Monday 21.02.2011

The (in this case East) wind doth (continue to) blow but (hopefully) we won`t have snow, so perhaps our Robin won`t need to hide his head under his wing.*

Still very grey but hey ho: good job February is a short month, as a colleague once said. (Think about it - we all nodded at the time and though it actually makes no sense in terms of the weather it`s a comforting thought).

Anyway dog and I set off. A notable lack of crows/rooks so I couldn`t study them properly but a deer "happened into (our) dimension",** skittering out of the trees suddenly, quite close, and then, as they always do, pausing to look back at us, a moment of stillness where we all seem to stop breathing.
Dog, I think, has finally accepted she`ll never catch one of these animals so just feels the need to `see it off` and eventually the deer obliges by pretending to "run away" so honour is satisfied all round.

*For anyone who had a deprived childhood...the original reads:
"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."

** And while we`re on the poetry kick this is another Ted Hughes:

Roe Deer
"In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.

They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

And hesitated in the all-way disintegration
And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign

That the curtain had blow aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

The deer had come for me.

Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over a snow-lonely field

Towards tree-dark - finally
Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

Into the boil of big flakes
The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

Revising its dawn inspiration
Back to the ordinary."