Saturday 23rd May - MOUSE!

 In capital letters! BB saw it zoom across the dining room yesterday afternoon and excavated behind the curtains to no avail.

At breakfast time today he saw it whoosh across the dining room again...

This morning he walked into town and came back (look away now if you are a sensitive soul) catching contraptions, all right, traps and also a sonic device which is supposed to prevent it from going into the hall and upstairs.  

This afternoon I have just, now, seen it, from the corner of my eye, whizz across the dining room and into the kitchen... did it go left or right? Into the kitchen or turn into the hall? It went so fast, as though it was attached to some stretched elastic and someone had just let go!

OH, how we wish we still had cats... although they would have probably brought it in themselves. This one must be an intrepip adventurer. BB has set one contraption under the dining room table, and tonight I expect there will be more in the hall and the kitchen.  

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I really don't care for the phrase 'Mother Nature'. I see precious little of the 'Mother Love' side of Nature in the raw, more like 'Tough Love'. Some animal parents do spend time and energy in gentle and diligent nurturing, to be sure, but there are plenty of the darker sides too. It's why I won't watch wildlife programmes, not even our wonderful David Attenborough. Sooner or later something will attack and eat something else and I have to leave the room.

I have at last cleared my work table (at the expense of the dining room table - not so good) so this morning I was able to sit by the open patio door and look out over the garden as I wrote up my daily page-a-day review of the day before. You can see this beautiful postcard of a watercolour picture of wild flowers that I received yesterday. I'm keeping it handy as I thought I would try and copy it, to see how the artist, Honor Budden, created it.

I hope she wouldn't mind me putting it up; but as there are a lot of her pictures on instagram, which I don't use (nor facebook...) she obviously made her work public. Thank you, Elisabethd for sending it to me.

Do any of you use an app to identify plants on your phones? If so, which one? I recognise many of the plants in the postcard, but not all.

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It's SO HOT! Here's some suitably languorous music; Joshua Bell, soloist and conductor with the Academy of St Martin's in the Fields playing the slow movement from Spring; Vivaldi's Four Seasons.