Monday 8 March 2010

Morepork Through the Windscreen (nearly)

A long dull day at school in the company of dull Travel & Tourism girls who see no point in learning anything that won't earn them NCEA credits (Chile? Haiti? What have they got to do with me? Why should I know where Greece is?) and would prefer to just waste time rather than say, look into an atlas and discover something - very depressing. Lumpen Epsilons.

But then it got much better, with High Tea at the Langham in the city as a guest of VisitBritain, all of us wearing silly (or elegant) hats in honour of the Mad Hatter. Yummy coloured sandwiches, little fancies, scones and cream, with bubbles before and excellent tea with (albeit in bags - but then so they do at the Savoy, tch). It was a splendid way to get us sugared up for the hi-saturation 3D colour of 'Alice in Wonderland' at Imax, the Cheshire Cat hovering in our faces, the Bandersnatch looming with excessive numbers of teeth.

Good fun, if rather silly - so such a shame that the evening ended with probable tragedy on the high road, when on the way home an owl swooped across the road and whumped into the car - or vice versa. Poor little thing, it's a morepork, named for its call, small and brown with huge eyes, and very cute. It's tucked up in a shoe box full of holes, and if it's alive in the morning, I'll take it to the Bird Lady in Brown's Bay; and if it's not, I won't.

We saw a display of owls in Abergavenny, one of them very like the morepork, in the middle of a pedestrian shopping street: unexpected, but charming. It's being so serious that makes them so sweet.

UPDATED: This lovely bird too has joined the choir invisible, alas.

2 comments:

the queen said...

Bird had a concussion! You were supposed to walk her around and around in circles and be sure she didn't fall asleep. Or, it all could have been due to a drug overdose, as she was an attractive bird.

TravelSkite said...

Oh dear, yes of course, its eyes shouldn't have been drooping like that at 11pm - it was an owl! I should have taken the poor thing mousing till dawn. Tch.

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