Hope restored!

Winter is a time when, with the death of Nature, faith looks, at best, a little sickly. It is difficult to be positive when all around you damp desolation is your inspirational landscape. Gaunt empty branches, dark ruffled water in the pond, only the hardiest weeds growing in the shallow detritus in the gravel. What hope?

The element which retains my weakest faith is the belief that the fish population of my pond will be sustained through the cruel winter months and having hidden in the murky depths that they will rise in all their finny multitudinousness to frolic on the surface blowing bubbles of mirth at my lack of belief.

I know about fish, and I know that they all do come to the surface at some time or other. So, if you stare at the opaque surface of a seemingly inert pond, sooner or later you will observe ripples or tiny bubbles of air which indicate that sub aquatic life forms are moving about a bit. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Global warming (or ‘coincidence’ if you happen to be a serial Global Warming Denier like Bush Jnr.) has confused the seasons and the internal clocks of the fish and they have started to rise, defiantly to the surface, together with large tadpole like creatures which, I have to believe are children of the reclusive denizens of the deep. No wonder they didn’t show themselves on the surface: a sense of moral decency and modesty at the public exhibition of their piscatorial passions.

I have, therefore, to celebrate the appearances, taken some photos, together with various shots of the developing spawn.

It is at times like this that I regret taking biology at school for only one short year. I thoroughly enjoyed studying biology because, as far as I could see, it was a science which didn’t need maths and allowed lots of description and illustrative drawings: my depiction of a bird’s wing was a thing of beauty and my detailed exposé of the internal workings of spirogyra was a wonder to behold. Alas, in our school, the choice of biology would have been at the expense of something boringly essential which meant that I had to do chemistry. This was not a good plan, because, in those days, you had to balance equations for chemical reactions and I invariably ended up with three figure quantities of elements and it still was a bit wonky.

The only thing that I was confident about describing (with illustrations) was the Frasch Method of extracting sulphur. This, together with a detailed description of how people died by carbon monoxide poisoning was almost the sum total of my chemical knowledge. I was asked about neither in my O Level Examination which I regard as a crime against academic knowledge. It was a bitter moment when a chemist college vouchsafed to me that the Frasch Method had not been used in the real world of sulphur extraction for years. I dismissed his view with contempt: educationalists teaching outmoded concepts? Unthinkable!

Meanwhile the spawn. As promised I have taken a photograph which shows the growing specks. If the quantity of spawn actually produced wriggling tadpoles then the resident fish will be able to start their evolutionary journey by climbing over the writhing bodies of the young frogs and join them in their amphibious journey towards world domination. Or they will all be eaten.

Lunch in Swansea in an Italian restaurant in Mumbles. The restaurant’s location is the site of the old coastguard or lifeboat station and is perched on top of a cliff overlooking the rocky bay complete with promontory with lighthouse as scenery from the table! The set menu was more than reasonable; I had creamed spinach soup, followed by fish of the day with a prawn sauce and vegetables. The cream confection which was my pudding was an extravagant construction in calories which necessitated an astringent macchiato to compensate for the sugary indulgence.

On the drive back from Swansea along the M4 we passed a smouldering load of hay bales. There were three or four fire engines and the police directing traffic. Clouds of smoke were obscuring both sides of the motorway and I suppose we were lucky that the police had not closed both east and west traffic. I thought because of the short queue that the fire had just started, but the presence of the engines seemed to indicate some time had passed. The solution to this conundrum was clear after some minutes of driving when a police car was visible blocking the motorway and holding back a horrendous queue of traffic; further down the motorway the three lanes had been coned off and traffic directed off the slip road leaving an even more massive queue of traffic building up.

It is difficult to know what expression to have when passing a queue of traffic which leads to another queue of traffic which leads to another queue of traffic. Shadenfreude in this instance should be experienced in the mind and not expressed on the face: it’s just too cruel.

As a footnote, and not trying to be too much of a pedant, I received a letter from Cardiff City Council writen by Christine Salter, Chief Financial Services Officer, telling me that the council has delayed “setting it’s budget for next year.” I assume that the city is wealthy enough to afford some sort of suite of word processing programs which indicate to the chief officers when an apostrophe has gone rogue. Pity this one escaped.

I am aware that, in spite of my use of the vilified Gates’ software which does its [please note use Ms Salter] best to help me spell and punctuate; erratic neologisms, quirky grammar and inventive punctuation still escapes my rigorous scrutiny and litters my otherwise immaculate prose.

Call it individuality!