The Cresta Bear Books

It seems centuries ago that we used to visit a bookshop in Liguanea Plaza in Kingston, Jamaica, to buy books to read with our three-year old daughter. There, in the latter part of 1974, we discovered these little books, just four of them all published in that year, which featured Cresta the polar bear.

At the time, we didn't realise that the books were part of an advertising campaign run to promote a fizzy, fruit-flavoured drink called Cresta - it didn't matter anyway because we fell in love with the humour and the characters in the books.

Cresta is a cool, laid-back polar bear who is motivated by moments of enthusiasm to do things which, inevitably, turn out badly but which, in a gentle way, promote a moral. So, in 'The Smile of Cresta Bear', on a miserable, grey polar day Cresta makes considerable sums of money by selling a smile to other polar bears, and is then admonished by his wise friend Brian for selling something that should be free - resulting in Cresta returning all the money and ending up a much happier bear.

I used to love reading these books to my children. It's not often that an adult laughs heartily while reading a children's book, and there were times when I wondered if the recipient of my bedtime story efforts doubted my sanity.

The books were never reprinted and seemed to disappear from the market. How, I asked myself, could these wonderfully funny books fail to find the immense success of some of the much inferior children's books of the time - the Dr Seuss books being an example? My view was that they should have been just as successful as the Mr Men books.

The other day the daughter for whom these books were bought almost fifty years ago lent them to me to re-read. All the years fell away and I was back in Jamaica, sitting on the edge of her bed in that sweaty bungalow, laughing and laughing....

Littleferry Finds

The tide was rising fast at Littleferry this morning, the strong inward current at the entrance to Loch Fleet carrying several black-and-white divers into the pool that's just inside the loch's mouth. We rather assumed that these were all....

....guillemots and were pleased to see them as this species continues to be the one whose sad corpses are most common along this coast's strand line but, on closer inspection, we realised....

....that the majority were razorbills. The bird at left in this picture, with the sharp bill, is a guillemot, the other two, rather darker and with much blunter bills, are razorbills.

It was good to see so many razorbills. This is the first time we've seen them in any numbers.

Along the sands just to the north of the entrance to Loch Fleet we came across this large jellyfish. It was about 18" across at its widest and looked just like....

....an animal's entrails. I think it's a lion's mane jellyfish, a species we saw rather too much of in the waters off Ardnamurchan but which has been much less common on this side of the country.

We've seen very few jellyfish this year, few enough to count on the fingers of one hand.

An Exotic Weed

A rather unusual plant appeared in one of our vegetable beds the other day. At first....

....the fruiting body reminded us of a teasel, several of which we'd planted in the garden a couple of years ago,  but....

....it rapidly became apparent that it was something far more exotic.

We made quite a fuss of it, staking it up and weeding around it, until a search on the internet revealed its true identity. It's a thorn apple or jimsonweed, a poisonous plant of the nightshade family which is an aggressive and invasive weed. It is native to middle America but has spread across the world, in part through contamination of bird food - which is probably how it turned up in our garden.

Worse, the traditional use of its seeds as an hallucinogen and as a drug to treat a range of mental illnesses has led it to being experimented with as a drug of abuse but it is so disorientating and unpleasant, as well as being fatal, that few dare use it.

The advice is to destroy any occurrences, using gloved hands, and not to dispose of it in the compost heap. This we have now done, if rather sadly, as it was rather beautiful.

[Fourth picture courtesy Wikipedia]

Small Bird News

We now have a seventeen-house building site next door so had fully expected that, despite the generous menu we offer them, the small birds would cease to visit. I'm pleased to report that diggers clanking, men shouting, rollers rolling and vibrating, and huge trucks dumping vast amounts of aggregate have made not the slightest difference to the way of life of some species. The sparrows continue to arrive in chattering flocks to clean out all the feeders....

....the chaffinches continue to be some of the most daring when it comes to experiments with new feeders, the dunnocks chase each other in and out of the shrubs....

....the tits visit as if nothing untoward is happening - the coal tits being encouraged by dedicated sunflower seed feeders - and....

....at least three robins are arguing over this prime piece of winter territory.

However, this list does mean we have lost some. The greenfinches haven't visited since the noise started, the blackbirds only occasionally come on to our lawn, we've seen a song thrush once since work began, and birds like goldfinches and woodpeckers are faded memories.

Insects in the Sunshine

Despite yesterday's midday temperatures being disappointing for the time of year the sun came out in the afternoon and warmed us wonderfully, bringing - at last - a surge of insect interest in the fine display of michaelmas daisies and other wildlife-friendly flowers in our garden.

The michaelmas daisies were covered in insects. There must have been over five different species of bumblebee all so intent on the nectar that....

....I could almost poke the camera into their ears without disturbing them. There were also at least three varieties of....

....hover fly, of which this was the largest.

Meanwhile, the verbena was visited by a red admiral and....

....a silver y moth managed to find the last of the buddleia flowers.

"Best Beach"

"Brora," The Guardian recently declared, is "the best British beach you've never heard of," so we drove there today to see what effect this discovery had had on said beach, fully expecting it to be ruined by the crowds - to find it as empty as ever which, if I owned The Guardian, would give me pause for thought.

We went there not only to revisit what is a fine beach but not exceptional for this area but also....

....so that the visiting family could prove to themselves that the beach is, at very least, an excellent one for wild swimming, with clear, clean waters, a light breeze and a water temperature hovering around a very acceptable 15C, which left the older members to wander along the beach towards where....

....two flocks of small waders were working the beach for their breakfast.

They were sanderlings, welcome returnees at this time of year and one of....

....the prettiest of the waders, constantly dashing in the swash and backwash of the breaking waves to find their food.

We've seen them on Brora beach before though last time there were....

....many more ringed plovers mixed in with them - look carefully in this picture and there's just one, towards upper left. There was also....

....a lone dunlin - at centre of this picture - looking rather lost.

So we enjoyed a very pleasant couple of hours on the beach - continuing to meet hardly a soul - after which we rewarded ourselves with Italian-style ice creams from Capaldi's in the village's Main Street. Now they are something for the Guardian to get excited about!

"Called at Sports Club"

Here's another of those breaths of air from the past, from 1947 when I was two, a brief excerpt from captain Bill Solly's diary:

Monday 21^st July, 1947

 

Left Zanzibar about 1300 hours, arrived Dar-es-Salaam and moored in harbour about 1900 hours.

 

Tuesday 22^nd July, 1947

 

Sent telegram to Margaret*, also letter by air.

 

Received note from Mrs Helen Haylett of invitation to visit.

 

Wednesday 23^rd July, 1947

 

Met Cecil Haylett (African Mercantile) at pier in evening & called at Sports Club en route to residence.

* Bill's wife

Bill was a captain in the British India line whose ship carried passengers and freight between East African ports and those on the Indian subcontinent. My father's company, the African Mercantile, did not deal with BI ships, yet it is evident from this that the two families were already firm friends, perhaps through having children of much the same ages.

The section I love most is "called at Sports Club en route to residence" - it was what my father did with all the captains he invited ashore. By the time they arrived I would have been out of the way in bed.