VE Day 75th Anniversary

Flags and more flowers

This lamb and often his brothers and sisters gather here, and prevent anyone getting through the gate at this point. I think they hope that we might let them through to this side as we attempt to pass! The funny thing is that if you walk about 10 yards to the right the fencing actually stops!! You (and the sheep) can simply take a slight detour and ignore the gate thing completely!!

Only a week or two ago this was all brown.

A hot afternoon but the horse still has his coat on and, by the seems of things, can see where he's going either at the moment! 

I spotted this little stone and loved the idea that someone had had of painting HOPE on it. The I noticed the #campion rocks (presumably without the space). I shall put this on Twitter and see if there is more information.

Butterflies usually fly off as soon as I manage to focus - or, more often, fold up their wings. This time I was lucky.

These are flag iris. Quite appropriate as it is also VE day.

This is quite a strange photo and the sheep appears to be in a sort of dungeon. In fact it is just a small stream at the edge of the field and the plants there seem particularly tasty too. If they stroll further down the stream they can also have a go at getting into the paddock behind where I live. Most summers a few of the chunkiest lambs make it and have a good time as we chase them to send them back.

In the air

A crow

An advantage of a decent zoom on my camera!

The blue tit was a nice surprise. He just landed on the branch as I passed by.

These pylons cross the odd little path that I referred to in a recent post. I have a certain fascination with these but don't feel comfortable standing beneath the crackling current a few feet above my head!

Footpaths

I found this nice map of footpaths around the village. If you live somewhere else then just change the settings to find those near you.

Not all the paths are obvious! I just happened to know that one went straight across this field.

In the middle there is an interesting, if not particularly scenic, view! And you can hear the loud buzz from the cables which are not that far above you at this point.

Wellies

One of the nice things about living here is how you can wander around without having to talk to people but, if you do happen to come across someone they are nearly always pleasant and have a smile and a greeting. 

On my travels today I can across some very cheerful people gathered around the small bridge where my children used to play Poohsticks, since modernised with variations on themes to prevent sheep crossing. Substantial dredging and bank clearance work in recent months has helped the stream to develop quite nicely and it flows much faster than it used to. The rains, though, swelled it for several weeks and the newly cleared banks are now just mud. Sticky mud. The sort of mud that you really can't stop young lads wanting to walk into, if only to see how far up their wellies it will go.

One lad had done just that!

Prior to this posed picture, he and the wellington boot were at some distance from each other. What made me laugh, though, was his mother attempting to extract the barely visible boot with a stick!

It was a brave effort and might have worked if she had had a couple of hours spare. She was standing on a dry part of the bank, leaning forward and jiggling the stick around and I could see her slipping and falling in the stream with her enthusiastic but sadly slightly misguided plan. I reassured her that her wellies would allow her to go into the stream, from where it would be an awful lot easier to reach the boot with her hands and rescue it.

Now, I didn't actually know whether her boot wouldn't leak and fill up while she was at it but I took a chance on that one. A few minutes later and the boot was rescued and the young lad could stop hopping around.

As I said, there are nice people around. I felt slightly useful and was surprised to learn that one of the ladies knew about this blog. So I really do have to feature them in today's rambling.

In other news we have to figure out some new etiquette for passing people on footpaths. You're approaching someone on a narrow path by the side of a road. Who moves first? So far I have had some amusing near dances as I've waited until almost the last moment and then we've both moved, moved back again and, eventually, one or other has stayed in the road! One lady went to the opposite side of the road almost as soon as she saw me and stayed there until she had passed, unable to get any further away short of clambering over a hedge and I'm not sure she hadn't even though of doing that. She looked pretty terrified and was quite grey and not one of the happy people here.

I have always thought that it was for a gentleman to move onto the road and my inclination is to do so, whether the approaching human obstacle is a group, has a dog or children or a pram or all three. I will stay put for a bike, even a lady on a bike and most certainly for anyone in lycra on a bike. For another bloke then there has to be some sort of visual assessment of their age and condition. I'll move off the path if I think they look a bit old and doddery. If they then do the same I just have to accept that I am not young any more.

