One of the benefits of having the ground covered with snow is the picture it gives you of the local wildlife - and not so wild life. Animals leave traces in the snow of their daily, and nightly, activities.

Take the footprints on the right. We think this track was made across our courtyard by a pheasant. The chasse (the local hunt) has established a pheasant enclosure in the woodland near our house. The idea is that it's a safe, protected environment for the pheasants to breed and raise their young, so that they can fly off into the surrounding countryside and get their heads blown off there.

We often get pheasants on our land. The winding, apparently aimless track left by this bird confirms what we've always suspected: pheasants are stupid. The other thing that struck us about this track was how fake the imprints seem. It's as though someone has come along with a pheasant stamp.

There was more evidence of pheasant stupidity over at the enclosure itself. Above is the fence that runs around it. You can just make out the bird's track coming down from the top-right corner, outside the fence.

The bird reached the corner of the enclosure and made a right turn to continue following the fence. In the picture on the right you can see how it continued until, after about 100 metres of walking, it suddenly thought, "Wait a minute! I'm a fucking bird!" and took off.

The beating of its wings made a fascinating pattern. We saw this repeated on numerous occasions - strange little snow angels. Below is another - note the pattern on the right side of the picture. The other disruptions in the snow suggest there may have been some sort of encounter:

Others are not so easy to identify. We think the tracks in the left-hand picture below are those of a rabbit. The pairs of marks are the hind feet, the other two the front feet. In the right-hand picture, there seem to be at least two rabbits running the same path. Meeting this track is that of (we think) yet another pheasant. The line in the snow is caused by the dragging tail. Either this bird met the rabbits or encountered their trail. Either way, it decided flying was the safer bet.

 Hope you all have a great Xmas break and a happy New Year.

Looks like the odds for a white christmas just got stronger - it snowed overnight, the first snow we've had in December since the Grande Tempête (Storm Lothar) of Boxing Day 1999. The pic above was taken on the 17th.

Here's what part of the garden looks like:

Being small, Mini can find lots of interesting places to sleep. She's always liked climbing inside my bathrobe. Now she's discovered the sleeve is the snuggest place.

In my previous post about my mother's death, I showed my father's year of birth as 1923. I had a good reason for doing that - documentary proof, no less.

I still have my father's Army paybook. I was aware that the date of birth shown is incorrect - the day and month are wrong, which I know from so many years of celebrating my father's birthday. But that wasn't a surprise. He told me that he'd lied about his age in order to get into the Army. I assumed he'd just shifted the date a few months.

He had to try three times to get in: the first time the recruiting sergeant booted him out for being obviously too young. The second time he was rejected on medical grounds (a stomach problem). The third time, and under the watchful, but this time more tolerant, gaze of the same recruiting sergeant, he succeeded.

He joined on 19 Nov 1942, signing up for seven years with the Colours and five in the reserves.

According to the Army records, he was 19.

I found it intriguing that even the Army wasn't that sure. His Certificate of Service, given to him on his discharge from the Regular Army shows a different date of enlistment - 14 Oct 1942 - and his year of birth as 1924. I also have a Release Leave Certificate, issued in 1949, that shows his date of enlistment as 19 Nov 1942, which has been struck out and rewritten as 14 Oct 1942.

And so I decided to do a little digging.

Annoyingly, most of the services available online for checking birth records demand a fee. Although they are exploiting government records, paid for by our taxes, they want you to pay for accessing information that should be freely available. The UK Government, in the form of the General Register Office (GRO), is working towards making many of these records available online. In the meantime, there's an admirable effort in the form of FreeBMD (where BMD means Births, Marriages and Deaths), which has already put millions of records online for free. The information may not be as detailed as the paid-for services, but it did allow me to pin down the year of may father's birth - 1925.

So, when he joined up he was actually 17. At that time, the minimum age for conscription was 18 (and had been 20 at the outbreak of war).

No wonder he looks so young in all his army photos.

My mother died last night. And I have a lot of work to do in deciphering what that means for me - none of which I intend to share here.

But it did make me think about what we take with us when we go. All that unrecorded history.

My mother had a lot to say, and never said it.

We know a little of it: her memories of seeing Hermann Göring drive by in his open-top Mercedes; of the Gestapo turning up at her doorstep demanding to know why she wasn't in the Hitler birthday parade; of the bombing of Hamburg.

And there were painful memories of the early years living in a London suburb, babe in arms, her British husband posted back to Germany, surrounded by hostile people with fresh memories of the Blitz.

Yet there must have been so much more, now gone forever.

The picture shows my father, John (19231925-1991*), mother and my eldest brother Harry (thankfully still with us). I think it must have been taken in 1947 in Hamburg.

  * UPDATE: My father's year of birth has been somewhat clouded in mystery - see 'Lying about one's age'.