I went in the bathroom last night and a tiny, dark hallucination went streaking across the floor. "Ach, that's what comes of staying up too late staring at the monitor," I thought, but then the hallucination, instead of disappearing, started running round and round in circles and I had time to identify it. A mouse. Finally it quit panicking and ran to the corner and hid. And here's something I didn't know before- mice don't realise they have tails. I located it behind the toilet cleaner and it bolted behind the toilet pedestal and every hiding place it chose it forgot to tuck its tail in. After a while I gave up trying to catch it and just opened the bathroom door and invited it to find its own way out.

I'm torn between "how cute" and "oh drat".

I told Ailz this morning. She proposes getting a batch of these plug-in doodads she's seen advertised that emit a ultra-sound screetch that mice can't abide. A sort of Pied Piper effect in reverse.

P.S. Since I wrote the above, Ailz has been looking on-line and she finds that the screetching doodads also disgust spiders. What, drive out our lucky spiders that catch the flies? No way! So we need to do a rethink. I propose humane traps. Then I can take the meeces out the back and let them loose in the long grass. I absolutely refuse to kill them.

Winter always goes on just that little bit too long.

I don't hate winter. I like snow and bad weather and Christmas tree lights.

And the winter stars. I love the winter stars.

But there always comes a time when I've had enough.

And it's always several weeks before winter finally packs it in.

But here's the Spring Equinox at last. Yesterday wasn't just mild, it was hot. Walking down the street, we passed a tree full of cock sparrows all flapping and pecking and skriking at one another. I guess love was in the air.

And today I looked into the back yard and saw a hen blackbird with moss in her beak go dodging into a clump of honeysuckle and ivy.

Nest-building. Yay!

The crocus are out.

(What's the plural of crocus- Crocuses or crocii? Both are ugly, so I'm sticking with the generic singular.)

As I rode into town yesterday they were coming up in clumps by the roadside. It's not Spring yet- of course it isn't- but the crocus are the first sign.

Harbingers.

Ezra Pound talks about their "gilded phalloi". This has stuck with me because (a) it's bold and (b) it's wrong. The crocus is fleshy, but not in the least bit metallic. And the colour isn't gold but a sort of deep egg-yolk yellow.

I stole the sexual metaphor and wrote a poem once in which an early crocus "Peeks like a clitoris from the rough." I've never been sure whether this was brave or ridiculous.

I'm struck by their fragility. A little wind, a little rain and they're done for. They push sleekly up through the hard soil, then just fall to pieces.

The dinosaurs weren't wiped out by a meteor. Or anything else. Instead they grew wings and flew up out of harm's way.

The fluffy little robin in the holly bush was once a velociraptor.

Maybe that's why I'm so fond of him.

Once it's pointed out, the link is obvious. Birds have a dinosaur attitude. See how the strut!

And the dinosaurs that are being uncovered in China had feathers. They were flightless, but they had feathers. It's not impossible that ALL dinosaurs- or at least all dinosaurs of the raptor kind- had feathers.

Which would mean they were always birds. A bird is not so much a dinosaur that has evolved as a dinosaur is an early kind of bird.

There's a frost on the ground. So the first thing I did this morning was renew the food in the bird feeders.

The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then?
Poor thing.
He'll sit in a barn,
And keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing,
Poor thing.

Which makes me think of Mary Poppins and how it's no longer permitted to feed the birds in Trafalgar Square.

Why, what harm did it really do? The birds messed up the monuments (so what?) but children loved being at the centre of a fury of wings, with birds perching on their shoulders, their heads....

Mayor Livingston is a good thing in some respects, but in this he's a kill-joy.

I drew the bedroom curtains this morning and four or five small birds flew up from the second feeder I've hung over the front door. I came down to the kitchen and saw sparrows and blue-tits hopping about in the eucalyptus tree- location of feeder #1

Operation Feedthebirds is a success!

I'm half way through Virginia Woolf's Between The Acts, her last novel. Compared to most of the earlier ones, it's an easy read. What she's trying to do is say something affectionate and positive about England on the brink of WWII (it's set in 1939). If I've a criticism it's that it's a bit too starry-eyed. But lets not carp. It's charming and delightful and I love you, Ginnie!

The story- insofar as there is a story- is about a pageant that the village people are putting on to entertain the nobs. Queen Elizabeth I features prominently. I remember watching a pageant in my home town of Croydon sometime in the late '50s and Queen Elizabeth came into that as well, entering on a white horse with a page-boy/girl holding the bridle. I guess that must have been one of the last pageants ever staged anywhere.

Woolf's England has vanished. But there are all sorts of things in the book- tricks of speech and manner and little spasms of prejudice and snobbery- that bring back my boyhood. My mother had a friend not wholly unlike the over-assertive and over-sexed Mrs Manresa, "the wild child" who overrides the rules of this rather stuffy society and gets away with it by sheer force of charm and character. I counted up on my fingers and was a little shocked to realise that 1939 is only 12 years before I was born.

Here's one of Ginnie's wonderful similes: "She had been waked by the birds. How they sang! attacking the dawn like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake."

I remember sitting in a car on a Kentucky hillside (the tyres will earth the power if a bolt hits us, right?) watching the lightning strikes get nearer and nearer as the storm swept up the valley towards us.

I remember rain in Philadelphia. The air pretty much displaced by water. The force of it and the roar of it.

I remember a huge thunderhead sailing over the fields (in Kentucky again) all lit up from inside by frequent lightning- like a citadel at war- and how I waited till it was almost directly overhead before I ran for the house.

This is prompted by jackiejj writing about hurricane Frances. Heigh-ho; we don't get weather like that in Britain.

Local: We've taken to throwing stale bread on the roof of the shed under the window where I have my computer. It's good to have the birds swooping and squawking. In the old days when we had cats the birds kept away. Heresy, I know, but I like things better this way. I like birds better than cats.

There's a principle here. I like beasts better when I don't own them.

Mainly we get sparrows. But I'm sure I glimpsed a long-tailed tit a few days back.

National: Some chap has reintroduced the Great Bustard to Salisbury Plain. He's brought in chicks from Siberia. The Great Bustard is the largest bird that can fly. They used to be British natives but the Victorians had a mania for putting them in pies and museums and so wiped them out.

The chicks are being trained to avoid local predators this way: a tame fox is walked among them on a lead and if they don't hasten to get out of its way they get squirted with a water pistol.

World-historical: Scientists have finally settled the question as to whether Archaeopterix- the ur-bird- used its feathers to fly. Answer: Yes, it did. It's all down to the amount of brain space that was given over to functions like sight and balance. They did a scan on an archaeopterix  skull and found the brain was just like a modern bird's. This makes me happy. I like to think of those funny, little, scaly, toothy things actually  flitting about.