Tuesday 4th June

I'm using the laptop tonight. I had to refresh the screen three times to persuade blogger to load as far as the full home screen. Persistence pays... then another couple of refreshes to get the photographs to load.

I made an error myself with loading the photographs and in the end just deleted the post, came out of blogger, and this time everything has worked perfectly. I shall be happy with that!

This time round I have loaded all the photographs in one go, in the right order. Happy happy happy!

This is a local nature reserve. Time was when we would gather the offspring, load up a small backpack with some refreshments and disappear out of our back gate to follow the stream/river (depends on the amount of recent rainfall) upstream to the millpond which is the nature reserve. It was a pleasant half-hour walk. These days we drive the short five minutes down the road!  

We haven't been since before 2020, that momentous year which changed everything for us.

The visitor centre has been considerably upgraded, but in a very well designed and naturalistic way. We've bought season tickets again, as we fully intend to be regular visitors now.

It is an idyllic spot, and I can see us bringing my father here for a coffee, to admire the flowers and sit in the sun and people watch.

I remember the feeding station from when the children were quite small. There is a hide looking out onto this space, and we used to spend quite a while bird watching here. A squirrel was hogging the centre suet feeder, hanging upside down from the cross bar.

This is the Bat Bothy. It is about eight feet tall, built from flat stones laid one upon the other. There are plenty of spaces for the bats to squeeze in and roost. 

The shape is one I associate with Time Team archeological sites in the Scottish Islands, but here it is to commemorate the iron kilns which turned Sussex into an industrial landscape in the sixteenth and and seventeenth centuries, supplying iron for canons, firearms, fire-backs etc.

Walking back, the sun had come out, and we were accompanied by these little brilliant blue damsel flies (if that's what there are...)       

The past few days I have been working on this watercolour. I'm always a bit tense starting any new notebook, but starting a friend's notebook feels doubly difficult! (She's starting my new notebook... we will swap books at the end of the month, as we have been doing for a couple of years).

I consoled myself with the thought I could always cut the page out and persevered. I'm pretty happy with the result.