Is anyone out there having problems with PayPal, I am not getting confirmation emails and it is very concerning and they are being about as helpful as an extremely dead donkey. I may have to remove the option of using them soon. And what is even more annoying is that they are not admitting the fault is theirs, which it most definitely is. They are going to be in big trouble if they don’t fix it before December that is for sure.

The British Airways advert that is showing at the moment takes me back to the day I flew back to the UK with the birds, June 13^th 200. The shots of the huge jumbo jet makes me remember sitting in the cockpit of the enormous plane with the tiny window at the front, smoothly racing down the runway at Atlanta airport and taking off into the rising sun with all my birds, my dogs and my life, flying back to something that I had no idea if I could deal with, and no home to go to. It was a memorable and unforgettable moment.

I see that that idiot Robin Page is at it again, - Time to prey on predators – in his country column in the Telegraph, if I were a farmer I would be ashamed of him, although I am not convinced he actually is one. Interesting that they show a drawing of a Sparrow-hawk rather than a photo and then a photo of a non-indigenous species of animal that is frequently hunted and shot because of the damage it does. I wish he would learn a little about wildlife because he sure as hell does not know what he is talking about, but then he is very short, perhaps that explains it! I wonder if he gets paid for that rubbish.

I just filled in a form called the million women study, I am really bad at forms because the boxes never give the option that I want to give, so I either leave it blank or put in my own! Not quite sure about the question of how many bowel movements I have a week, that depends entirely on if I have been to India or not and the answers would be extremely variable. Loved the one about how many units of alcohol I drank in my 20’s 40’s and 60’s, I put ‘are you serious – who the hell knows’! And I suspect they are going to be somewhat interested in my diet – breakfast cereal – NO!

However I am feeling very virtuous because I have gone through my various in trays and cleared as much as I can before going to India (and increased bowel movements!) It is looking much healthier now, with only the usual things that I want to get done, but never manage, they get to be old friends in the end.

It was a glorious day on Sunday, Simon is back, and Holly and things are getting back to normal, we had lovely visitors, many of them now good friends and the birds flew brilliantly. On the Saturday evening wee went to a fireworks display that Laurence, a friend of Richards did, Richard was the vital assistant, it was very very impressive, I have never been to one other than the ones we do here, the only thing was I forgot to take my camera which is now annoying me!

I have got to the point where I think that R and D (research and development) departments should not be allowed. Last year we put in a water heater in the weighing room, it is small and it has a tap that apparently is the relief valve as well. Remembering that hot water expands and so it needs somewhere to expand, well the idiot that designed this system thought it would be a good idea to have the water expand through the tap. So we were told not to turn the tap off fully, so that the water could dribble out and dribble it did, almost permanently. Well that might be fine in a household with one person, but it sure as hell does not work where up to twenty different people may use the tap. To start with you have no idea where to stop in turning off the tap, where is too far???? Its like giving directions to get somewhere and stating that if you get to the roundabout you have gone too far, by which time it is too late! I think it is a clever ploy because the flaming tap is £150, and we would need one about every nine months. However we are changing the system to get rid of the bloody tap, although it is turning out to be immensely more complicated than I would like.

We got a lot done today, although I found it a frustrating one, and still have not ridden Mollie, we cleaned and re-perched and painted all the owl enclosures in the small falcon block, made room for a pair of Mottled Owls that are coming, and moved the kestrels around so we could put the two new pairs of Lesser Kestrels in there. They are not in the best of condition feather wise and so need to be in a nice safe, secure, dry and warm aviary, which they now are. Had another injured wild buzzard in yesterday as well, they are nearly always males, I wish I knew why.