In the afternoon I wandered over to Richmond Park to see if I could track down any of the parrots mentioned by
sbisson here. He definitely had better weather for his trip than I did; it started raining almost as soon as I left the house. Nevertheless I found the feeders on which he'd seen the parrots, only to see the two who were currently inhabiting the feeders fly off as soon as I got within photography distance (admittedly not very far on a gloomy, damp day). Those, and two more, flew around the area for the twenty minutes or so I waited for them to come back, but didn't return to the feeders themselves. The feeders have an RSPB crib sheet in front of them which shows the types of birds you might expect to see there, but it omits parrots altogether ;)There were a lot of squirrels around, looking for nuts and the like. One of them seemed set to run up my trouser leg in an attempt to find some nuts -- wrong gender, mate! -- and he was one of eight I could see without turning anything except my head.
Returned to finish off some odds and sods of work, and then began the Cooking. So far: mushroom risotto (for dinner), the dough for rosemary and cheese biscuits (for Boxing Day), completed banana bread, pastry for mince pies made. Still need to make and cook the mince pies themselves, and then there's a batch of choc chip cookies to do... but I like cooking, so it's no great hardship. Not given that we have a dishwasher, anyhow.
