Racing pigeon

On Motueka Bridge at the weekend there was a grey rag on the path, crumpled up, which on stopping (one always stops to inspect grey rags. It's like the citizens of Shepshed who stop and gather round in a circle to watch a hand grenade. "I thought it was a hedgehog" said Ms Elaine Smithers (36) of 48 Bennett Street, according to the Loughborough Echo. - This happened a good fifteen years ago, and somewhere-or-other I kept the newspaper cutting. - You may take it that there isn't a great deal to do in Shepshed) turned out to be a comatose racing pigeon with faint trickle of blood from his beak. I thought he might have been hit by a car. He'd lost several feathers and I brought him home expecting him to die. For two days he sat unmoving in a little pigeonhouse, ignoring both water and wheat. He's now perked up, wanders round the garden, comes into the workshop, and betrays a particular attraction to the angle grinder. However this morning he flew erratically into the kitchen window and retired for the rest of the day back to his house, presumably with something of a headache. - If that other pigeon is anything to go by, he'll spend a three week holiday with us and then vanish, one hopes to his owner somewhere in the North Island.

NZ-PUKE-2012-0168 with a bit of a headache. The close observer will deduce that the hens roost in the tree just above his right shoulder.

In shipping news, now the rain is over what I have discovered to be the protracted business of gluing all the joints has resumed. Epoxy hardens quite quickly in the sun. This is so dull a business that a single photo will have to suffice. It's of the overlapping wooden joint of the side planks, which worried me enough to chisel away all the overlap, and the worrying was rewarded by my finding hardly any glue underneath. 

The photo is rubbish but if you have a vivid imagination you can see the glue that isn't there. I can't take another photo cos it's now been replaced with glass fibre.