Mad Dog and English Hen Stay Out of the Mid-day Sun!

Mad dog & English hen stay out of the mid-day sun.

Standing around like a headless chicken.

Summer has arrived. How long it lasts, this being Britain, is another matter but for now the sun is blazing and the sky is pretending to be Mediterranean. A mere two weeks ago I was glad of my winter coat as hail stones and biting winds howled down the mouth of the River Dee. Today all the house windows and the French doors are thrown open and, as can be seen from the two photos above, the menagerie has been hiding from the heat of the day. And these are just the pets I could find. The other hens had vanished beneath shady shrubs, and our cat Jasper is nowhere to be seen. Fear not, she'll return at 5.55pm sharp in time for food at 6pm. She always does.

Jasper is once again without a collar. We no sooner buy her a new one and she contrives to lose it. I told Richard that we might as well just tie a £5 note to a tree and save ourselves the bother of buying a new collar, placing it round Jasper's neck then waiting for her to leave that one up a tree somewhere. (Ok, moggy, we get the hint. No collar from now on...!)

Aquilegia self-seeds around our garden.

Apple blossom on our tree.

Several of the larger shrubs in our back garden need pruning back hard. At the moment, the path to the Grove is so overhung that you have to bend over to pass down it. I like things to grow fairly wild, but that's getting a bit much even for my tastes, especially when some of those dangling branches belong to big-thorned roses. Finding the time is no mean feat, as at the moment I'm in the process of giving Bethany Rose a final edit-and-polish. I'm around a third of the way through the MS and things are going sooothly, with hardly any chages made. Beyond this point, editing gets silly in my opinion - and you also risk what I call Death By Editing. But that's another blog post.

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