Tonight we celebrated the long awaited, sale of the cottage (see yesterday’s post). We went to Côte Brasserie, our current favourite Farnham restaurant, and ate like we were in France. As usual, the food, service and alcohol were all excellent.
Before settling down to food, Mirinda wanted to check out Ebb & Flow so we went into town a bit earlier than our reservation required. Of course, I didn’t need to check out Ebb & Flow, so I went to The Wheatsheaf for a pint and a read.
While the Nelson’s Arm is my favourite Farnham pub, The Wheatsheaf is a close second and an excellent way to spend half an hour while you wait for your wife.
Obviously, I had my book with me and, along with a pint of IPA, I sat and read another chapter of Snowdrops by AD Miller, a book recommended to me by Dawn.
Not to be confused with Snowdrops: Monograph of Cultivated Galanthus, the one I’m reading is about snowdrops of the type Homo sapien. I’m thoroughly enjoying it (thanks, Dawn) and, every now and then, a sentence jumps out at me from the page. Like this bit of contemporaneous prophesy:
An excellent book which I recommend to anyone who loves a story with a slow build up towards the carnage.
I’m sure there was nothing slow about the carnage that took place in our garden over night.
I went out first thing to see if the temperature was high enough to open the greenhouse doors (it wasn’t, the temperature didn’t reach 10° all day) and was brought up short by a scene of carnage on the grass, under a bush and along the path. It looked like a bird had fought valiantly for its life. And, given there was no blood or body, either succeeded in escaping or was completely eaten.
Assuming it happened overnight, we wonder why the bird was around after dark and what took it. I ventured it may have been an owl but Mirinda discounted that because, while we do have owls around here, one is not likely to carry off a whole bird. Particularly a bird as big as a dove, which she reckons it was.
I guess it could have been a squadron of owls working together. Though probably not.
I searched for any sign of a carcass, thinking that perhaps the killer was a cat – there are a few feline garden invaders – but I couldn’t find anything. In fact, the trail of feathers ended just around the back of the greenhouse which leads me to believe that it was our fox. The one that regularly visits and upsets the girls.
Maybe it’s an example of Tennyson’s nature, red in tooth and claw. Though, oddly enough, the original quote indicates how Nature cares little for individual species, and would happily wipe out humanity as readily as it did, the dinosaurs. Which, perhaps, refers us back to Putin and his desire to end all human life on this planet.
