pumpkinstrokemarrow

Instead of that, the litter picker does occasional service getting things up and down from the garage roof. Lots of bolts (for heavy things) and nails (for light things) in the rafters.

Until Saturday that is, when FIL loses his hearing aid while out on a walk. Or at least he thinks he has; lots of other places where it might have got to. A gadget which is both small and expensive: I imagine lots of them get lost, which is a bit of a pain for all concerned. So we go over the walk twice, about half of it on woodland paths on the fringe of Epsom Common. So there we are, walking very slowly down the road, eyes down, looking for small pink object. A couple of hours of which was surprisingly tiring: focussed vision must burn up a fair amount of brain power (I think that, depending on brain size and quality relative to the rest of it, brain power is about a third of the total. Vision maybe a third of that again? Think how much heat is generated inside a PC and that has a very small fraction of the computational capacity of a brain).

We do not find the hearing aid, but we do find that while there was not much large litter on the route in question, there was an interesting array of small litter. Filter tips from cigarettes probably the most common single item, although I did not notice either lighters or matches to go with them. Sweet wrappers. Popper packs for pills. Various biros and parts of biros. A small number of nuts, bolts, screws and nails. Various odd bit of metalwork. A small number of bottle tops. An even smaller number of plastic bottles. No glass bottles, although there was the odd small piece of glass from a bottle. One contraceptive. Lots of slugs: black, brown, short, long and fat. Some with horns out, some without. Some with visible spiracles, some without. Much smaller number of small snails, almost all of them having black and white shells and lurking under one particular hedge. Much evidence of dog life despite it being one of those areas where you are supposed to clear up after them.

A passing lady suggested that with school about to start, there was always a chance that some nosey child would light upon the thing. A notice offering a reward might encourage same. So, taking full advantage of our sophisticated home technology, we now have two notices, one strapped to a telegraph pole and one strapped to a lamp standard, advertising our loss and offering an unspecified reward. I shall be very surprised if anything comes of them.

Slightly more relaxed jaunt around Horton Country Park this morning, inspecting the harvest scene. Blackberries more or less done, but not in the market for them. Plenty of sloes, but not in the market for them either. Plenty of hazel bushes of various sizes, but very few hazels. There was little hazel debris on the ground so my bet is that there were few nuts on these bushes this year, rather than my having been preceded to the field by squirrel or human rival. Maybe they only bear every other year or so. Maybe these bushes were shaded out by the oak trees, at least in so far as bearing nuts is concerned. Maybe there was not the right mixture of male and female plants - although saying that I do not know whether hazels are self fertile. Lots of fruit trees are not, but then they are not nut trees.

Net result was that I was just about able to fill my pockets up. Somewhere between a pound and two pounds of the things.

But I did come across a clump of aspen trees. Somewhere else to go to admire the trembling. See May 7th.