which I have often likened on this blog to David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane costume. And at 0:14, if you look at the left-hand flower, you'll see a white crab spider (Misumena vatia) that has grabbed some poor fly, or possibly two poor flies. I left the natural sound in the video, so you'll hear birdcalls and wind as well as the shouts of some teams on the athletic field adjacent to the cemetery. Summer sounds!

I didn't see any butterflies in the butterfly garden, oddly, but I did find this Angle Shades moth (Phlogophora meticulosa) in our living room yesterday morning. Maybe it flew in when we had the light on the night before. I gently put it outside on a buddleia. Hopefully it promptly moved where it would be better camouflaged.

Dahlias and a Rodent Houdini

Our first dahlia blossom of the year has appeared -- one of the "Bishop's Children" variety. It was a race between that one and this:

Remember how I said the "Iron in the Fire" dahlia appeared to have died over the winter? Well, I think that (above) is "Iron in the Fire," which means the dahlia that died was actually the purple one -- "Dalaya Dark Aruna." (You can see them both here.) I'm not broken-hearted either way, and I guess we won't know for sure until the flower opens, but that bud sure looks more like an orange flower than a purple one.

I spent yesterday almost entirely indoors. It poured rain in the morning, which was fantastic. It's cooler out there than I'd like it to be but I'm so happy for the moisture. I stayed on the couch reading about Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, and in the afternoon I watched "A Summer Place," which is definitely a melodrama but better than I remember. I learned that the real-life house used in the film -- which was in Monterey, California, and not Maine as specified in the plot -- burned down last year. A shame.

Apropos of nothing, here's a quote I came across yesterday from author Michael Chabon, who wrote "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" and "Wonder Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "Telegraph Avenue," all of which I enjoyed:

"Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he's going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney."

Let's just say that struck home.

And here's the sight that greeted me when I looked out the window yesterday afternoon. I don't know if you can see what's going on there, but that squirrel is head-down in the plastic interior tube of that bird feeder. Having emptied the peanut feeder, Houdini-squirrel found a way to unlock the lid of this one, which is supposed to be squirrel resistant. I can't turn my back for a minute!

A Model World

I haven't said much about my slide project lately, except that it's continuing. Here's a more thorough update: I've finished scanning my third bag of loose slides, the one on the left in this photo, and I've just started sorting the loose slides in the green middle bag. Then there are the boxes to go through. I'm trying to devise a way to consolidate those boxed slides while not mixing them together or allowing them to lose their context, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, yesterday I came across multiple slides of something that looked like an amusement park of miniatures. Above you can see a couple of rocket launchpads and lots of little vehicles leading up to and around them. For a sense of scale, there's a person standing behind and to the left of the rockets -- you can see he (and the buildings behind him) are much larger.

The sign on the right-hand building in the background says "Børneteater," which means Children's Theater in Danish. So that gives us a hint where we are.

These slides were all mixed in with a bunch of others, so as I came across them I set them aside in a special pile, and soon found that I had a dozen. They're from 1969.

When I looked more closely, it became obvious that these aren't just miniatures -- they're miniatures made with Legos! Yes, these photos do indeed show the first Legoland amusement park, the year after it opened in Billund, Denmark, in 1968.

The photos vary in quality. It took me a moment to figure out what I'm looking at here -- not a real ship out a window, but a Lego ship (a model of a ferry named the Winston Churchill) in a display case.

This is a model of Marselisborg Palace in Aarhus, Denmark, the summer home of the Danish royal family.

There's a model city, complete with a church with a wedding in progress -- you can see the little Lego people standing in the doorway.

There's a city of the future, featuring architecture worthy of the Jetsons.

And there's a sort of Western-themed area called "Legoredo," which despite the name does not appear to be made with Legos.

The photo quality is dubious overall, but it's nice to be able to add these images to the public record of the history of Legoland.

This Lego portrait, like the ship above, was apparently housed indoors and the photo didn't work out too well. The slide is also significantly discolored. But who knows if there are any images of this portrait elsewhere in the world? I might have the only one! (Google can't find any others, at least.)

Here's a fun short film about Legoland made by British Pathé studios in 1968, the year before all these pictures were taken. You'll see a lot of the same constructions depicted above and how they were made -- not to mention an "American Indian" in full feathered headdress, presumably in Legoredo.

I'm not a huge devotee of Legos, but I still found all this interesting.

Squirrel-Proof

Dave and I have recently marveled at how quickly the peanuts disappear in our "squirrel-proof" peanut feeder, and now you can see why. Turns out, it's not squirrel-proof at all -- at least not to a young, smallish squirrel.

