Elephants on the
Roof and Other Exciting Things
From my house on rough and stormy days, I can hear the
crashing of the waves. One weekend I went out to nearby Brenton Point to see
what I could see of it, closer up. As always I lamented the fact that the great
coast defence works around the point (built in the late 1930s as the US was
coming out of the great Depression partly to provide jobs for the locals) made
access to the beach a bit of a challenge. And there were notices galore warning
people to stay off the rocks (which are ignored of course). But to be fair I can see why. The sea is
battering the defences, solid as they are,
to pieces and there are nasty iron remnants of old walkways all over the
place that could do the unwary serious harm.
Nonetheless it's frustrating looking down but not being able to get at
great baulks of timber on the beach that would be really useful for bridging
the ditch at Wansdyke.
I wasn't alone in my wanderings. There's
an endless fascination about a turbulent sea lashing at the coast. Quite a few
people were trying to capture the drama
of the waves with phones and cameras including a nice young lady from Delaware with lots of
hair. She asked me, as an evident local, for some directions to the nearest
lighthouse, and then said that I didn't sound as though I was from around here
either. I owned up to coming from the UK. She said she hadn't been there but to
make up for it offered that she had been to Prague. So that was alright. And it
was awesome that I was teaching at the Naval War College. We parted with mutual expressions of esteem.
Tourists
like her are beginning to reappear in Newport and some of the Mansions have
started opening up for the season, which really only begins in May/June time.
But the weather isn't all that accommodating. Strong winds brought down several
big trees along the Avenue, closing it for a while. One big branch came off
just over the fence which would have made quite a difference to my plans had it
fallen ten feet this way. The squirrels are out in force pairs of them chasing
each other around in the tree and lumbering over my roof - hence the elephants. Rats with tails they
might be, but fun to watch if not listen to. Birds are appearing too. I put up
an improvised feeder but had to come up with a serious strategy to keep the
squirrels from raiding it. Great success with a better shot of a Tufted
Titmouse, a nice little thing with button black eyes.
However the pesky
squirrels are evidently not ornithologists.
Their final victory came last week as they not only raided the feeder
but stole the whole thing. How they did
it I cannot imagine, as it was nearly 12 inches long and 4" wide and had a
great heavy sea shell wedged into the top as an improvised cover. Moreover it
was suspended from a high tree branch swinging in free air with no other
branches nearby. I even used a long
piece of fishing line I found on the beach to hang it, thinking there was no
way squirrels they could climb down it. I've looked everywhere to see where the
feeder ended up and cannot locate it. Game set and match to the rats with tails
I am afraid.
Some
passing excitements too. A big dinner with all colleagues at the Victoria
Military Society which they model as
closely as they can to a British Military Mess Dinner, and everyone who can
turns up in uniform - some quite bizarre - the Honourable Artillery Company of
Massachusetts and so forth. I squeezed into mine too at the earnest
representations of my colleagues and it wasn't too much of a disaster. I could
eat my roast beef of old England at any rate . The beef was paraded around the throng with
the inevitable piper of course. It was all quite weird.
Talking
of weird, this is what most sane people would
think aptly describes what I thought the biggest excitement for me over the
past several weeks. First though I
should say that to have a change from things naval I sometimes indulge myself
with dabbling in family history. It really isn't easy, although I think when
ordinary people have access to Artificial Intelligence family history will
become much, much simpler. Tracing all possible permutations in family relationships
is hugely complicated. I think in fact it's the most intellectually challenging
thing I have ever done. I had one breakthrough last year when I realised that
one William Till was another's father. With a lot of really complicated
reasoning I managed to construct a possible family tree going back to 1674, but
there was a lot of reasoned surmise (one step up from guesswork) in it. The magic moment for me suddenly came
when I spotted the date (1787) and place of the death of yet another William
Till. Since his age had been recorded, I instantly realised who he must be and
that validated the whole thing. It
wasn't inspired guesswork any more. It was actually true ! All that agonising had paid off ! Wow...
Well,
at least it keeps me off the streets.
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