Footnote

By way of a footnote to our holiday, I notice the breakfast when I took two fried egg sandwiches on white. that is to say two sandwiches, each consisting of two slice of white from Tesco's and one fried egg. Fried hot in some kind of vegetable oil, hot enough that the edges went brown. The first time that I have done such a thing for a while  - and probably the last.

Perhaps it was a reward for solving the washing machine problem - which turned out to be absence of power. This being a challenge because the relevant plug was behind the machine and one could only get at it by pulling the machine out from its hole. We never did get it all the way back in again.

This was followed up by a visit to Quarr Abbey, partly to enjoy the pigs which we had enjoyed the previous year and noticed at reference 2. Probably not the same pigs a year later, but the same sort of idea. And so it turned out: lots of pigs and piglets to be seen and admired.

A rather too heavy cake with my tea in the cafeteria, probably not helped by the earlier fried egg sandwiches.

But a good sit in the Abbey church. A place which wears well: a properly solemn place in which to conduct solemn business. And makes a welcome change from the more ornate style favoured by the Catholic revival churches in London. The snap above being turned up by Bing at reference 1.

The chapel under the altar was shut for some gardening reason. Perhaps trees were being attended to on the path around the back.

After which we failed at Bembridge, as already noticed at reference 3. But we did walk to the hut, which seemed rather further than might appear from the snap above. Nothing of note to be seen on the water on this occasion, a couple of cormorants apart. Didn't make it to the goose at St. Helen's either. Of reference 4.

PS: Thursday evening: a rather dim bird on the table under the bird feeder outside the kitchen window around 18:00. Dim enough that it was still there when I got back with the monocular. About the size of a robin, a bit fat, brown all over and with a pointed beak. First thought was a sparrow, but the beak was all wrong. Second thought was a juvenile robin, a bit fluffed up with down. Not spotted, but otherwise filled the bill. Too young to know that people peering at them were probably bad news. I might say in passing that the RSPB website was as useless as ever for bird identification: whatever do they do with all the money that old ladies leave them apart from buying up marshland and erecting notices on it about all the things that are forbidden? Thinking with my fingers, maybe they ought to fund a campaign to bear down on the number of cats. That might do something for the bird population.

References

Reference 1: https://onthewight.com/quarr-abbey-launch-a-new-cd-of-gregorian-chant/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/08/pigs.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-ones-that-got-away.html.

Reference 4: https://thegoosebooks.com/.