The end of August

Nearly the last event of August was a visit to Stamford Green Pond to check the levels again.

Coots, ducks and geese had reappeared, after their absence when the pond was more or less dry. For some reason, leaving just the moorhens.

BH has been reporting on a pair of Egyptian geese and their brood, and it may be them on the island in the middle, although zoom is not very helpful on this occasion. Hopefully back for another look tomorrow.

Gemini had a good story to tell about the moorhens, snapped above. Moorhens like damp mud, coots don't. A story which is corroborated in part at reference 1, although one could be a bit picky on one or two points.

I have learned that both coots and moorhens can fly perfectly well.

Home to attend to a lentil lunch, as snapped above.

Proceedings started about 11:30, with 8oz of lentils well washed in cold water, then added to 2 pints of clean water and brought to the boil. Boiled for between 5 and 10 minutes, then adding some sticks of cross-cut celery and dropping down to simmer.

On the side, prepared the flavouring: butter, onions and an elderly leek, fortified by most of a baton of saucisson from Sainsbury's out of Bastides. This last being much easier to peel than the slightly posher version, from the same company, offered by Waitrose. Added to the lentils about 10 minutes before the off, just after 13:00.

Plus brown rice and white cabbage.

Good stuff, as ever, with hardly a dead fly to be seen. Tracking down the previously noticed vegetarian origins of which is left to the reader. Origins which were provided, as I recall, by Gemini.

PS 1: goslings flying off to find some proper water does not fit with the Gemini story very well, and there are plenty of foxes about. How old does a gosling have to be before it can fly? Are the bumps and bubbles to the left of the geese on the zoom something else altogether?

PS 2: Gemini suggests that it takes goslings around three months to fly. I shall have to quiz BH on when exactly they appeared. Maybe the foxes had them after all.

PS 3: I read in today's FT that one Chris Wormald has received considerable compensation for his rather crude and very public dismissal from the Civil Service. He may have been badly treated by past PM Starmer, but if Gemini is right that the deal he has negotiated is in addition to his fine Civil Service pension, I think he has been rather greedy: settling for half a mill would not have looked anything like as bad.

But then again, Gemini also tells me that he will have to pay tax on the compensation, so he will actually net around half the headline figure. Optics still bad though, as public relations people might say.

Search says that the FT did not mention the tax angle, which is perhaps wrong on their part.

Something to provide food for thought at the better class of bar. Perhaps not TB.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorhen.

Reference 2: Keir Starmer approved £860,000 pay-off for sacked civil service chief: Settlement for Chris Wormald far exceeded standard contractual entitlements, former PM was told - George Parker, Financial Times - 2026. 

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