Wallflowers (good specimens) are blooming at the café near here. Pomegranate trees just putting forth their buds, which are brilliant red. Weeds pretty thick everywhere. This is probably as green as the country ever gets, but there are still considerable dried-up patches. Yesterday saw some wheat green but in fairly good ear.
Local method of hobbling cow with grass rope (base of horn to below knee).
Saw two storks nesting today. The nest is enormous, about twice as wide as a heron’s nest & also several feet deep, a huge mass of twigs filling a whole fork of a large tree. The hen was evidently in the act of laying an egg, the cock standing beside her; presently she got up & they stood side by side.
Our hen pigeon laid two more eggs & sat there for some days, then both she & the cock were mysteriously destroyed & disappeared – only a few feathers left. Said to be cats but suspect humans. That makes 4 we have lost &, of course, we shall not have any more. They evidently breed readily here. Three or four of those at the café now have eggs.
It is getting noticeably hotter & flies beginning to be a nuisance again.
Forgot to mention that at Taddert the people had camel’s hair ropes, very pliable & seemed strong.
Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 
He really missed his calling as a cave-drawing-artist.
I shall miss those pigeons, and their eggs.
I will alert Hercule to the mystery, immediately. Meanwhile, do not contaminate the crime scene, camel-rope it off immediately.
“NOW!!!!!” ~~ Jack Bauer, Sr. — circa 20February1939
Woot!
No eggs, no pigeons…but still–
George is back!
Woot!
(Well–there is a stork egg. Good omen I hope.)
it really is an excellent drawing of an ox..
Thanks George, I had been wondering what the Taddert people did for rope.
The only good cow is a hobbled cow. ~~ ancient edict
Getting kicked in the head by a cow will succinctly dramatize the concept—especially if the молоко is stinky.
Camel hair has been shown, by a remarkable margin, to be the preferred shirt of ________*.
“‘[M]ysteriously destroyed & disappeared,’ you say?” queried Poirot.
Consensus was that the phrase was code for “made darn good sandwiches,” but the Belgian detective was skeptical.
*Slemac
Mother and child reunion down at the cafe´
Today’s Special –
pigeon pie and egg salad
I wonder if there are any cave paintings that depict a hobble. Does “Animal Farm” arise from this part of GO’s consciousness or subconsciousness?
The stork paragraph, when broken into its seven or eight visual segments, becomes a paradigm.
Anthropomorphism by osmosis via Orwell’s retinas to my brain.
21 February 1939—German Jews are ordered to surrender all gold and silver, except wedding rings.
22 Febuary 1939- JL3 is offered job writing code @ Bletchley park … says “I am no code monkey ,I am a human being!!”
I notice the heat,
The green will not last for long:
I wilt, am hobbled
When I think/write/talk to (yell at) myself, I seldom use the phrase “of course.” Therefore, Blair/Orwell is equivalent to Jekyll/Hyde in this case and he is obfuscating in order to avoid revealing his startling discovery–upon awakening from an apparent delirious nightmare–of curiously familiar pigeon feathers in his teeth.