As you can see, I've already had to wire on the lid because otherwise the squirrels will unscrew it.

Here's the escape:

You don't suppose it will ever get stuck in there, do you? I'm not sure how I would solve that problem.

We're reconsidering all our bird feeders -- both their placement and their structure. I'm putting out fewer suet balls, even though the birds love them, because they bring rodents, and I took one feeder down entirely because it got mobbed by pigeons. The others get mobbed by pigeons too, but they're built in such a way that the smaller birds also enjoy them.

I spent yesterday chilling at home. It felt so good, after such a busy week, to lie on the couch and do nothing. I got all my pictures organized and archived and I started a new book, "Dream Lovers," a biography of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee written about 30 years ago by their son. I have no idea what possessed me to buy this book. I read about it somewhere -- probably around the time Dee died in February 2025 -- and it sounded interesting. I have a soft spot for big, colorful '50s and '60s melodramas, like "Imitation of Life" and "Peyton Place," and of course Dee and Troy Donahue in "A Summer Place." Maybe this will inspire me to watch "A Summer Place" again. I haven't seen it since we lived in New Jersey many moons ago. Probably not the best use of my time, but hey, I'm retired now!

Lilies, Nigella and a Girl With a Cat

Well, my brother and his family are off to Heathrow this morning for their return to the USA. Dave and I had them over last night for a farewell dinner -- Dave made flank steak -- and I think we all agree it was a fun and successful visit.

We met up at noon yesterday for a pub lunch in St. John's Wood, and then took a walk to Regent's Park to stretch our legs before circling back to the school where I used to work (and Dave still does). Dave met them there to give them a tour, and I came home and did some photo editing. I am SO BEHIND on managing and archiving all my photos, especially with this huge slide-scanning project happening. I'll be working on that more today.

As you can see above, our yellow lily is blooming again this year. But the Asiatic lily behind it dropped its buds and it looks like we'll get no flowers. That's probably partly due to the two honesty plants also growing in the Asiatic lily's pot. After the honesty sprouted on its own, I thought all three of them might manage in there but with our dry spring I think the Asiatic lily just didn't get enough water and/or nutrients. Oh, well -- there's always next year.

We also have a single love-in-a-mist, or Nigella, that sprouted by the back steps. We used to have tons of it growing there but it's gradually been crowded out by other plants, weeds and grass. I'm amazed there are still seeds out there to sprout. I think this is the only flower so I'm not sure we'll get any more fertile seeds, but if it produces some I may save them and try to grow them on next year.

All during my brother's visit I was continuing to scan and post my rescued slides, about ten per day. The second Flickr album now has 143 photos in it, and more will be forthcoming. The picture above, from 1974, was a long-shot rescue attempt; the slide is so dark that it's almost black and I could barely see the image. So I scanned it and used Lightroom to brighten it up and bring out the contrast. It's sort of ghostly in its effect.

I downloaded the garden cam yesterday and found that the batteries gave out at some point in the middle of the week. So no garden cam video this weekend; I'll save up what little footage I have and put it all together for another video next week. I know you're all heartbroken. 😀

I intend to reappear elsewhere in blogland today and catch up on all my fellow bloggers' lives! Forgive me if I don't go back and answer all my comments from the past week, but I have read and appreciated them all. Frances asked several days ago why Americans are so infatuated with visiting Stonehenge, which she termed "a few old stones in a field." I think it's basically their age -- I can't think of any large-scale monuments in North America that even vaguely approach the age of Stonehenge. Mesa Verde, in Colorado, has been an inhabited site for thousands of years but the existing cliff dwellings there "only" go back to the 1200s or so. There are other ancient sites but they're mainly excavated areas where spear tips, arrowheads and that kind of thing have been found. Nothing as large as a stone circle. So that's my inexpert opinion!

The Sightseeing Bus

That's the Gothic ceiling of the stunning Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey, above. It's one of the places we visited yesterday, on a day devoted to London tourism.

I met up with my brother's family in the late morning and we bought tickets for one of those open-top tour buses that roll around the city, taking in all the main sights. Dave and I have found that these buses are a great way to get the lay of the land and at least a glimpse of all the major sights, and then you've got some information to decide what you'd like to revisit. We recommend them to all our visitors.

Our tour began uneventfully. We picked up the bus in Holborn and went eastward, along Ludgate Hill and past St. Paul's. I was amused by this couple sitting in front of me, the man with his "Quality Milk Producers" fleece and the woman with her cow headscarf. I detect a theme.

Then, as we approached London Bridge, crazy weather! Everyone fled the top deck of the bus, including my brother and his family. Only I and the woman with the cow scarf stayed put, and I at least had an umbrella. She must have been soaked. I didn't do too badly -- my seat stayed dry because I was in it and my umbrella sheltered most of my body.

