WE WOKE early, hearing voices in the olive grove, and looked out to see men and women moving about in the dappled sunlight, laying a carpet of green plastic netting around a tree.

TRY SNEAKING up on a pigeon. It seems to have eyes in the back of its head. In fact, it has a visual range of 340º, leaving little or no blind spot especially when the bird is boppin’ along, head dipping and rising like one of those toy dogs in the back windows of cars.

A CHRISTMAS card I opened showed a white owl on a post in a snowy field.

AN ENGLISH language (EFL) teacher I know emailed me from China last week. He lives and works in one of the many hundreds of Chinese cities with a population of more than one million . His dim glimpses of China on the ground — or rather, on a bicycle — may interest readers.

I SAW, in the Guardian newspaper, that a German woman, settled in England, had been arrested for picking wild mushrooms.

WINTER reveals what was hidden all summer. Three nests in the garden, visible from my workroom window.

WE SAW An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore film on global warming, showing for five nights only at a cinema in Clonakilty, a trendy town with health food shops, gourmet shops, a country market, a holistic healing centre offering naturopathy, aquapuncture, homeopathy etc, a music school, bookshops and many well-educated people pursuing the good life in West Cork.

WHAT with trying to find the right wood-burning boiler to heat my house and engage a tree doctor who could wield a chain saw with the finesse of a brain surgeon, my mind was full of sawdust and two short planks all week.

GOVERNMENT policy of carbon emission charges is great news for the big-time polluters, according to Friends of the Earth (FOE), but not such good news for the PAYE citizens that will pay the price.

THE DAILY mantra of “occasional showers, some heavy’’ heard on the weather forecast most days in mid and late October turned out to be joined-up downpours, relieved only by brief intervals when clouds like lead barrage balloons lowered overhead, promising yet more rain.