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….