JULY / AUGUST

You know that feeling of boredom that comes over you when you have to wait for any length of time – well it overcame me at lunchtime recently.  So much so that I had to come and look in through the window to see if they had finished lunch yet as I was getting peckish, wanted to play and was fed up sitting around doing nothing.  There was an alternative motive as well – French sticks – not the sort made from trees, but the sort made from bread – all crispy on the outside and gorgeously tasty on the inside.  They make such a satisfying crunchy noise when you bite down on them and are conveniently sized to just fit into my mouth without too many gaps round the edge.  I do know from experience that once the Boss and Mrs have finished their lunch, not only do they emerge from indoors to play again but they usually come bearing the remains of the French stick they had for lunch and I am given it as a treat.

Recently I accompanied the Boss and Mrs to a shop where they sell nothing but French sticks – I couldn’t believe my eyes (or my nose)  The smell was droolingly lovely and after buying several to take home the Boss inadvertently put them into my travelling compartment for the homeward journey.  I believe in share and share alike – do you?  Anyway there were far too many for just the Boss and Mrs to eat so I helped them out by chomping half of one before we reached home…. Big mistake!  The Boss got it in the ear from the Mrs for incorrectly placing them near me and I got it in the ear from the Boss for checking the flavour had not changed. 

Maybe I should just ‘stick’ to the tree sticks in future and leave the French ones alone!

JUNE

The world underfoot has turned blue with a certain perfume in the air - at least it has in the woods surrounding The Vyne NT.  Normally I can forage where I like but, in there, you need to be led and you also need to be careful where you park your backside in case you crush any of these smelly flowers.  There is a sign up saying leave any babies where they are as their parents will come back to collect them in their own time.  I was seriously worried we would find wailing miniatures in the undergrowth but upon hearing a few hoots and a fluttering I realised they must mean the resident owls.  The only miniatures we saw were little black lambs being staunchly protected by their rather scary horn headed mothers.  The Mrs strolls slowly around clicking a small contraption which captures images which she will eventually replicate using the most difficult method she can involving pigment and water – she calls it painting, I call it boring.  I kept trying to position myself so that I could present my good side in all of the photos in the hope I would appear in watercolour one of these days but she seems more interested in these smelly flowers at the moment.  After bounding around for a few hours I decided I needed to cool down in the conveniently flowing nearby stream.   After some altercation with the Mrs it turned out she seemed much happier with this than she was with the muddy puddles of last month and thankfully I didn’t have to put up with that embarrassing bath routine when we returned home.  By the way you may be interested to learn that the dictionary I swallowed last month has now been completely digested and my language has returned to barking simplicity….