Duncan Harley

There’s a forecast for rain tonight, but I doubt if it will come to much, and the Chinese folk next-door have been chucking rubbish into my front garden. Lucy of course is mainly oblivious and is tucked up in the shed. It has a black-felted roof and is splendidly warm despite the fairly obvious clutter. At some rotund age or ever she is quite entitled. “Do you know how old I am” she purrs as the vitamin-enhanced cat-soup goes down.  As I say, she can do more or less as she wants in her dotage. My son says she is 22. I disagree and suspect a year older. The railway station cat at Aberdeen lived to 26, but Lucy probably doesn’t really care about such niceties. Last week, and despite her age, she took lumps out of a local tom, and I don’t blame her. I may yet set her on the Chinese next door – that is, if one is allowed to even say such things nowadays. They, the Orientals, are probably very very very fine folk. But chucking stuff into a neighbour’s patch kind of makes a moc...

A friend posted a splendid video onto FB this week. Titled ‘a murder of crows’ it set me thinking about collective nouns.   A bank of monitors, a range of mountains, a troop of mushrooms, a rope of onions and a coterie of orchids immediately sprang to mind. Then came a ream of paper, a budget of papers, a string of pearls and of course a pod of peas. A phantasmagoria of phantoms and that collective-term an anthology of poems followed close behind – and why wouldn’t they after all. It set me thinking about a visit to the high-land of Tibet a few eons ago. After a good few frustrating days in Nepal awaiting a visa – my partner of the time had somehow alerted the Chinese authorities to the possibility that the trip had a hidden political agenda, which it did not – and despite the best possible planning, the prospect of entry to the land of the Yeti seemed already to be in jeopardy. This was a shame since I had simply thought that we were off to experience a holiday in a magical ...