The view from the kitchen window this lunch time.

Now the temperature is falling, I’m told we will have blue skies tomorrow. I could do with that.

I was more than a little surprised by what I found.

A closer look

Now the fact the boys are as surprised  (and curious)as I am about this, and that the I tore open the wrapper to get the box out suggest to me this didn’t happen here, and not the result of a boyish prank in this house.

We’d welcome an explanation. Here is one version  of such an event(with the odd expletive)

Entering ‘Swan matches burnt in box’ in to a search engine, brought up some very odd links, not least what appeared to be a spoof site for bargain cremations in Southampton, which nearly got a link until we felt it took black humour just a graphic step too far.

But I know you are fond of a meandering  link, hopping across time and space.

Try the history of the match girls

And how they changed the political landscape of the day.

In the east, all golden glow and wisps of mist

To the south, a more modest blush and a veiled valley

And cold blues chasing the moon away into the west

A tree with a special need of a hug, is the tree known locally as the lightening tree, it has for as long as I can remember been a tree with half a trunk, but it battles on, well at least it did,

  it suffered a set back in the autumn when the guys from the electricity board   lopped off its remaining branches,  I wonder, can it come back from this? (It’s alder, they are made of strong stuff.)

Stop, look, listen; Spud hears Tom’s voice,

there can be no doubting Spud regards Tom as Uphilldowndale pack leader, his masters voice demands attention if not always obedience .

Joe and I tried to get  creative and get Spud to pose behind a sheet of ice from the cattle trough,

it wasn’t totally successful  project, but we had fun trying.

It  didn’t really matter, it was just good for the soul to be out in the sunlight.

There was sunshine  beaming in on the jug of tulips on my desk this afternoon

In the garden the birds were basking in the stuff.

A nuthatch at the bird feeder, not the sharpest shot in the bag, but I like the  beak and the  bullet shaped sunflower seed.

I’m very nearly a decade out of retailing, but ‘shop lifting’ still presses my buttons (even from Tesco!) You have to be a very committed reader to remember when I wrote about a similar experience. But the Worrall Thompson stuff has reminded me that I haven’t bloged about an ‘incident’*  in a ‘ leading high street pharmacy’

Joe and I were shopping, when I noticed something, not quite right about the young man in the aisle near the razor blades (one of the most stolen items) he was being very furtive, not really looking at the goods on display, but glancing around. It was all a bit odd, to me he had the jizz of a shoplifter.

So I told a member of staff of what I’d seen. She thanked me profusely, and Joe and I continued our shopping, good citizen deed of the day done. Cut to ten minutes later when Joe and I are paying for our purchases at the till. The member of staff appears at my side, ‘I just thought I’d tell you’ she says ‘the gentleman you described, that you thought was a shop lifter. Err. Well. Err, actually,  the gentleman, he’s our store detective.’

Over the Christmas break we went to one of our favourite beauty spots (where all the photos on this post are taken, at different times of the year) only to see that someone has stolen the bronze topography , presumably for its scrap value. Annoying.

At the top of the hill, huddled together against the gale that was blowing, we realised we were all standing in some recently scattered ashes, presumably human. Sorry.

Tomorrow, so I’m told the sun will shine and it will be bright and frosty; normal service will be resumed.

*something my family would describe as ‘one of Mums Miranda moments’

It’s not that we haven’t been down the field since the beginning of December you understand, just that we’ve rarely been able to keep our feet in the high winds or see where we are going for lashing rain, stopping to access mole hills has not been a priority .

We humans are now considering  the mole hill to be a site specific art work (after Goldsworthy) and that nature will take its course; the only comment Spud  will make is that it makes him sneeze