Sunday 13th April – Leonardo joins the circus and chris and barbara get released back into the wild

Another Sunday bites the dust.  Here are some things that happened today:

I saw a hummingbird today.  This was very cool.  I am indeed turning into Rolf of the Harris.  We have a hummingbird feeder on our deck.  I haven’t seen any activity from any birds until this morning when one flew up looking hopeful then was sadly disappointed when it realised we are from Glenfield and Blue Peter never showed you how to make a hummingbird cake, only a lard filled seed pie for starving English birds.  I will investigate in the hope that in a few days I will wake up to a tribe of hummingbirds getting fat off whatever it is hummingbirds eat, probably some kind of nectar.  Perhaps they eat bees as well, which is why they hum.  It would also explain the fact that they never keep still.  It’s all the bees bouncing about in their tummies doing the bee dance.

The kids went out for the day with nana, her friend and her friend’s grandaughter who is the same age as Tilly.  They went to some beach or other and had a picnic.  They arrived back at five this evening absolutely sodden and filthy and with buckets of pet crabs.  Jason was not best pleased about the fact that they had been allowed to keep the crabs.  I feel that the crabs were also not best pleased that they were allowed to be kept either.  We didn’t mention it to Nana who looked rather sandy, very exhausted and delighted to be getting shot of her little charges.  We felt that she had had quite enough to contend with for one day.

Matilda had a crab called Fred, Tallulah had many, two of whom she had named Chris and Barbara, which was interesting.  As soon as Nana disappeared into the distance to have a well earned rest, Jason hopped into the car and made the girls go down to the beach with him to release Chris, Barbara and Fred back into the wild.  There were many tears and now Tallulah is plotting the day when she will create and run her own crab aquarium.  I suppose it makes a change from the chick hotel.  I do have sneaking sympathy with the kids, as the crabs were very cool, but I could also see that keeping them on a warm verandah in two inches of luke warm sea water with a rock for shelter wasn’t going to keep the crabs happy for very long, and releasing live crabs with a fond farewell is infinitely preferable to having several tear filled crab funerals over the next few days.

Because we only had Oscar for most of the day and he is still shattered due to his general growing, teething and violent bouts of activity he spent a lot of time in bed, and so did we.  Actually I never made it as far as bed, falling asleep on the sofa with a hot water bottle under my crippled neck.  It was much better when I woke up this morning, then much worse and now it’s much better again.  I’m hoping it will be healed by tomorrow as we want to hire those bikes while the weather is still good.  It’s hard to balance a hot water bottle on a bike and I tend to be quite tetchy when being driven over sleeping policemen in a car due to the bouncing on my neck muscles.  I can’t imagine that riding a mountain bike is going to be any more sympathetic to a cripple like me.

We snuck off at lunch time to eat at The Med Grill in Royal Oak.  I’ve been there before about seven years ago and remember it as being not particularly kid friendly, but rather delicious.  This was borne out by today and we were glad we only took Oscar.  They did have high chairs, but no kids menus, no crayons or colouring and looks of horror from the other diners when Oscar paraded in proudly with his triumphal shout of ‘din nah!’ once more.  Much to my delight they didn’t have chicken nuggets either.  I really, really hate chicken nuggets with a passion.  When I am world dictator I am going to ban them, and anyone found cooking, eating or supplying them will be incarcerated with a year’s supply of fresh vegetables and a portrait of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

They did manage to do us a child’s size portion of pasta, which he hoovered up along with some rosemary foccacia bread, several of my prawns and scallops from my seafood fettucine and large amounts of his father’s burger and fries, so he acquitted himself admirably and only got a bit tetchy when the pudding was rather slow in coming.  I had great sympathy with him.  It was worth waiting for though.  It was dark chocolate torte with vanilla ice cream.  My only complaint was that the cream it came with came out of a can, which was a bit down market.  Why anyone would choose to eat cream out of an aerosol can rather than freshly whipped, or preferably clotted cream is beyond me.  I could understand it if you were someone like Banksy I suppose.  He makes a living using things out of spray cans.  I have visions of him living on a skateboard eating cans of cheez whizz and squirty cream as he cunningly defies the law.  Hopefully he won’t get his paints and his dinner mixed up after a few pints.  That would be a bit unfortunate.

So, that’s it.  I’m reading another book about Leonardo Da Vinci, and then I’m done with school books for a while, which is quite exciting.  Having said that, the Leo book is very thick and I keep falling asleep, so I may not actually get it finished before we leave.  It’s not that it’s not interesting.  It’s actually quite well written, it’s just intensely soporific.  I think it’s the density of the type or something.  After about twenty pages my eyes begin to clang shut.  I must make more of an effort though.  I really want to read something fun for once. 

I have realised that despite being over five hundred pages long, so far most of what anyone knows about Leonardo is made up, at least for the first twenty odd years of his life.  There’s a lot of Time Team type history going on: ‘If you look at this 3mm shard of pot you can see that it would have actually been a giant amphorae encrusted with diamonds and owned by a man called Dave who had a chariot, three horses and a wife called Millicent, and here’s our computer recreation of it.’  It’s quite entertaining, but leads me to believe that I am as qualified as anyone else to write a book about the early life of Leonardo, and in fact may well do so:

Leonardo was born in a small bucket, one of twelve midget children who were employed in a travelling circus, as a troupe known as ‘the flying da vincis’.  His mother was a bearded lady called Eric and his father was a flea circus owner and tightrope walker by night and an arc welder by day.  Leonardo ironically ran away from the circus at the age of five, smuggled out of the big top in a woman’s jam sandwich.  His great dream was to be a florist and after washing off the jam and taming a wild bear which he used as transport, he moved to Florence and was apprenticed to Big Jesse boy Mario, the leading florist of the day.

So.  That’s a start.  About as true as anything else I’ve read so far.  I will continue the story at a later date.  Now I hear Ray Mears and the kettle calling.