Tuesday

Went to Irene's today. Hooray, the sun came out, but there has been a bitterly cold north-easterly wind. We decided after lunch to take Emma and her cocker spaniel Sian for a walk to the next village. It's a mile, uphill some of the way. She wanted to speak to the workmen who are putting in new water mains because she needs to have the use of her field back for the sheep, and there's still a big hole in the field. Anyway, we found the workmen, they promised to come and fence off the hole and the pile of mud so that her lambs won't come to any harm, and then decided to walk back the long way. I said yeah, I'm up for it, but poor old Emma struggled a bit, well in all honesty so did I. It involves about half a mile of a one-in-three uphill gradient. What a killer! Anyway, once it levels out, about another mile across the top, and then back down the lane to her farm. I guess about three miles in all, took us an hour and a quarter. The views from up there are fantastic though. I haven't cropped the photos I took, so if you have a 15" monitor or bigger, it's worth clicking on the pics for the full panorama.

I had a great afternoon, but I am a bit fed up, because she will soon be gone, and I shan't be doing any of this stuff for much longer. Typical of my luck, someone who I have a lot in common with, who is now single again, with no family here, same as me, and now she's about to depart. Bummer.

Oh yeah, another bummer. In the past 7 days, I've now seen 7 squashed hedgehogs, run over by cars. Thats more than I saw all last season. There's one either end of our village, one in exactly the same place as I saw one last year. Another one I saw had so very obviously been deliberately run over, it was dead centre of the width of one lane, so the car would have had to be straddling the centre white line down the road to have hit it. How people get off doing this is beyond me, how evil can you get? I hope they have a similar death.