Something else I have noticed that has nothing to do with wellington boots or path etiquette is the way the landscape is changing. The slopes and hills are generally much as they always have been but there are definitely new bumps and mini-valleys appearing. I also find new places where a stream is starting to run or where you tread in trainers at your peril. There is one part of my normal walk where in the last few weeks I have had to make quite a significant detour to keep my shoes dry. I usually follow the well-trod paths left by the sheep but these are not as reliable as they used to be.

I have managed to avoid shops for most of the week but will need to visit Tesco tomorrow. I expect the experience will be noteworthy. We'll see.

Spaced out.

Manufacturers of black and yellow tape are doing good business. It was all over the entrance floor at Tesco this morning and also at the Greens Norton Medical Centre where I had to go to collect a prescription. I spent quite a while standing in one of those strange queues at Tesco. We were all spaced out, not on psychedelic drugs, just doing the 2 metre apart thing. It was a warm sunny morning so standing around looking slightly vacant wasn't that bad a thing to do. After a while, though, I began to wonder just how long we would stand there for. Several people had emerged and I had assumed that as one person left one would go in but that wasn't happening. The two people in front of me were youngsters, both engaged deeply in whatever was on their phones and it occurred to me that they may not have noticed the people coming out. Then I watched an old person just walk straight in, missing the queue completely! I decided to follow her.

Inside it all became clear. I had, by chance, arrived in a special period reserved for old people and it was about 15 minutes from ending. There was a lady dishing out sanitiser, wiping our baskets and giving us all gloves which seemed a bit over the top as I only wanted some flour but I went along with the procedure cheerfully. The staff recognised me and didn't seem to query that I might not have been 'old' which was quite disappointing but did have the advantage that I didn't have to go back and queue for another 15 minutes.

There wasn't any flour but I did find some bananas.

My final part of the journey out today was to the Post Office in Greens Norton where they didn't have any black and yellow tape. They didn't have any flour either but I did get a Corgi Toy on its way to a collector in The Netherlands and had a laugh with the chap behind the counter about the length of parts of many Dutch street addresses.

I seem to have made it back safely and think I have managed to avoid anything that might have wanted to attack me. I am particularly glad that I don't need to return to the Medical Centre for a month. I feel a lot safer with the sheep.

Early morning, exercise books, rood pole or perch.

I had a call at 7am this morning. Calls at that time tend to make me think it's bad news or, as I made my way downstairs to try and find the phone before my odd answerphone message would trip in, the sobering thought that it might be the NHS or some local authority telling me that I should go to bed immediately, not pass Go and definitely not collect £200.

I had recently ignored some eye test that I am recommended to do as I was 0.001% over whatever random line is placed in the book for being diabetic and, despite since being a rather larger percentage under that same random line, I still get all the bumph from clinics and people that tends to do more to worry than cure me. As none of the locations were particularly local, unlike the last one that I did attend a year or so ago, and I am not supposed to drive myself back and the whole thing was worded as a recommendation rather than an instruction, I decided to give it a miss this year and maybe I'll do it next year if they come up with a more convenient venue too. So I had visions that it might be a reminder about that and I was preparing excuses as I went. Or maybe they were having another go at getting me to have a 'flu jab which I had also put off this year. Or, and this was the scary, one, was I actually in this group of people to be locked away for 12 weeks and provided with food and stuff?

It was none of these at all. In fact it was a Corgi collector who presumably had nothing better to do at this time of the morning. I can only guess that he had got used to getting up regularly get up for work at 6am or something and catch a train or bus at this kind of hour and so it seemed totally normal to speak to people at 7am. He just ploughed in with some questions about gold-plated Rover 2000s. I didn't mind too much as it was a relief that it wasn't someone in uniform about to curtail my freedom.

I did remind him that it was, er, quite early and wasn't he surprised to find me 'open' at this time and I think it did begin to dawn upon him that I might not have had breakfast, let alone find some clothes to wear. It was clear that he had seen Boris's announcement last night and simply felt that he needed to occupy himself with something as an alternative to the commute to which his brain and body seemed to have become accustomed. I can imagine that there will be many people waking up this morning and wondering just what the hell they will do and all the autopilot things that their brain is attempting to suggest to their arms and legs are being interrupted by the new input.

