Thursday, March 28, 2013

Visitor, adage and builders




































Same robin different angle.  He is back again today. He visits every day to see what I can do for him.

"All cats love fish but fear to wet their paws." The adage that Shakespeare refers to in Macbeth. " ... I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat i the adage."  announces the latest post in One Fine Day hnjh. blogspot.com.

Paul the gardener asks me whether I mind working next door to a building site after the peace of the deserted garden I had been used. In fact it has never worried me except once when a young man's music drifted  insistently over the fence with a sullen beat as he sorted plywood boards. For the most part the digger and mechanical shovel and the merry shouts of the builders don't disturb me at all. Though it is true to say that robins (with the exception of the one above) and blackbirds have been shyer than usual this year.

2 comments:

Roderick Robinson said...

I think the noise of work being done, however intrusive, is far more acceptable than the noise of someone else's choice of music. Here in Hereford I practice a variant of this principle: on crowded roads I prefer to let lorries, Transits, buses and white vans (rather than cars) into the main-stream of traffic on the grounds that such vehicles are evidence of someone trying to make a living, whereas I am merely retired.

Your third para starts "Paul the gardener" and I itch to make that a capital g. It has something in common with a TV news technique whereby the story is fleshed out with vox. pop. interviews. Thus the head and shoulders of someone protesting about, say, a local planning decision is captioned "JOE DOAK Resident." Whole lives are compressed into a single word and the effect may be subversively risible. A bus crashes and we hear first-hand experiences from "JOE SNOAK Victim." Emphysema is on the increase, as we are told by "JOE DROAK Sufferer."

Keep an eye open. There are some collector's items out there. "Taxpayer" amuses me; definitely "a world too wide for his shrunk shank".

Unknown said...

The Welsh I believe have the habit of linking the name to the profession as in Jones the Milk.