We rode the bus over the Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London, and thought we might get off there, but it didn't stop. Only then did we realize we have to hit the "stop" button, just like on a city bus, so we got off at Embankment instead and ate at a pub near the Temple.

Then we caught the bus again and took it to Westminster, where we checked out Big Ben and went into the Abbey.

I've been to Westminster Abbey several times before, but every time I go I'm astonished. The graves of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots! Of Edward the Confessor and multiple medieval kings! Chaucer is there, in Poet's Corner, along with graves and monuments to many other famous writers. It really is a mind-blowing place.

The figure above is Joan, one of the 12 children of Edward III originally depicted on the side of his tomb. (Only six of them are still there.) He died in 1377. Amazing.

From there we walked across Westminster Bridge to the London Eye. The line wasn't too long and although my brother wasn't crazy about the idea (he doesn't enjoy heights), my niece really wanted to ride it. So we bought tickets and took a spin.

I noticed the LGBTQ+ Pride flag on the white building at lower left in the image above. We've seen Pride flags in lots of places, I assume because this is Pride month. I'm happy to live in a country where such things are still celebrated.

Remarkable views, as always! I think my niece was pleased.

From there, my brother's family took the tour bus back toward their hotel and I caught the tube home. There was another tube strike yesterday but it didn't affect us much, fortunately -- the line I needed to get home was still running. (This was a very strange strike, with some lines open and some shut down, apparently depending on which union represents the workers.)

Today is our visitors' last full day in London, and they're going to spend it at our place in West Hampstead. Home sweet home!

Bath

Not content with all the things there are to do in London, we struck off across the country yesterday to see Bath. I think my brother and his wife wanted to get a sense of the countryside and see what life is like in other parts of England. Bath isn't exactly your typical town, being a huge tourist destination in its own right, but it has a lot of history and a rather unique sense of place so it seemed like a good choice.

I met my brother, sister-in-law and niece at Paddington Station and we caught a 9:30 a.m. train, which rocketed smoothly across the fields and farmland and got us to Bath in less than an hour and a half. We walked into town and visited Bath Abbey, the site of religious buildings dating back to the time of the Saxons.

The structure itself has been demolished and remade several times over the centuries. What's there now is a Gothic building dating back to the 1500s. I particularly enjoyed the downstairs museum, with its examples of medieval floor tiles and other artifacts found when parts of the abbey were excavated.

Then we went to the Roman baths, which I had never done in the several times I've been to Bath. I don't know why because it was quite fascinating -- not only the pools themselves, which in the time of the Romans were fed by water from an underground warm spring -- but also the exhibits of all the Roman debris they've found in and around the springs. Coins, glass, headdresses and masks, jewelry, you name it. Some items were tossed into the springs for ceremonial or religious reasons, including "curses" inscribed on bits of lead, calling on the Gods to exact vengeance on certain thieves or miscreants.

You wouldn't want to swim in the spa now. Apparently the Roman plumbing has given up the ghost, because the pools aren't refreshing themselves the way they would have back in the day. There are modern spas nearby that perhaps use the same spring as a source for fresher, warmer water. There was a spout to taste clean water from deeper in the spring, before it got to the stagnant pool above, and it tasted warm and minerally.

After the baths we hoofed it over to the Royal Crescent, an impressive arc of 18th-Century townhouses overlooking a park where I walked Olga way back in 2013. (How time flies!)

And then it was time to catch our train back to London, so we hustled back to the train station via the promenade along the river, and got there with about ten minutes to spare. A few more random photos:

A ghost sign over a closed shop, harkening back to the days of film developing;

Some rabbit graffiti;

Some colorful hair;

And a sleepy dog on our train home. I used to often hold Olga in this exact position, but this dog, a whippet, looked to be about 10 kilos lighter than Olga!

Today, more sightseeing around London. Sorry I am largely absent from blogland at the moment but I am reading all your comments and I will catch up when I can!

Stonehenge Squall

Yesterday turned out to be one of the craziest experiences I've ever had sightseeing in England.

First, there was the tube strike. The lines around my brother's hotel were completely shut down, so I was afraid that getting from there to Victoria Station -- where we planned to catch our tour bus to Stonehenge -- might be a challenge. I took a Thameslink train and got down there at 6:30 a.m. just in case we had to walk the whole way. But city buses were running and at that early hour they weren't too crowded, so as it turned out we caught a bus from Bloomsbury Square, right around the corner from the hotel, all the way to Victoria Station. We even had enough time once there to have breakfast at Starbucks.

