shewhomust | Five things for the equinox

The milk thief has struck again: our milk has been lifted for the second time within a week. Other people have been the target on other days, and the people across the road (who one day lost five of their eight pints) are pretty fed up. They have installed a security camera, which managed to see nothing this morning, neither the delivery nor the heist.

Not everyone in Ajo likes the new paint job on their lighthouse, and I have some sympathy with them: it's certainly striking. But not much, because, as a quick search on Flickr makes clear it wasn't all that exciting before!

We watch more television in lockdown than we did before, but it's mostly quizzes and the odd documentary: we aren't drawn to all the must-see drama that gets so much praise. Last Friday, though, the BBC (for reasons of its own: it was Rosh Hashanah? because it was directed by Alan Parker?) showed Jack Rosenthal's The Evacuees, and we caught up with that over the weekend. It draws on Rosenthal's own childhood experiences, and one result is that it's a bit episodic. The boys are sent away from home and eventually they return: here are some things that happened in between, and here are some people they happened to. Sometimes I wanted footnotes: for example, the schoolmaster escorts his class from Manchester to Blackpool, and then leads them along the street, knocking on doors and asking people to take them in, and, really? And where are the girls? (Aren't there any girls?) There's a curious double-vision of the past, too, viewing 1940 through the lens of 1975 - and the joy of a young Maureen Lipman.

GirlBear posted me a puffin:

She bought it at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, and she sent it to me, and I pressed it out and slotted it together and there it is. With a little help from its friends it just about stands up!

Next I shall have to see if I can hatch the puffin egg D. brought me from Iceland.

This afternoon we did the sort of shopping where you go to one shop after another and do a number of errands: this has become very unusual for us! durham_rambler was keen to try the new weigh shop which has opened next door to his favourite beer shop, and to stock up on light bulbs from Wilko (that's about as opposite as two kinds of shop can get.