About two years ago Daughter Dee designed a play which was put in in the Quad at UCC.
This was based on the history of the college and at the final moments the cast planted hundreds of large white windmills all over the quad.
They looked wonderful but unfortunately were pinched immediatly by the audience.
Dee managed to save two and, as I was the one who had to shift her out of her flat in Cork last summer I then stuck these two, on a whim, as sentinels about the old shed which is at the bottom of our garden.
The same shed is known, picturesquely, as the Bothán, mainly to distinguish it from the real, modern and roofed shed which actually serves a function.
I rather like to think that this same Bothán served a pig sty when the house was first built in the 1930s but have absolutely no evidence for that.
We had great plans when we bought the house first of reroofing this and even making it into a spare room but all we have done is to plant some clematis on it and to encourage some ivy to climb up its walls, thereby , we hope, entitling it to live up to its fancy name.
But I digress.
For the last six months these windmills have obediently stood sentinel, whirring around as if they were generating electricity, until today.

Last night, or yesterday, in the winds which have been storming about us, one of the windmills took off.
It must have taken off with a vengance, with its sails working like the propellers of a plane, because it cleared the six foot hedge and has vanished we know not where.
I hope it is giving someone pleasure where ever it landed.
Meanwhile the remaining twin, a little battered in the winds, is whirring away happily.