Weird 'Stuff'

So I was sitting at my desk when I heard scrabbling noises on the roof above me. This is not unusual. We live next to a park in an area surrounded by two golf courses and three wetland reserves all within a ten to fifteen minute - not too brisk - walk so there is a huge array of birdlife. Among these is a clan of Australian ravens which often land on the roof or settle in the large marri tree in my front yard where they finish off whatever they're found to eat - then drop the leftovers all over the yard. These are mostly bones filched from rubbish bins and which we have to search for on a regular basis so the Virgo's dogs - frequent visitors to our place - don't get them. Along with chop and steak bones, chicken bones and leg bones from lamb roasts we also find the sad remnants of baby birds they've killed - they killed and ate all but two of the seven wild ducklings that hatched in my neighbours' front garden last year, and little hollowed out egg shells they're snaffled from nests.

One little dog we had hated them with a passion and they were one of very few things that set her off barking, They would sit just out of her reach and stare at her and send her into a frenzy. For all these reasons we don't encourage them around here but they are very intelligent birds so they often settle on the roof where they take a positive delight in letting us know we can't do anything to move them on.

Anyhow this morning after a few minutes of thumps and scrabbles something fell past the window and landed with a noisy splat on the path so I went out to see what it was. It turned out to be a hen's egg shell, plenty much cleaned of any residue. I have to assume it came from someone's bin since as far as I know there are no hens being kept around here at the moment. Bin raids are much more likely on the weekend when some bins are full to the brim and I've watched as the ravens flip bin lids open but whether that's the case I guess we'll never know.

So that's one of today's mysteries. Another revolves around a dream I had yesterday when I was sick and had to go back to bed. What was special about this dream? Well I dreamed I was talking to my friend Annie and the discussion was entirely logical and rational - well, if you ignore that we were in my teenage bedroom along with two toddlers and a baby playing with a Jack Russell in the corner. The weird was that the actual conversation made complete sense even after I woke up instead of dissipating into nonsense as soon as I came to as dreams are prone to do.

And finally when I went out to hang out the washing this morning I saw that the Spanish bluebells are in flower - nothing odd there apart from them being about two weeks early, but then I found the grape hyacinths are also in flower and that is odd because they have already flowered once eight weeks ago. Then there's the cyclamens that I bought in flower back in May and which died back and are also into a second flush of flowers, something has never happened before in my garden. So everything is going mad.