Back to the stars...

I'm afraid I didn't pay enough attention to the needs of Blipfoto today, so you may feel you've seen enough of this particular view of the night sky about 8.30 this evening - I had a red alert from my Aurora app and scooted out to see if there was anything to see. I don't think there is, other than an ever-so-faint purpleness towards the bottom right of the photo, but when I put it on the big screen I realised just how many stars - and presumably the odd planet, or what's the larger bright thing in the top left quadrant - were out there.

I eventually got to sleep last night, though I was up once, and didn't waken till almost 8am. An hour or so later I went downstairs for some toast and tea, but then returned to bed as in a good, old-fashioned sickie, and stayed there till lunchtime. If there are no further developments, I shall conclude that it's a case of norovirus, which is apparently rife just now - things that happen when country bumpkins plunge themselves into a concert-hall full of folk! Anyway, I felt better of the hour or three spent reading blips and dozing, while the piano tuner, who lives in Brazil but still comes home to see his dad (and his former teachers!) and tune his circle of pianos, tinkled away below me. It's a strange thing, however - why are my feet always cold in bed when I'm not lying down sleeping? 

Didn't do much for the rest of the day either, though I got up and put my clothes and my face on. I instructed the gardener from my bedroom window (he was here on a regular grass-cut) and had a couple of phone calls; I read Sunday's Observer; I did my Italian. Occasionally I got out of my chair and moved around like a half-shut knife. I worried about eating dinner, but in the end pretended my stomach was fine and ate it anyway. (So far so good ...I reflected that when I was hospitalised 30 odd years ago with campylobacter food poisoning, the first dinner I had was fish and mashed potatoes  - followed by tinned mandarin oranges!)

A last thought - and I could have chosen a photo to represent it, only you'd have seen how dirty my kitchen window is - is that I've never seen so many sparrows in/on our back garden hedge, mobbing (and emptying at a rate of knots) our feeders and sitting in a row waiting their turn. Himself thinks it's maybe because we gave the hedge a radical haircut at the end of autumn, so it now has a sort of flat top on which they can all sit together. I feel ever so slightly like Tippi Hedren ...

The evening was normal. Compline, Surgeons at the edge of Life, bed (well - when I've finished this). I didn't know whether to laugh or be affronted that they felt it necessary to supply subtitles for a surgeon with a Scottish accent, doing clever things in Edinburgh Royal ...