While riding the bus, we passed this guy (above) apparently selling that very mod abstract painting outside Green Park station. Then we saw the same guy and painting outside Victoria Station, which is where I took that photo. The likelihood of seeing the same guy with his artwork in both locations -- which are not close together -- seemed quite coincidental.

We left London on the tour bus at about 8:30 a.m., and drove about two hours to get to Stonehenge.
 

When we first got there, the sun was shining. We got off the bus, the driver praised the sunny weather, and though we'd brought umbrellas we didn't think we'd need them. So we left them in the luggage rack above our seats.

After quickly collecting our wristbands to prove we'd paid admission, we started to walk to the monument, which is quite a distance from the parking area. We saw ominous gray clouds in the western sky, and I tried to go back to the bus for our umbrellas, but the bus was locked and the driver nowhere in evidence. So we soldiered on without them.

We walked through fields of sheep and even some woods before coming to Stonehenge, all beneath more or less sunny skies.

And suddenly, everything changed.

You can see the transition in this video. Dry to begin with, a shot of the advancing clouds, and suddenly crazy mayhem with rain. (There's a lot of background noise in the video because of the wind, but I wanted you to fully experience what it was like!)

And I don't mean a small amount of rain. It was pounding, drenching rain. There was thunder. There was hail! And of course, Stonehenge is on a hill in the middle of nowhere, so there was no shelter. We just had to stand there and take it. To be honest, even having an umbrella might not have helped much, because the wind was so powerful -- but I was still cursing our driver.

It passed just as quickly as it came. We wound up sopping wet, standing like hurricane victims in a line for the shuttle bus back to the parking area, which thankfully was warmish and not air-conditioned. My brother was wringing streams of water out of his shirt -- he and my niece got new shirts at the gift shop to replace the sodden ones they were wearing. I fortunately had a sort of windbreaker on that proved to be water-resistant, so I wasn't too drenched.

We had lunch (Coronation chicken sandwich for me) at the cafe and then boarded our bus back to London. And once we got into the city, that bus moved at a crawl. I was half insane by the time we disembarked back at Victoria about 4 p.m. I walked with my brother and his family to Green Park, where I caught the Jubilee Line (one of the tube lines still running) to get home. They continued walking toward their hotel and apparently got more rain on the way.

I know I wanted rain. I know, I know. But I never envisioned standing in a downpour in an open field with no protection from flying hailstones! How did we offend the pagan spirits that haunt Stonehenge?

Skyline Views, Both Real and Tattooed

This may be a familiar sight if you've visited London in recent years, or if you've read this blog since 2003 and you have a really good memory. It's the view from the top of the elevator that takes visitors to the top of one of the chimneys at Battersea Power Station. Dave and I did this back in 2023, when it was called Lift 109. Apparently it has been renamed The Chimney Lift but it's the same experience, and I went up with my brother, his wife and my niece yesterday.

The weather cooperated and we had great views across the city in all directions. If you want to see more of what it looks like, check out that linked post above.

They sell plush toys in the gift shop, including Charlie the Chimney. I bought one just because the idea of a stuffed chimney was so peculiar. My brother got one for my niece, too. The woman working the counter at the gift shop said, "You don't need a bag, do you?" When she put it like that I felt like I had to say no, so I was carrying this chimney around for the next hour or two. My niece discovered that they stayed secure head-down in a side pocket of our cargo pants, so that's what we did.

Americans will buy anything.

Before taking the lift we had lunch on the patio of a seafood restaurant near the river. Our server had this great tattoo of London architectural icons, which seemed appropriate for a day when we were getting a good skyline view of the city.

Afterwards we walked down the river to Vauxhall, passing the U.S. Embassy and the sky pool, and then across the Vauxhall Bridge to Pimlico, where we caught the tube.

Today is going to be more of a challenge. We're supposed to go to Stonehenge via a bus leaving from Victoria station, but of course it's raining (yay, but why today?) and there's also a tube strike. I'm going to have to be creative about getting us down to Victoria. I'm catching a 6 a.m. Thameslink train to get to my brother's hotel and we'll go from there, either by bus, taxi or walking. Given the rain I'd say walking might be out. Wish us luck!

Banksy and a Sunbathing Robin

We met up with my brother and his family yesterday for a Sunday pub lunch in Bloomsbury, where they're staying. We thought they should experience a traditional Sunday roast, so that's what we got -- chicken, in my case, with a Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings. It was good but as is typical when I eat a Sunday roast, I consumed pretty much my entire day's caloric intake in one sitting. No dinner for me last night.