So that was a strange start to the day but I was quite impressed by my ability to string the words together in approximately the correct order to make complete sentences in answering the caller's questions. I could make a massive profit on a gold-plated Rover 2000 if I were able to find one for him but they are really few and far between so it's unlikely but nice to be asked.

It seems to be a morning for people getting up very early, or, at least early by my standards. My friend Adrian had been having trouble with his email but announced at sometime around 6:30am that all was well after all. The earliest, though, was Charlie Clarricoates who runs Charlie's Dog Training Centre in Soham. He was up  when the time began with a 5! Charlie has trouble with some technology but finds text easy and there was a long message about putting some videos on his web site. It seems that, whilst I don't have to fix Adrian's email today, I will have quite a bit to keep me occupied with Charlie's videos.

Although sales are not exactly in the same league as that of the £1500+ Rover 2000, I have had a steady flow over the last week or two and no obvious signs of marked change yet. My last two sales, in fact, were to two of the most badly affected towns, Bergamo and Madrid. I was a little concerned that the new rules to keep us in our homes might not permit trips to the Post Office but I believe I will be able to do that and, as it happens, the Greens Norton Post Office is also a food store so I could buy some essentials too.

On my visit to the Post Office yesterday the lady behind me was standing so far away I was having serious doubts about my appearance or maybe I had been wearing the same jumper for too long. I mean, she was at the opposite end of one of the aisles which was more like 20 metres than 2. She was, however, of a certain vintage and may well never had had to deal with such things as metres before. She probably thought it was something like a rod or furlong, one of those measurement units that were always printed on the back page of exercise books.

It is now 10am. I need to get on with work.

Signs of life

This time next year?

It's a lovely sunny Sunday morning and you see these guys in the field next door and, of course, their world has not changed at all. In terms of my day-to-day existence here, I suppose my immediate, local world has not changed either. I like to think that if I can stay here, undisturbed and uninfected, I can just get on with all the things that I do that people often smile at - the photos, the Corgi Toys, the stamp collection, the crosswords and diabolical sudoku puzzles, but not the Eurovision and X Factor articles or predictions as neither are happening. For the most part, I can and do with the days actually passing quite rapidly before I have done much of what I had proposed that I do when I woke up. 

The evenings are readily consumed with TV programmes, live, a mass of recorded stuff and, when that's finished I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, of which I have barely scratched the surface. I have Le Carré's Agent Running In The Field to read too. I can definitely keep myself occupied, go for a walk, a drive, chat to friends and family on the phone or some app or other; I can do these things but for most of the time I am mostly trying not to answer the question as to when will this all end? When can I give my daughters a big hug, put my arm around my sons? How much longer will it be after that when I can walk out in the Arrivals section of Zhuliany Airport and fall into the welcoming arms of a partner?

We hear news that people in China are now starting to return to 'normal' and that the only new cases being discovered are those arriving from outside the country. So, without a vaccine, those people who have survived appear to have waited only about three months before they can start to circulate locally, although clearly they cannot travel to other countries. This seems most encouraging but almost too good to believe. Could we here in Britain be similarly free to associate, wander around, shop and work in June? 

At the moment I am trying to come to terms with the more likely scenario that, whilst the village here will remain much as it always has been and the only people getting ill or dying will be those whose time had come anyway, in cities and other vast swathes of the more populated areas there will be terrifyingly large numbers of people who become badly affected and it will only be in the autumn or even this time next year that the virus may have finally run its course, killed as many as it can and will either be killed itself by vaccines that we all receive or will simply run out of people to infect and cease to reproduce to the point where we can celebrate its demise.

By that time I would hope that other countries, either by luck or better defence activity, will have also bade farewell to the damn pestilence and planes will be taking off once more and, sometime in April 2021 I will walk into that Arrivals area, a year older, deeper in debt but still welcome.

Clouds

September

The last instalment of catching up with the Summer brings me to this evening's wonderful Moon after more wildlife and an eclipse yesterday.

The Woodpecker is still around.

So is the bizzard, but I keep missing him or her!!

Butterflies are a bit easier to focus on.

As I said, butterflies are a lot less trouble..

It rained quite a bit one week

Lots and lots of damsons on Maggie's tree

I don't know whether herons like damsons.

The Blue Moon Eclipse at 3am, 27 September

The Moon is still pretty red tonight.