Words are my seed corn and I am rarely lost for them, but words failed me when I saw an expensive cream settee dumped in a layby on the road between Fettercairn and Edzell.
We have been entertaining Rosie, daughter Cait’s roly-poly bundle of fun – a rough-haired Jack Russell who terrorises Inka.
Dogs – as I’m sure other dog owners will confirm – have a canny habit of finding the most revolting things in smelly corners and either rolling in them and carrying the fragrance back to share with the family, or eating them and throwing the proceeds up on the drawing room carpet.
Walking with Inka on a woodland track a woodcock rose silently from rough grass and flitted off ahead of us, jouking and jinking low between the trees. Woodcock are essentially wading birds with a long, straight beak, a dumpy body and short legs which have adapted to a woodland environment. Unlike the explosive clatter of a pheasant taking flight, woodcock can be so silent and fleeting you question if you really saw it – just a blink-of-an-eye encounter.
I’ve just finished an utterly absorbing book – The Seabird’s Cry, The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers, by Adam Nicolson. The ocean voyagers are “creatures of the high latitudes and distant oceans” and include albatross and gannets, kittiwakes, shearwaters, fulmars and gulls – “pelagic wanderers and wind-buffeted migrants”.