Painted Lady Nottingham
Julia thinks I’m hard at work and by now, I expect, thinks that I have done the washing up and am well on my way to compiling the list of things that need doing for the move. She has, I admit, had some help in forming these thoughts.
Having had one of those husband/wife heart to heart chats about how we seem to be making little progress towards moving, I decided I needed to take action.
This took the form of making a list of all the things I need to do, and prioritising them (with her particular concerns near the top of the page). I then left this around the house last night in places I knew she would see it.
It’s not my own idea, it is, as you may know, a similar thing to Meinerzhagen’s Haversack Ruse, or even Operation Mincemeat, though obviously without the submarine or dead body. Meinerzhagen has come down through history as a liar, fraudster, thief and, possibly a wife murderer, so it’s possible that his story about the haversack could be exaggerated, but it’s a great story. I’m also not a great one for revising history or applying modern perspectives. He may have been a homicidal maniac, a plagiarist and a fantasising self-publicist but he was a good naturalist at one time (as you can see from the fact that he had a wild hog and a genus of bird lice named after him). If it hadn’t been for the ornithological fraud, I wouldn’t have a problem. And the wife. Murdering wives is always wrong. Misleading them with false lists in notebooks is, in case you are wondering, I consider to be a grey area.
Pie from Botham’s of Whitby
In case you don’t want to follow the links – the Haversack Ruse was a plan to mislead the Turks in Palestine about British plans by having an Intelligence Officer allow himself to be almost captured and drop a blood-stained haversack with confidential documents as he escaped. Operation Mincemeat was much the same but more successful.
Photographs from September 2019.
Bee in a Nasturtium. Leaves and flowers are peppery and edible and can be used instead of watercress.