Dogs that bark, birds that sing…

Ho hum, another day doing what I do these days and it gets really hard to find anything worth blogging about with all the stuff that isn’t going on around me.

Oh, the rest of the world goes on – although there was almost a hiccup with the world and the end of it last week. Turns out to have been a bum steer, an erroneous tip, yet another misguided religious fundamentalist getting it totally wrong yet again. They’re all the same regardless of doctrine or creed.

Of course, there are things happening. Another Icelandic volcano with yet another unpronounceable name is spluttering out yet another nasty ash cloud. Kathy Kirby - my Dad’s favourite - died yesterday at the age of only seventy-two; she was the highest paid female singer of her generation and very pretty with it. Oh yes, and Bob Dylan will be seventy tomorrow. Ryan Giggs may have had a few 'not quite as discreet as he would have liked' away games allegedly (or aren’t I allowed to write that). Blackpool and Birmingham are out of the Premier League (yawn), and those misguided whales have left that loch in Scotland, and it appears that the one that died wasn’t stranded at all.

Yes, things are happening – just not for me, and as always in times like this I find myself focussing on the minutiae just to stop the bigger picture (which at the moment looks like a very dreary landscape by somebody who has lost all the bright colours from his paint-box) from flattening me completely.

You can probably tell that I need to get out more - a lot more. Small things have become very important, ritual something to focus on, silliness a way of feeling better about things - and of course it is that gardening time of year.

As you might expect both my front and back gardens are pretty tidy at the moment. I’ve even begun raking the gravel into patterns at the front of the house again - and the hanging basket and pots are all getting watered daily. The gnomes out back are dusted weekly and the fish pond cleaned out fully almost as soon as required, even the wisteria is being carefully kept within the confines or the space allotted it. I’ve bought a solar powered light string to hang from it and the lights look like tiny dragonflies. I can hardly wait for night to fall – they make me smile a little. Well, they do say small things please small minds, and I’m sure that I can feel my mind shrinking.

Small things please small minds because they tend to take your mind off that big picture, the dreary landscape I mentioned earlier. They distract me -- and so to the point - dogs that bark and birds that sing.

Not a real dog, but my new doorbell which barks like a small terrier when the button is pressed – yap, yap, yap, yap, yap – yap yap yap – grrrrrr - yap, yap, yap, yap, yap – yap yap yap.

And my bird, it’s a blue tit actually. Well, when I say blue tit a not-quite-lifelike resin rendition of a blue tit with a motion sensor embedded inside it. I keep it on the step by my front door and each time somebody steps onto my porch it sings a song to let me know I have a visitor. First I get the tweeting early bird warning, then the barking dog announcement that somebody is at my door. It is all very effective, even if it is a little tacky (well, quite a lot actually). It makes me feel a little better, brighter, it lightens my mood and that’s what counts there days.

Maybe I should buy an aquarium and some tropical fish?