Anyway, after eating we took the tube down to Piccadilly Circus and walked from there through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace, to show them some of the sights in that area. One I hadn't anticipated seeing was Banksy's newest artwork, on a plinth near Pall Mall.

As we passed it, Dave exclaimed, "Hey, that's the new Banksy!"

I think we all know who inspired that artwork.

We also passed a wino clutching a bottle of rosé who slurred "I love you" to each of us as we disembarked from an elevator in the Piccadilly tube station, and a man belting out an off-key version of the Cranberries' song "Linger" while concealed behind a statue in St. James Park. He may have been hiding his body, but his voice was on full display.

After strolling past the palace and through Green Park, I sent them back to their hotel on the tube and Dave and I came back to West Hampstead to intercept a grocery delivery.

A relatively short garden cam video this week, at just four minutes, but one that features some excellent footage and answers an important question!

-- We start with Q-Tip (I think) trotting past and pausing. Near the teasel to the right of the path you can see a dark object on the ground. That's one of the fox's dog treats, which they get from an unknown source. At 0:32 the fox makes a half-hearted attempt to pick up the treat, but ultimately leaves it behind.
--  At 0:44, the following morning, I pick up the disgusting half-eaten treat and throw it out so we don't encourage rats.
-- At 1:03, a little robin hops into the lower right of the screen and then nestles itself into the ground and spreads its wings. This is what we were seeing last week when I thought the bird might be sick. It's not sick at all. Robins and other birds sunbathe to maintain their feathers. Who knew?!
-- At 1:22 you see me with a watering can. I saved this footage to show the temperature: 116º F (or 47º C), according to the camera. The next afternoon it's even hotter, at 127º F (or 53º C)! Obviously that's not the air temperature, but the temperature of the camera sitting in the sun.
-- At 1:48, Pale Cat wanders past.
-- At 2:02 we get some of the best fox footage I've ever collected. The fox, in daylight, wanders up, gets comfortable and lies down for a moment. I love seeing the fox so relaxed in our garden! (That will change when we get a dog, sadly.)
-- At 2:43, a squirrel doing a sort of funny, bow-legged old-man walk.
-- At 3:03, a fox hops out of the nighttime shrubbery.
-- At 3:11, Tabby slinks past.
-- At 3:18, some rough-housing squirrels jostle the camera.
-- At 3:38, the fox returns, and then at 3:49 it's back in color for some scratching and grooming. Someone's feeling itchy!

Grounded for Lack of Toilet Paper

Well, yesterday turned out to be wall-to-wall activity! My morning went pretty much as usual, blogging and uploading pictures to Flickr, and cleaning the house to prepare for my brother's visit. He, his wife and my niece had an eventful day of travel. The first leg of their Delta flight was grounded by a broken tissue or napkin dispenser, believe it or not, and then the ground crew couldn't find the plane's maintenance log book -- which I suspect was the real reason for the delay. All of this meant an extra 45 minutes in Jacksonville before takeoff, which meant they missed their connecting flight in Atlanta and had to board a later plane for London. This put them here six hours later than they'd anticipated.

But they did finally arrive. I journeyed out to Heathrow to meet them, and just missed getting caught up in this snafu. When I entered the tube station, a notice board said trains weren't running to Heathrow. I was trying to figure out an alternate plan but then my train did indeed go all the way, so I suppose the system was just getting back on its feet after the earlier disruption.

The tube was running back into town with no problem, so soon after I met them we were zipping back to West Hampstead. They came to our flat and we sat out in the garden in the almost-sweltering warmth. My brother does read my blog, so I imagine it was fun for him to see first-hand all the stuff I've been writing about, from the ladybird larvae in the yard waste bag to the starlings on the bird feeder.

(Incidentally, I retrieved another ten or so ladybird larvae from the bag yesterday, so I decided to dump out all the garden trimmings in the back "wildlife area" of the garden. That way whatever's living on that alkanet can crawl to nearby living plants. I don't want to be responsible for killing all those little critters.)

After a while, my brother and his family took an Uber to their hotel in Bloomsbury, and I joined them there after a couple of hours so we could go to dinner. (Dave, who has been feeling under the weather, didn't join us -- but he was happy because the recliner repairman had come earlier in the day, and his chair is now fully functional once again!)

The gigantic mural above is one of several in the neighborhood near their hotel. We walked to a nearby pub called The Swan, where we ate, and then wandered the streets surrounding Queen's Square and the Great Ormond Street children's hospital. Here's some more of what I saw during the evening:

Door in the men's loo at the pub

Today my brother and family are going to rest up and then Dave and I are meeting them for a Sunday pub roast. Maybe before that I can get caught up in blogland!