As wise as David Beckham

 

Photos from a week in beautiful North Wales. How fast a summer week flies by. How fast a whole summer flies by in fact. There has been walking and kayaking and rock climbing and surfing. The dog went on a boat, which he hated, as did another less portable dog. He also found the kayaking very stressful and stayed in the lake too long trying to keep everyone together and got cold and shivery.

Other major shocks included sheep strolling about the streets, a hang glider dropping out of the sky i front of him and the above goat, which was larger than it looks in the picture. I persuaded the dog to edge a bit closer for a photo and we both jumped out of our skins when it had a huge snorty sneeze. 

On the home front, I have been tackling a couple of enormous evergreens this evening. It's one of those jobs that I started on a whim and may live to regret. Now I have a couple of enormous evergreens with a giant chunk cut out of the sides and more green waste than I know what to do with. The inside of the trees is very brown and dry. Fire hazard dry. The trees are overhanging the new neighbour's garden, but it turns out they like trees and are quite happy with them, so I'm trimming rather than removing. At the moment the trees are winning.

When we moved in, they were small and manageable. Somehow they have romped away when I wasn't looking. But the pigeons love nesting in them each year and the smaller birds like to look for insects in there, so they are quite nice to have. They look vastly better from upstairs, where you are eyeball to eyeball with the birds and it's like being in a nest.

The littlest boy, who incidentally is now 15 and taller than me, has been making me laugh. He absolutely loves a treasure hunt and suggested I hide his phone and give him a clue/riddle as to where it was. I could immediately see the problem with that plan, in the event that he didn't find it straightaway, so I gave him an easy clue. I hid it next to an owl and said, A wise one can help you. 

After things degenerated and got a bit tantrummy I helped him a bit by asking him what word he immediately thought of when I said 'wise'. Oh my. He did not immediately think of 'owl'. In fact he did not think of owl at all and things got even more tense. Some of his guesses were 'bread' and 'David Beckham'. Suffice to say he has very different thought processes to me. And probably to the rest of the world. I gave the clue to a brother in the end who found the phone in ten seconds flat.

Another conversation that made me laugh involved a mention of Leonard Cohen. Littlest boy: Was that the bloke that invented the spud gun? In case you were wondering, it wasn't. I did check, in case he knew something that I didn't and LC had put it together in an idle moment in between writing songs and wrestling with poetry.

Any wisdom at your end? I do hope so. CJ xx