Must be spring

All sorts of bird life around this morning.  Delighted to see that the mallards are back - they came crashing in about 06:30 and stayed for a quarter of an hour or so.  They don't exactly conform to type, our ducks.  Normally, the male pushes off once the eggs hatch, but our drake seems to have stayed put up at the big pond, and we are of course convinced that it's the same pair that comes back to visit us each year.  Probably sentimental nonsense.  But they're Doris and Arthur, OK?  Our neighbourhood heron was down at the pond when I came down around 06:00, but flapped off the moment it saw movement in the house.  Pairs of robins, dunnocks and chaffinches have been down to feed already, plus the occasional blackbird.  And of course it doesn't take long, once you've put the feed out, before the garden is full of wood pigeons, the greedy brutes.  A magpie just dropped in, and fled immediately - not unprompted.  Haven't seen the jays yet, probably because we're out of peanuts.

The traction for our Worcester jaunt has changed yet again.  Originally it was to have been an un-rebuilt Bulleid Pacific.  Then that was changed to 70000 Britannia.  Now it's to be the new-build A1, Tornado.  Pity - that's the one we had last time.  It did its steamy job very well, granted, but it's nice to ring the changes.

I bit the bullet a week or so ago and got a couple of new tyres for the VW.  They are pretty big tyres, and come with a correspondingly big price ticket.  Still, by shopping about a bit I got the price down by £40 per cover from the supposedly much-discounted figure I paid Kwikfit the day we had to replace a tyre on the way to Brighton - and SETyres even gave me a small discount on their web site price.  Still a bit of a dent in the bank balance, however.  Talking of big tickets, my desktop computer is getting unreliable.  It's hard to know how to research a replacement: my needs are pretty modest, but web sites seem to demand ever more bandwidth and processing power, and I'm very bad at weeding out the rubbish in my photo library.  I'll probably just go to the manufacturer of the laptop, which apart from a problem with the screen, quickly replaced under warranty, has been a delight. 

Mother would have been 95 today.  I wonder what she'd have made of the fact that Charles was in fact her second brother, after Frank.  Cousins Pip and Frank's daughter Gill are due to meet some time this month.