An ending with chips and the lightfingered acquisition of a few cherries

marbled white

chalkhill blue

six spot burnet moths

small skipper or Essex skipper - not sure which

Everything rolls around in the end doesn't it.  We got to the end of term on Friday, with a giant exhale.  The biggest boy walked out of the school gates for the last time, it'll be secondary school for him in September.  The last couple of weeks were filled with trips, a play, an Oscars night, a Year 6 assembly and last but not least the leavers' service in church.  And then it was all done, and he walked home from school, while I stayed in the playground for a while with the other two.  I watched him go, all alone, and something tore inside me a little.  There's a lot he'll do on his own now.  And of course that is how it should be.

Friday evening there was cricket for the bigs and a beavers end-of-term shindig for the little.  Afterwards we had chips, just to top off the sweets and chocolate and fizzy drinks and heady emotion from earlier.  On Saturday we detoxed with a walk up Painswick Beacon.  The open grassland has drifts of wildflowers in places and it's good for butterflies.  There were lots of marbled whites, as well as the other ones pictured.  I hope I've labelled them correctly.

Today we hung around close to home, settling into holiday mode.  We saw a friend, signed up for the summer reading challenge at the library and dodged the showers in the garden.  I read a couple of pages of the tidying-up book at the weekend, and I've pretty much cleared the room that will be the middle boy's bedroom, in a wild fit of decluttering.

The kitchen is full of berries and cherries.  The cherries were partly purloined from my neighbour's tree.  I filched a load that were hanging over our side, and then confessed.  He told me to help myself to some more as well.  I'll need the stepladder I think.  There are masses of blueberries, two bowlfuls today alone.  I made muffins with some of them.  The blackbird family are doing their best to help out as well.

Wishing you all a wonderful summer.  CJ xx

Butterfly and moth names edited, thank you Countryside Tales!

Garlic, fallen tomatoes and Moominmamma's Best Buns

It's a happy time of harvests in the garden and down on the plot.  Bowlfuls of berries of every kind, colanders of salad leaves and the first of the cucumbers.  There will be Sungold tomatoes tomorrow, although the bigger ones will be a while yet.  I found the biggest green one on the floor earlier.  Everyone blamed everyone else.  It wasn't me.

I've sown more sugar snap peas to replace the ones that are coming to an end.  Should have done it earlier of course, there will be a gap in production which won't go down well with the littlest boy who likes to eat them every day.

Do you see the feathery green tops?  Carrots no less!  I'm very excited, although the tops will be wasted with no piggies to feed now.  You may recall I've never properly managed carrots before, so this is a bit of a breakthrough.

The pear is the single solitary one for this year.  Last year there were so many the branches were breaking off.

There's a little pile of summer reading.  I've no idea how Marie Kondo's book got there.  It may have fallen into my Amazon basket late one night.  I woke up the next morning and it was all like a dream.  It promises to change my life.  I haven't read it yet, but I've thrown out some of the several hundred old exercise books that the children brought home from school.  Not the littlest boy's plant diary though, it's a gem.  His seed didn't grow at all, but he still gamely wrote about it every week.  The biggest boy laughed so much he had tears running down his cheeks.  He likes to quote from it on a regular basis.  "My pant has not grown at all.  I think it is because it didn't have anuf water."  He doesn't do it in front of the littlest boy, so no feelings have been hurt.  And it is of course all done with great affection...

I'm working my way through everything Barbara Kingsolver has ever written.  And I'm reading "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to the smaller two.  It's actually my copy from when I was little.  It cost 40p, and it's in mint condition.  I was a very neat child.  In fact it occurs to me that I may not even need my life changed by Marie Kondo, it's probably everyone else that makes a mess.

I picked up a picnic food book, although some of it is rather fancy and time consuming for the sort of picnics we have (ones thrown together at the crack of dawn).  Some of it might take most of the day to prepare.

"The Moomins Cookbook" is visiting again from the library.  The Moomins really know how to eat well.  There's Snufkin's Favourite Bean Dish, the Fillyjonk's Leftover Pie and Moominmamma's Best Buns.  All interspersed with enchanting quotes from the books.

"Eventually Moomintroll stood up and mechanically removed the picnic basket from where it hung on the branch.

It was full of small packages of sandwiches, two of every kind, each wrapped in silk paper.  He set them down in a row next to one another, but he wasn't the slightest bit hungry.

All of sudden, Moomintroll realised that his mother had written something on the sandwich packages.  Every package bore words like 'cheese' or 'only butter' or 'expensive sausage' or 'good morning'.  On the final package she had written: 'This is from your father.'  And in that package was a tin of lobster that Moominpappa had saved all spring.

