Last week was freezing and the birds were lined up pleadingly. I suspect they got together and asked the robin to sing its heart out on top of the arch over the gate to get us to break out with another round of fat balls.

Today, there is just a touch of spring in the air – not to be relied on of course – but it does remind you that it won’t be long before they are dashing about with estate agent prospectuses in their beaks looking for a nice place to build starter homes.

The Virginia creeper was a fave with the blackbirds and one year we woke up to find that the bit near our bedroom window had collapsed, exposing a nest of startled blackbird fledglings. Nick propped it back up, and all was well.

The following year though, we had building work done and they had to make do with the climbing Hydrangea – but everyone has to downsize now and then.

We put one of those nest boxes with a camera in it (a nice Christmas present from the son) in just the place they used.

Not a dicky bird as they say.

Nests built above and below it, but an assiduous avoidance of being watched.

The back hedge though is the garden’s housing estate with numerous sparrows and tits in residence.

They make a great racket so I presume there are neighbour boundary disputes and the avian equivalent of kids of bikes and BBQs in the back garden.

The only time it is ever quiet is when the Sparrow Hawk comes over. It is an impressive sight to see every little sparrow face clamp its beak shut and dive for cover.

The Sparrow Hawk uses the back hedge like a tapas bar  – but then its name is rather a give away.

Anyway, all this is leading to the fact that we have to cut a significant section out of that back hedge if we are to build the platform which will be the basis of our George Clark style Amazing Space.

We have a fabulous view from a ladder perched against that hedge but want something a little more stable and able to accommodate more than one person at once.

I have visions of something which will act as a spare bedroom-cum- study-cum- place to sit on a small verandah watching the Downs.

The man himself is starting out with a platform and a couple of deck chairs.

Either way, if we are to build it, the hedge needs to come down and before the residents start re-building their nests.

I hasten to add , there are plenty of other hedges all round the garden but persuading someone to reduce their recreational space so you can squeeze in a three-chick home next twig, may take some negotiating.

January seems to be a good time to clear out all your old books. Some of course come brown and damp direct from a garage to our shop and thence, very quickly, to a re-cycling dump.

Some come carefully packed in boxes and then I feel more sad about putting them into white sacks and sending them off to the dump – but we really cannot sell the AA Road Atlas of Great Britain published in 1972.

Others bring in say 10 boxes and ask for the boxes back so we have to de-box all the books there and then – never much fun and they usually arrive five minutes before closing time.

Some come in black bags and when someone rings to say they have a lot of books and will we take them and then say they are in black bags, your heart sinks just as you say, ‘Brilliant, thank you, how many is a lot?’ And you are told, ‘ About forty or more feet of them.’

Well the bags came in and there were a lot. But, and this dear reader is a very rare occurrence, they were absolutely brilliant.

Art books. Lots of art books. All in pristine condition and all interesting – and all very saleable. And even more delightful, the woman who brought them in – clearing out her parents’ house – said she had been directed by them to only bring them to the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield and be sure to sign up for Gift Aid (which means we get 25% more on every sale from the Government.)

So, having looked them all up and pricing them, we decided to do a window full of art books and as we were piling them up on the table ready to put in the window, people were buying them left, right and centre.

Usually, January in the bookshop is a quiet month – no one has any money left and books – even second hand ones are not high on the priority list.

This amazing gift to our shop has meant we have had a better January than anyone can remember.

So thank you, whoever you are, for getting the books to us. Thank you to your parents for loving art books, caring for them and making sure they got to us. We are never again going to be as despondent when we get a load of black plastic bags.

The lovely thing about Viennese coffee houses is that they look like they must have done 100 years ago.

There are men of a certain bearing coming in wearing great coats and homburg hats, women in fur coats, couples leaning together and having intense conversations and of course – cake of every kind of confection.

We slipped into one through the lovely arrangement they have of a semi-circular rail holding a curtain so that the cold is kept out when you open the door.

Inside the floor was not really polished, the décor a bit shabby, the waiters in long white aprons, the locals reading the paper and having a ‘melange’ of coffee and hot milk.

We had been sight-seeing and were cold and tired so sitting there in the warmth, watching the locals, was definitely in order.

Coffee houses was where the Viennese have conversations apparently. I am not sure whether they chat about nothing at all at home and keep the real stuff for coffee houses but it looked like that.

And it rubs off.

After a desultory conversation about what to do the next day, we started discussing how the Labour Party should run their election campaign.

‘Ask a nurse’ was the theme.

When bankers say they cannot reduce bonuses, the Labour Party should say they will introduce them to a nurse and then they can try and justify their position to her (or him.)

(And, by the way, can we really believe every banker who got a reduced bonus would up and displace their whole family to Singapore. And even if some of them do, are there no more intelligent people, with or without a physics PhD, who could take over their role?)

Is it fair that private schools get charitable status – I tell you what, ask a teacher in an inner city school.

How fair is the tax system – ask someone on the minimum wage.

Well you get the idea. The sad thing is that I could articulate this plan so much better and so much more convincingly sat in a Viennese coffee house – it must have been the atmosphere.

Perhaps we should send Ed Miliband there, after all it can’t make the current situation any worse.

We have just been to Vienna and a much better trip it was than last time (a really long story which I will add sometime….)

Despite the taxi driver saying we should visit in the Spring when it is lovely, I think Vienna is a wintertime city.

And, do you know what… as we walked back from the restaurant on our first night, it started snowing and by the middle of the night, it was coming down in thick flakes and romantically coating the church opposite.

So, as I set off in the early morning to go to the flea market – of course – I was tramping through the snow past the cathedral and all only my own.

Except for a Petit Walter. A little golf cart time thing with a mini snow plough on the front and a big bag of grit and salt on the back.

He was not alone, there were lots of them whizzing about, doing their business and making Vienna safe for its inhabitants.

Compare and contrast with the sleepy hollow in which we live.

No one would expect Petit Walters (or Small John’s as they might be called) to race around the lanes of the Hartings.

So a few winters ago the Parish Council said they had secured a large pile of grit or salt to be stored nearby and at the first sign of bad weather, piles would be left at strategic points around the lanes and hardy locals could shovel the stuff around.

The weather happened but the grit didn’t.

In a stroppy mood I bearded the Parish Councillor responsible in his lair.

(His lair happens to be the rarely-open carpet shop in the village. Given the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers have long gone – about the same time as the smithy and bank shut up shop – it is strange to find a carpet shop.

We presume, not unreasonably, that it is a front for a Colombian drugs cartel.)

Anyway, back to the main story.

He said that no one had checked whether the grit had been delivered so when they went to look for it, imagine their surprise…..

Our house is a mile or so away from his shop so when he went on to say, ‘ I hear it is bad out your way’, I did feel that he probably spent more time in Columbia than on the icy local lanes.

I would like to be writing a short, clever trenchant piece about freedom of speech, but I have lost the knack.

When I first met my (eventually) best beloved, he was a civil servant and had the flexible views that come with that territory. He was never trenchant, though he was clever.

I had firm views on lots of things – those things that mattered about politics, life, bigots – hand me a glass of wine and I could rant about the rights and wrongs of almost everything.

Of course, they were not necessarily right rants or even well-informed rants, but they were firm.

Now I find myself saying things like, “ Well it is complicated.” Or “ The trouble is for every ‘this’ there is a ‘that.”

He meanwhile, has changed tack significantly and has very firm views on all sorts of stuff.

He tactfully says I have become wise and thoughtful, but I suspect he means wishy-washy and boring.

Is it being buried here in Deepest Sussex and the need to zip the mouth in the face of most people having different politics. Or is it doing nothing much in the way of intellectual activity, and not having to have an opinion you can stand up in the face of a table full of people in your house asking what you think? (Those were the Peckham days.)

So, freedom of speech. What do I think?

I am tempted to leave this thorny issue aisde and set about making supper but that, you see dear reader, is the problem. Displacement activity to avoid thinking.

So, here are some random thoughts.

How many people murdered in Nigeria by Boko Haram does it take to get anywhere near the coverage of Charie Hebdo?

Is it freedom of speech to wear the hajib and if so, why not let French women wear then?

Why does our Prime Minister come back from a freedom of speech march in Paris to tell us we need to have more surveillance and more people locked up?

Those of us on the Left have let the Right claim the ground for what are our values. We have embraced multi-culturism and I think, we need to re-visit what that means and what rights and responsibilities people living and loving and making their home here, have to do, and not do.

When I was young and involved in left politics, I met a lot of people who joined the many groups.

The differences between the SWP and the Communist Party for Great Britain – leave alone the difference between them and the Euro-Comms – were arcane, but immensely important to the people involved.

Getting them together to fight against what was happening in Thatcher’s Britain was like herding cats.

At the time, it felt like those people could just have easily been captured by religion or a cult.

They had found something to belong to. Something to give them the words, the thinking, the comradeship, the way out of all the problems of navigating yourself through thought and action and a daily life which wasn’t all that promising.

And maybe that is the same for those young people who are going out to Syria and coming back.

Actually, now I am getting going, I could go on for a long time – but I must make supper.

I do like snow in my winter. Last year was just wet – even for those of us who don’t live on the Somerset levels.

I sloshed and squelched around the countryside with a dog who looked perpetually damp and miserable – no doubt because she was.

Those times when you are asked to imagine yourself in the ideal time and place for you, the NLP practitioner or whatever, almost always suggests a beach with an azure sea, lapping waves etc etc.

Not for me. My ‘lovely place’ is being inside with a roaring log fire, comfy sofas, nice red wine (even though that is not really my tipple) and snow coming down in large flakes outside.

This did happen the first two winters we were here in deepest Sussex and of course the reality is slightly (and not for the better) different from the fantasy.

So, in the first winter, we had a lovely snowfall and I shoved casseroles into the bottom oven of the aga, got the candles out and laid the fire and was very happy.

The next day dawned bright and clear and cold so we all went out and the dog rolled about and barked and chased and best beloved and I plodded along smiling and feeling very smug about the thought that we could come home to (another) casserole and fire.

And then in the night it snowed again, and the following day dawned bright and clear and cold and we all went out (see paragraph above for an account of day two.)

Day three, likewise.

We can’t get out by car because there are a couple of small hills around us and they have been changed into ice rinks by the 4x4s. We have walked to the village shop and the pub – but in those days we didn’t know anyone so we sat in a corner on our own.

Day four, see above again.

Day five and we could get out and I have never been so pleased to see the bright and giddy lights of Petersfield.

The next year though we had one of those great evenings that are just created out of circumstances. It snowed heavily.

Our neighbour was on his own (wife in London.) Another neighbour was also on his own (wife in Wiltshire – if you don’t need this much information, please skip.) Other neighbours were home but mourning the death of their beloved dog. Other friends in the main village and wouldn’t want to walk out to our hamlet.

But as we had developed the habit of all going to the pub on a Friday, and it was a Friday, I called around offering supper. I knew the next-door neighbour would come, but expected everyone else to decline for one good reason or another.

Imagine my surprise, dear reader, when everyone (except the wife in London) said, “ Great, what time?” (Wife in Wiltshire had a 4×4 and determination.)

I am not a woman to have an empty freezer, a larder bare of all but a few old lentils, a fridge with only beer and gherkins but even so, finding a good supper for nine was a challenge.

(For anyone who wants to know, we had a pie made of a variety of meats, and I found that nice china blackbird to poke its beak up through the pastry crust. Chips and other stuff.)

It was one of those magical times when friends tramp through the snow into a warm kitchen, put their dripping coats to dry, line their boots up near the door, open the wine, sit down to food, tend the fire, stay late and I loved it.

So, I know snow is not great for all sorts of people, I know I am a sucker for this sentimental snow imagery,  but I am still going to go to bed tonight with an (atheist) prayer for snow overnight.

Refugee Action asked that people should write to their MPs. Mine is Andrew Tyrie who is (not surprisingly, a Tory). I have had a great lunch with mates and a browse around the shops in Chichester today but I was awake at 5am and heard stuff on the World Service and was (again) in awe of how many Syrian refugees have been absorbed in neighbouring countries.

We ( the UK ) have take 50 people in the last 3 years…….

In a typical Reluctant Housewife manner, I will be selling preserves I have made, and a few chairs I have re-upholstered (with a good friend) for the Syrian Refugee Fund this year. Some small help ( though the Man says refugees could do with other things than carefully reupholstered chairs…..)

Dear Andrew Tyrie

Or probably more accurately Dear Andrew Tyrie’s assistant,

This is rather a long email and I am sure you get lots.
Me too – I ignore long emails.
You have other things to do.
You have a pretty sure idea of what I might be complaining about.
It is not your area of interest/business/concern
I might well be a Guardian reader and as so ( yes I am ) I won’t vote Tory and so you can easily ignore me in your constituency.

But, I am one of your constituents so you owe me a listening to ( not good grammar but you get the meaning).

I am sure you get a lot of emails asking for you to ‘prevent the flood of immigrants’ into this country. I am a constituent who is asking you to take more – there is of course a difference between illegal immigrants and refugees (and I won’t go into a load of stuff about immigration and the nonsense about how we are overwhelmed by people who are scrounging off our benefits system – I am sure you know well enough that is such a red herring) – but currently, the Conservative Party and some parts of the media do not seem to make a distinction.
In Jordan 1 in 4 of the population is now a Syrian refugee. In Lebanon the ratio is 1 in 3. I am pretty sure you will have seen a piece in The Telegraph today but just in case….

“The number hosted by Lebanon as a ratio of its population would be equivalent to nearly 15 million in France, 32 million in Russia or 71 million in the United States.( interestingly the equivalent number in the uk is not cited)
Turkey hosts the second largest number, with 634,900. And where not so long ago Iraqis travelled across to the border into Syria for refuge, there are now a quarter of a million doing the reverse journey.
The Domiz refugee camp, 20 kms southeast of Dohuk city, in northern Iraq hosts Syrian-Kurds
In December, the UN appealed for around £4 million for victims of Syria’s war, while a total of £1.3 billion was pledged at the Kuwait Donor Conference in January.
Oxfam said only 12 percent of the money pledged under the UN appeal has been delivered.”

We have taken 50 people from this flood of anxious, terrified, endangered, lost, desperate, grieving, amazing, educated, thoughtful, kind, skilled people into this country. That is it 50 people compared to thousands upon thousands of people that have had to move to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan.

If you have got this far, please, please don’t tell me that we aren’working’ to help people stay in the region. There is a lot of help coming from the UK but nowhere near enough. ( I am tempted to launch into a rant about stopping bombing IS not least as we can not even find them – and spend the money on
helping refugees and therefore improving our standing with Islamic community.)

If you have got this far, thank you.

When I was in Paris, I had a soft spot for pigeons not least as we didn’t have an abundance of other birds around the place.

Now in Deepest Sussex, we do have lots of other birds and what is more, we have more than enough pigeons – many more than enough.

In Paris we had two who lived in the tree outside the kitchen window and we called them Fred and Marge.

When we got to Sussex, there were also two in the garden so, with a remarkable lack of inventiveness, we also called them Fred and Marge.

One was dispatched by a sparrow hawk – the same sparrow hawk who, living up to its name, ate a load of sparrows.

(It treats the sparrows living in the big back hedge as tapas and takes a little snack now and then.)

And the thing about sparrow hawks is that they clean their plate as it were, so when we found Fred or Marge, there was only a feather or two left.)

But now there are hundreds of bloody pigeons all over the place and they are a blundering nuisance.

They are dim, hefty, greedy and all over the shop.

One pair had the bright idea of building just by our bathroom window – right by it.

There is a climbing hydrangea and a Virginia Creeper there so plenty to rest on, and build around.

I don’t know if you have every seen a pigeon nest but it is not a thing of beauty.

Each pigeon of the pair would arrive with a twig in its mouth and say “ Mmm, ahh, mmm, oh go on then, let’s drop it here.”

Slowly an ungainly pile of twigs appeared.

And whilst you were having a shower, a beady and rather ugly eye would be watching you as it sat on the teetering pile of twigs.

Yes, yes we should have got rid of the nest quickly and discourage them but before we knew it, we were used to being watched cleaning our teeth and then there were two eggs.

Then there were two chicks (we called the squallies.)

I had imagined they would be bald and ugly but the pigeons (mother doing most of the caring, hey ho) were just smart enough to keep them hidden until they were presentably covered in down.

One day I noticed that there was only one squally and yes indeed, a body was found.

I am not sure whether it fell or was pushed and the other squally was surely not telling.

So, as I write, there is one squally, intermittently fed by the parent and now, as I dry off after a shower, it has got into the habit of stretching its wings ready for flight – and showing off to me.

In a few days it will be gone, and so will that nest. (There is only so much pigeon voyeurism a woman can take.)

Recently we had the village harvest supper.

There is a sentence which would strike horror into the previous me.

I would worry (nay, fear) that what would come next was a bucolic lyric about charming village eccentrics and the heart-warming stories of a countryside thanking their god for a good harvest.

I will try, dear reader, to spare you the worst but feel free to go away and pour yourself something strong and read a Will Self novel.

Anyway, the harvest supper is linked (inexorably) to the church and is held in the village hall – well, I can hear you say, how interesting.

The village hall is in an area which has a lot of young families and working people – but no, the harvest supper is full of people even older than us, and a darn sight richer in most cases. I am pretty sure that few if any, of the immediate locals come.

There are a few young people there but they are dragged along by their parents and are more Bedales than local primary.

Still, and all, we have a good time.

Mostly because we have a great band – the village postman, his wife the postmistress, his sister, the Congregational pastor (or whatever they are called in the Congregational Church) and a bass player from the heady bohemian lights of Petersfield.

They are great, and the best beloved and I have a good dance.

Last year, feeling brave, we were the first up and left our friends behind at the table.

One of them was tapped on the shoulder by a village ‘elder’ who said sotto voce, “Just who are those people?”

Does anyone much get through life without a list?

I am pretty sure that there is a school of thought somewhere which says that if you don’t make lists in writing and instead work at remembering what to get when you are out, what you planned for supper and those basic domestic things you need to do this week, your brain gets a whole lot of exercise and you don’t get dementia.

But for me, without a list life would be like a poor Impressionist painting, not too bad from a distance but close up, those essential little blobs of paint would be missing.

In the old days when I had more than a housewife’s life, I would have rather interesting lists with a mix of stuff ranging from emailing a film director I wanted to come and speak at an event, to fixing up to go mushrooming in Nunhead cemetery.

Now it is all so much more boring – boring to me even, leave alone anyone else.

My skinny bliss has both a busier life and a good theory on lists.

She says, always start a list of things to do with something you have already done or can knock off very quickly. Then you can tick it off and feel good.

She also says this is the way to galvanise you into action to get the other, more intransigent things done.

Well maybe it works for her, but I end up with things being taken off one list and put onto another until I run out of notebook.

Sometime, I have left it so long and moved the task so often, I can’t remember what it was about. I found one the other day which said ‘note on bombing.’

Only as writing that have I remembered what it means.

I do quite like starting lists which don’t involve me in doing anything.

I am starting one at the moment which is a list of things that annoy me.

You, dear reader, can have a sneak preview of what in due course will become a very long list:

People not putting their supermarket trolleys back properly. It takes two seconds to push your trolley back into the line and save some poor being, out in the rain, from having to organize them all. And don’t get me going on people who just abandon them in the nearest parking space.

(As you can see, my reluctant housewife soul is coming to the fore here. )

Cushions on beds – what on earth are they for? They have to be taken off and slung on a chair somewhere. (Now, I have to admit, that behind me in our spare bedroom at two cushions on the bed but only because I made them and was rather pleased with myself at the time of their creation, and cannot bring myself to get rid of them – there is no practical or even aesthetic reason for them.)

Bombing ISIS or IS or ISL or whatever name they go by this week. Yes, I know they are a bunch of vicious, bullying bigots who have captured or been given a lot of weapons and are making life extremely miserable for a lot of people.

But they are not a traditional army, they don’t have HQs with a neon sign saying ‘Here, bomb this bit.’

They are scattered among a population in a vast area and the first British planes that went to bomb them couldn’t find them. We were told the pilots came back with a lot of ‘valuable intelligence’ but presumably that was intelligence of where ISIS weren’t.

Instead, let’s spend the equivalent money it costs us to bomb them on making life better for the Syrian refugees, the Sudanese, the Iraqis  – and get them to like us rather than being bombed by a drone ‘managed’ by a boy in Nevada.

Loading the dishwasher. Men just don’t seem to get the point, and it is a really, really simple point, that leaving your dirty dishes on the surface above the dishwasher is not a hint to the kitchen fairies but a annoyance to the person who needs that space to prepare supper. Enough said, after all no man likes a nagging wife.