How can it be April already?? Especially given that I still seem to be bogged down in January’s tasks. I need to sort my life out, and soon.
Sigh.
I did my best today, spending most of it alternately excavating the current raw file mountain on my Mac and the multiple piles of paper on my desk, in an attempt to restore some kind of order – and if I didn’t get all that far, at least the piles of paper are tidier. Well, some of them at any rate. And topping my personal “reasons to be cheerful” list is the fact that – unlike R – none of my administrative tasks today involved having to deal with the car insurance people, two repair garages, and a car hire company.
Weather-wise it was a fairly dour day – dark and blustery – so I also didn’t feel that I was missing out on much fun by incarcerating myself indoors. On a fairly quick recce around the garden this morning I only found a handful of the larger bees, 9°C with a piercing wind-chill being simply too cold for the little guys to be able to function. While I continue to believe that it isn’t possible to get bored with Hairy-footed Flower Bees, I concede that there’s a certain sameiness to a succession of photos of them with their heads in pulmonaria flowers, so I’m happy to announce that some of them are now favouring the freshly blooming Mahonia aquifolia as well. And if there’s a cuter thing than a Plumpie flying with his toes turned out, I certainly didn’t run across it today.
This evening I watched a fascinating programme on BBC 4 (currently on the iPlayer if you’re in the UK) called Chauvet: Humanity’s First Great Masterpiece, about the Paleolithic wall paintings in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche region of France. This site has never been open to the public, because of the degradation caused to the wall art at Lascaux and Altamira by water vapour and carbon dioxide from the breath of thousands of visitors – but as with those sites, a detailed replica has been built and can be visited. While scientists and art experts will no doubt continue to bicker over the precise dating of these paintings, I don’t really care how many thousands of years ago they were made – I simply find them incredibly moving.
R: L2, C7, D13.