At that moment, Moomintroll came to think that perhaps this wasn't so dangerous after all."

And the livin' is easy

a boy in a tree.  At the top, look closely for the blue

spotted him  yet?

busy

green orchard, but not quite as green as usual thanks to the lack of rain

shhh, pixies

small tortoiseshell

"Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."  Henry James

Blue skies, tree climbing, roses and bees, lavender and butterflies, pixies in the orchard and a little cricket.  Something had just happened in the photo above.  I'm still working on understanding it all though, so I can't tell you exactly what it was.  No, actually, that's a lie, I'm not really working on it at all, I'm letting it all wash over me and hoping I occasionally pick up some useful information.  That's pretty much my whole approach to life in fact.

The middle boy got hit by a six.  Suddenly I understand the saying.  He had a bag of ice on his knee for most of the afternoon.

The littlest boy shinned up to the twiggy bit at the top of the tree.  He places great faith in very thin branches at times.  Something went crack on the way down.

The biggest boy is going tobogganing tomorrow.  He needs gloves.

Summer is perfection isn't it.

Five on Friday

Joining in with Amy at Love Made My Home.  A few recent photos, and five random thoughts bearing very little relation to the random photos.

I've cut right down on news consumption lately.  I usually listen to a combination of The World At One, PM and the 6 o'clock news, and sometimes I watch a bit of the 10 o'clock news, but lately it's been getting me down.  Huge unsolvable problems, lives of abject misery, the human race making a mess of the planet and everything else.  It doesn't help anyone that I listen, so I've stepped out a little.  I like to know what's going on in the world, but I need a bit of a break.  Watching helplessly is frustrating.

Blessed rain.  As a gardener I can say that can't I?  The grass has turned brown and the watering can has been up and down the rows of vegetables.  So I'm happy when it's done automatically.  But I need it to stop for the weekend, den building and cricket are planned and I've a feeling they'll be cancelled (by others) if it tips down.  Umbrellas crossed.

Superglue dries quickly these days doesn't it?  The littlest boy has a small fossil that survived for millions of years until he got hold of it.  He dropped it and the end broke off.  He was particularly sad about it, so I promised to stick it back together for him.  Of course I got a bit of glue on my fingers and it set in about two and a half seconds.  I just about managed to detach myself in time.

LinkedIn is a scary thing.  I was looking at some profiles the other day and I didn't even understand what it was the people do.  Incomprehensible things, strung together quite aggressively.  Does anyone understand it?  I hope it's not just me.  I like plain speaking, I like to know what's going on.  It made me feel utterly inadequate and useless and a bit cross.

I was watching something recently and the question was asked, "Who would you take to a desert island?"  I thought I should have the answer to this pre-prepared just in case I'm ever asked and in a panic I go for someone ridiculous.  I've settled on Barbara Kingsolver for story telling and vegetable growing and Bear Grylls for den building, morale boosting and protection from any wild beasts that may want to eat us.  You?

Practically like Rio

It was the town carnival today.  The littlest boy wanted to be in it, so he put on his football kit and the two of us headed for the rendezvous point.  Quite a few mums had been told to get there a whole hour before the start time, so things were quite lively by the time we arrived, just twenty minutes early.  Someone had thoughtfully brought a football, so the team took the opportunity to have a particularly vigorous kick about, with all ages piling in together.

The theme was hard to determine.  Being the fourth of July, there was a definite American flavour, but with a vintage and WWII element as well.  Sort of Wild West meets Dad's Army, but with more pink than you would usually expect.

About half of the town were in the parade, and the other half were watching.  I walked with the littlest boy, to keep an eye on any possible antics.  They were quite a crowd walking along together.  At one point I could hear the sound of scuffling and loud popping sounds.  The next time I caught sight of the smaller team members several of them were clutching balloons.  You can imagine how this entertained them for the rest of the parade.

We walked behind the local country music association and the line dancers, and in front of a zumba band and frolicking ladies in brightly coloured feathers and mesh.  At one point the parade halted, and everyone kind of shunted up together.  The country music chaps up front were calling the dance for the stetson wearing troupe, and the zumba band behind were banging out their rhythm for all they were worth.  The feather ladies kept going very gamely the whole time.  There was a small amount of kicking of each other within the football section of the parade, but honestly, it was hardly noticeable on the whole.  And a couple of balloon skirmishes and a few more pops.  But all in all I felt it went off pretty smoothly.

I did feel slightly in need of a lie down in a darkened room when I got home, but by that time everyone was hungry so I made lunch instead.

The last few pictures are calming water shots.  Dee, your flamingoes are in the third picture from the end, you can just make them out.  Mrs Duck at the end just had the one duckling, but you could see she loved him a lot.  Made my heart glad.