Pic of the week 4/9/22
By pretty much any metric, summer is over.
The most important metric is that I return to school tomorrow, but this weekend has also seen a notable shift in the weather – its still been warm, but the glorious blue sky and wall to wall sunshine is no longer here. After brilliant, beautiful light for months, it did seem remarkably dark under the leaden grey skies yesterday morning. There has been a little rain – enough to annoy my washing! – but not the significant deluge we need.
It has been a great summer. The holidays, to me at least, have seemed really long. I think that’s been because of the wonderful weather – no day has been wasted, sat inside watching the rain and wondering what to do.
Kefalonia was wonderful and the sun has shined ever since we jetted off. We’ve also been to Sophie’s graduation (hot, hot, hot!), Coldplay, Bristol … the only thing we didn’t achieve was our balloon flight – cancelled three times, twice because of weather, once for a technical hitch. I’ve refereed a lot (and found myself enjoying it again) and spent many a happy hour tinkering on cars – its a shame I didn’t get the 205 through an MOT, but I’ve enjoyed working on it, and I’m also pleased to have cured the knocking noise on the Corsa (replaced a drop link) and also (finally) got the oil change plug out.
The sunflowers – both front and back – have been the success of the garden. Initially it was a little disappointing that we didn’t seem to have a mass of high sunflowers, but over the course of the summer, we’ve always had several in flower and it has been fun watching them blossom. Two pumpkins have grown – must tray and grow a few more next year – one is smallish and already fully orange, the other quite big and only just starting to change hue.
And on Monday I saw a grass snake!
I was driving along a country lane near Castle Cary (returning from Jago’s house) and saw it in the road. It was long: a good metre to 1.5 m long. an impressive site!