Our Garden, the Fox and Boris.

There's a little mouse who lives in our garden; it lives under an old dilapidated shed, which has a couple of trees between it and our back door. Each day, I put a few nuts down at the bottom of a little wall, and the mouse comes out of his home, runs along a smaller wall, drops down to the ground and up to where the nuts are; then it takes one and scurries back home to its family.

This takes it about five minutes as it must do something to the nut before making the journey back for more. Sometimes one of the squirrels will take all the nuts in one go and then when the mouse returns it finds that they've disappeared.

Poor old mouse aye?

Some days it manages to take them all before the squirrels have their fill. There are plenty of other nuts for the squirrels and the pigeons but they like to take the ones which aren't theirs because they don't know any better.

The birds, robins, dunnocks and the black birds, have another pile of food we put out: wild bird seed, crumbs and suet, all mixed together, and as soon as I come back inside the robin lands within seconds of me closing the door.

When the little dunnock comes over for some food, the robin flies up to about four inches from the ground and makes itself as big as possible by flapping its wings and the dunnock flies away; but it doesn't starve – it comes back later.

The birds, squirrels and mice live in this wild world where they would starve without using their wits. They wouldn't starve without us and it probably makes us feel a lot better than it does them, but they are living in the world where the stronger survive.

Sometimes all the birds, squirrels and mice disappear and the garden is quiet; we look out and it usually means a cat is crossing the garden. Our cat would look at the goings on through the window just as we do but he never went out. 

 

The cat that crosses the garden is the King, at that point, but once in a while, the fox comes in and that cat is nowhere to be seen.

The fox lives between some trees and bushes nearby and she comes in to the garden every day to see what she can eat.

I have put a little video for you to view at the top; my voice sounds a bit breathy as I had to run up the stairs to use the camera and I have also described her as a male; sorry Foxie!

You should be able to see the little wall where the mouse lives too.

It's nice to look at nature once in a while but these animals and birds are nuisances to a lot of other people so they would probably not be very pleased with me for encouraging them.

But that's me.

I look at those animals and I think of how we would survive; most of us can't do that at all. We have big strong people who tread over weaker ones and take from them what they can.

For those who read my last post, who do not live in the UK, Boris the buffoon won the election and stays on as the mayor of London. I didn't vote for him as he doesn't appear, to me, to know what is going on. He has been elected totally because he is a buffoon. 

 

I have seen him in debate and I get the impression that he probably wears big hard brogues and treads over the things he doesn't see and, because he walks and doesn't look down, he does a lot of damage – and that is metaphorically speaking.

When I lived here before, there was no mayor of London and there are no mayors in the rest of the country. There were elections in other cities, the other day, to see if they wanted to have a mayor and only one other city, Bristol, have voted to have one; I'm with the cities who rejected them.

The election in London was a personality contest between two big hitters and a few smaller ones. Boris won by a small majority over Ken Livingstone; Boris is a Conservative and Ken is Labour.

The election of Boris has gone against the national trend as there has been a huge swing to Labour in the local elections.

The Conservatives are making the usual excuses saying that this is a natural thing half way through an administration and in a way they are right. But they are a minority government to start with so where will they end up.

There is also a swing to the left in France and Greece as the people there don't like the austerity policies either. This word austerity is associated with the word asceticism which is a philosophical school of thought which means self-discipline, self-denial, non indulgence. 

Maybe we should start living like monks, growing our own food, and if we can't do that maybe someone will come along and throw us a few nuts and hope that the fox doesn't come along and eat us.

Strange isn't it that in 2008 some top bankers in America were calling home and telling their loved ones to go to the ATM and withdraw as much money as possible as the system was going to break down – this is true as I have heard them say it in interviews; Henry Poulson for one said it.

The problems with the sub-prime mortgages, derivatives and all the other commission at every stage swindles, caused a world financial crisis with the major powers throughout the world and that is what the Conservative Government here have inherited – so it wasn't just the Labour Party's fault.

But the USA have gone from the brink of a total collapse into growth and that is due to spending their way out of the recession just as John Maynard-Keynes advocated and just as the Labour Party would have done if they'd have been re-elected.

And the animals in the garden have no idea of what is going on in the world; neither have the young children who will be denied education because of the austerity measures but do you know something – children cannot wait for their education it has to come at a certain time in their lives so in twenty years time, when those children cannot find jobs and can't pay their taxes, when they are living on welfare it will be this government’s fault; just as Thatcher's children are experiencing now.