From Gordon Barnett…check him out, his work is fantastic , who has been one of the great bonuses of my daughter’s “alliance” with the S family:

…and that’s not someone whom you’ve been married to for many years.

To some birders, at some stratospheric level which I will never reach, the following statement makes immediate sense:

When we lived in Kolkata, my mother put my brother and me in a tiny school nearby (five minutes’ walk from home) called Swarna. Swarna (“ Su-varna “ or “good colour”, meaning, “gold”) was run by a Telugu lady called Mrs Sundaram (I never knew her own name), a lady who had been widowed with two daughters. The school was, and when I last visited Kolkata, still is, situated in a very beautiful old mansion on Rash Behari Avenue, with a small gate opening into Jatin Das Road. I never knew how beautiful the old mansion was until I revisited it in my memories.

Am just uploading the weekend pics to my photobucket site to post later, but meanwhile, here are some lovely words that I read as a child and have stuck with me: