Wordsley, Stourbridge, England: 8 degrees, cold and rainy.
It is my second day working remotely in England. It is good; there have been no hiccups until now.
In the morning, I got up relatively early at about 7:00 a.m. It is not a time to Rio de Janeiro standards at 4:30 or five, but I may get there shortly. As it is freezing cold outside and not so warm inside, I have had just more of a wash than a shower. Downstairs, I prepared a tea and did some exercises alone.
After the exercises, I got ready to go out. It’s about 3 degrees outside, so it is cold—very cold for Cariocas. I really love walking and listening to music while I am in the street. The day was beautiful, with blue skies and a little sun. I walked down to the canal, but this time, I was determined to walk longer, more in the direction of Wollaston, where I lived and used to fish when I was a child.
The countryside along the canal is sublime, rich with colours, wildlife, fauna, and flora. Besides the canal, you have open fields on the left side. There were many horses there when I was a child; unfortunately, there aren’t any there today.
On the other side, the right side of the canal, there is a dense forest with so many different colours from the plethora of trees and vegetation. It is autumn, approaching winter, and there is a mixture of dark greens and browns and sometimes a red from the trees, fallen leaves, and the beautiful mix of dense foliage on the floor, as if it were a patchwork quilt.
I have noticed various groups or families of ducks along the canal and on the paths. I have seen at least five or six squirrels. The combination of the outside cold and the inside warm, a nice day without rain, and a good walk is so exhilarating that it mixes and provokes all my senses; I am genuinely happy. It is good to be back in England.
When I got home, it was about 10:30 English time. My mother was already up, and I had to give my first class of the day in half an hour.
The first couple of classes went well. Then, I had to give a replacement class because the person was on a cruise, and I had to calculate all the different time zones, which confused me a little, especially when I had to give my normal classes to my pupils in Brazil. It is just a question of acclimatising more to my new reality of the cold outside and now that Brazil is 3 hours behind England, or, to put it another way, England is 3 hours ahead.
In the middle of the afternoon, I had some free time, but not enough to go to the cafe where I had already been with my mother. I decided to go to the local village(Wordsley) shops, a small green and shopping precinct in the middle of the village, to look or maybe buy something there and then go home to work again. I bought some food at the supermarket and saw and entered a pet/hardware shop that sells everything.
I had seen earlier that day on Google that there is a special food you can buy for ducks, Swans, and geese.
Clearly, many things have changed, happened, been created and improved in England since I last came more than twenty years ago. One of these is the special food for wildlife, and more importantly for me, for wild birds.
I find this quite interesting and intriguing, as it may exist in Brazil, but I have never seen it. Moreover, the longer I stay in England, the more surprising it is how spoilt but privileged the English people are for choice.
I asked the shop assistant if we had such food, and he said yes. There were large and small plastic containers for all kinds of wild birds. I bought the small container for £2, which I thought was reasonable. So, the next time I go down to the canal for a walk, probably tomorrow, I will be armed with something to feed the ducks, swans and geese.
For the rest of the day, I gave classes that now extend my working day until almost 11 p.m. because of the time difference. I don’t mind, but I was feeling a little tired towards the last class.
In bed by 11:00 p.m. English time.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Richard
