sweet and hot, branches, Mr Crow's morning

Sweet and sour is a familiar flavour combination. Less familiar is sweet and hot. I enjoy salads just now made with chilli pepper and a little sugar, plus oil of one kind or another. Cucumbers, red peppers, cherry tomatoes and carrots are well suited to such a sauce. Chopped coriander leaves add to the spiciness. A useful hot flavour comes from the preserved chillies marketed under the name Pepperdew.

Seen through the open slats of the blind, the pattern of upward-pointing branches resemble books lined up on a shelf.

In the early morning, sparrows twitter in the eves; in the distance Mr Crow says: "I'm here... I'm here!"