Rotating, waiting - forever

I got my first vaccination (Astra-Zeneca) Wednesday morning.  The jab was done almost without me noticing; I've had worse off bramble or dog-rose thorns. Coming back in the taxi I saw my first muntjac of the year, on the Parkway verge: the tiniest antlers, anxious-looking (you would be, next to that traffic). Hopefully I'll see him grazing from my window before too long. Later in the day I found half a robin's egg and brought back home. I just found  out its colour is sometimes called lost egg blue. Forty-eight hours on I've had no side-effects. Touch wood there'll be none coming. I pulled something in my back the other day and that's made for a couple of long tedious nights. It's migrating towards my waist.

Currently reading Nancy Arrowsmith's A Field Guide to the Little People which thankfully isn't twee as the title suggests. Its wights and goblins aren't averse to dropping the odd four-letter word. Some of Arrowsmith's choices don't quite fit. my idea of "fey": - basilisks, satyrs and selkies? Hmm.  There seem to be an unusual amount of fey women  whose breasts are long enough to throw over their shoulders. I guess that's warm in winter? Assuming it wasn't women who came up with those tales. It's illustrated by Hans Edelmann who did the art direction for Yellow Submarine.  I wish Mervyn Peake had been alive and working in the seventies; just imagine what he would have created for this! This passage on English fairies made me shout But what about Arden?*

They are known throughout England, although they are less numerous in the Midlands.

Pfft. Anyway, it's a good book. A paperback of Peake's Shapes and Sounds came through the letterbox yesterday and that's next. The cover illustration's extraordinary, drawn in the Blitz - a mother made of rubble holding a baby to her: "half-masonry, half-pain."

*Yes, I know Midsummer Night's Dream is set in an Athenian wood. But I'm with Angela Carter that it's just a stand-in for Arden.