God forbid,it's winter.

Now that Planning councillors are there?

This post started on Nov 30 and it's colder now than it was then. The hedgehog which I have hibernating in my garden is still slumbering,at least I hope it is slumbering. I have checked it but I have been told that if they do not awake to find food they may die of starvation. Short of asking it how it feels I have put some pet food near it in the hope that that will wake it. I asked a few people how I can tell if it's still alive( they don't move around much ). One less than sympathetic reply was that I would smell it if it was not. Ye Gods!
More sleepless nights now worrying how it is getting on.

past it: Hedgehogs need water before food after hibernation. If it's heart is still warm, it's prickles should slowly involuntarily rise a bit if you nudge it slightly.

It depends how much fat it managed to store before hibernating, but it doesn't sound too good along with the sub-zero frosts we've been having , unless it dug itself under leaves or insulating vegetation.

The Hedgehog in our garden has been out and about for at least 8 weeks. I've been quite worried that he/she was up too early but it seems to be doing OK. Fingers crossed.

Came back today from a few days away to find the hedgehog has departed and the pet food I left for it also gone, hopefully eaten by the selfsame.
He or she is now free to search out the slugs which regard my garden as a horticultural larder, and stock up his own larder.
I suppose it would have survived anyway but doing a bit to help has been interesting. Here's to Spring, or am I mad, probably the latter.

I think it's arrived. Goodbye cold,welcome rain and wind. Will we ever be satisfied?

past it wrote: I think it's arrived. Goodbye cold,welcome rain and wind. Will we ever be satisfied?

I've lost quite a lot of evergreen shrubs and well-nurtured saplings during the cold and severe frosts, despite trying to protect with bubble wrap and a variety of recommended, but ineffective, frost barriers.


A costly weather experience that's left me with denuded garden areas and a quiet gripe about Mother Nature killing off a handsome silver spruce.

I heard my first blackbird last Friday, unfortunately it was in Portugal but beggars and all that. anyway on the home front Mr Blackbird is singing his little head off in my garden and the Robins are joining in, God made songbirds for blind folk don’t you know.
Also the battle is on between the sparrows and Blue Tits for Lewis’s fur which I throw onto the lawn when grooming, him not me that is. Matron tells me the nest material is ‘carded’ and they look like they have long white moustaches when suitable individual hairs are chosen.
So fingers crossed that the extremely strange cold snap is finally gone, until November at least.

Yes MJH, I too appear to have lost one of my spring flowering clematis and, things aren't looking too good for my beautiful wisteria, I am hoping the latter has just been delayed .

Hinch, sorry I don't echo your thoughts about 'the old crow'.....I too lived through her reign as PM and suffered the hardships that followed but please have some dignity ..... you and others have years to voice your rantings, after she has been laid to rest.....

Hinch, I have to laugh .... and I agree in essence to what your are saying but, in all honesty, I think your timing is c**p......and here's me thinking that 'our' generation has been brought up to show respect, silly me

Hinch wrote:I was brought up to believe that respect is a two-way street. You get it and you return it. You treat people like crap and you get crap in return.

I'm a bit confused about the ' Winter ' relevance of returning 14 years of crap, but, "Hey," there's tons of fodder about that many younger people have never experienced, but simply been spoon fed.


' The original ‘Winter of discontent’, as it was dubbed in a line taken from Shakespeare’s Richard III, began in the autumn of 1978. Then, a weakened Labour government dithered over when to call an election, while trades unions vehemently resisted attempts to hold down pay in the name of fighting inflation.

The bitter disputes that followed were crystallised in the media and in modern memory by images of piles of uncollected rubbish and horror stories of grave diggers refusing to bury the dead. Yes, some of us were there and remember this, by bitter experiences.

What is especially haunting for the unions and the Labour Party is the knowledge that all this was followed by Margaret Thatcher’s electoral triumph in May 1979 and her government’s introduction of major restrictions on trade union power. '


The temper, tantrums, fervour and blunt savage rhetoric of Barbara Castle, along with bitter opposition from within her own party, is one of my abiding memories of that time, along with some trades union trashing of ‘In Place of Strife.’ Barbara Castle had a sub-zero winter in '78 ... and she could be a brutal public speaker.

I thought politicians were famous for 'feathering their nests' Mojo?

'Now is the winter of our discontent' is probably the most misunderstood Shakespeare quote ever...

Hinch wrote:Sweetest birdsong I've heard in ages was the final croaking of an old crow last week Salty. Music to my ears.

Ding-dong!

Hinch. I will give forth on the ex premier when I have attended the funeral of my very good friend tomorrow afternoon, a death I regret much more than the death of the lady. I am waiting until after her funeral on Wednesday to better judge the anti feelings and the hagiography which abounds.

I am hoping the weather will be good so that I can get out on my bike whilst the funeral watchers whether those rejoicing or those bemoaning are not on the road. It's an ill wind as they say.