Fred Astaire's Face

It's not just the feet, it's the face. It's not a handsome face but its expressive. It's a rubbery, comedian's face, with a considerable resemblance to Stan Laurel's.  There was never a more graceful. more inventive dancer, but if the feet had been wedded to a conventionally handsome face- a matinee idol's face- they'd have interested us so much less. Gene Kelly is as great a dancer but he looks like a jock- like an athlete-  like the sort of bloke who should be able to do all those spectacular moves- so phooey. But Fred doesn't. He's got the sort of face that invites a custard pie. It's sexless, peculiar, comical.  And then off he goes, gliding across the dance floor like an angel. 

Mewing

I walk under one of our tall trees and a bird of prey mews at me from the top branches, then, when I try to get a fix on it, takes off, drifts down the wind and goes to float over another section of the landscape.

It's a kite, isn't it, that makes that mewing sound?

There's a poem which likens the kite's call to bullets dropping out of the sky. Who wrote it? Was it Robert Graves? He, anyway, would have known what a falling bullet sounds like.