Sunset over Basford, Nottingham

We had a good afternoon yesterday, eating chocolate brownies in our new kitchen and chatting with my sister as I looked out of the window and watched a red kite overhead. I’m still amazed by this. They were almost extinct in Wales when I was a kid, and non-existent in England and Scotland. We also saw magpies. They are less amazing – you never saw them in the eastern counties when I was a kid, but there were plenty in Lancashire when we went north to see family. The same was true of buzzards. Over the last twenty or thirty years both species have managed to spread into parts of the UK where you never used to see them.

In some ways, this is good to see. They are both interesting species and the expansion of the buzzard suggests that nature is restoring itself after the insecticide problems of the 1960s. On the other hand, the magpies are one of the factors in the reduction in garden bird species. Having said that, there are a lot of other reasons for the problems with garden birds, including garden chemicals and viruses. Cats have been blamed too, but we always had plenty of garden birds despite having two cats.

Sunset over Sherwood

It used to be nice to go north. First the magpies would start, then possibly a buzzard, and finally, as we got onto the moors, they cry of the curlew.  Now magpies and buzzards are commonplace, there is no longer any excitement about seeing them, and there is real sadness that the curlew is hardly ever heard these days. Kites, on the other hand, having been reintroduced in parts of Yorkshire, are very common on part of the journey.

Unfortunately, the mood didn’t last. Today I had an email from the solicitor. I had emailed them a few days ago to give them a gentle nudge and was not impressed by the contents of their reply. They now require sight of certified copies of two documents relating the the deaths of my parents. They must have seen these several times already in the work they have done for us (but then they still needed to see ID for me despite having seen it on numerous occasions over the last few years. They had not, at any time, asked to see these documents when we started the transfer, so I’m not sure why they have suddenly become necessary. They also want to see copies of my bank statements. But they have already seen copies of my bank statements, and didn’t query them at the time.

Strange how a feeling of serene well-being can be so abruptly and completely brought to nothing by something as simple as a few words and an injection of high-priced inefficiency.

Sunset over Screveton