Grey Skies with a Silver Lining

Hello, thank you for popping in here, it's lovely to see you.  We are now just over halfway through our six weeks of school holiday and I am fed up.  The Mathematician finished her stint on Guernsey last weekend and came home...but only for a week because in the early hours of yesterday morning we deposited her at Birmingham Coach Station so that she could travel to Dover where she met a friend and then set off for The Netherlands, Germany, The Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Italy, all in three weeks, taking in a festival on the way. I admire her sense of adventure but do not envy her.  I didn't even want to do it when I was her age - when I was twenty-one I holidayed in Worcester with my parents and sister over a long weekend!
 

So, during this week of sorting out laundry, travel arrangements, insurance and shopping we fitted in some family time.  The Mathematician spent Monday catching up with her sister while the Best Beloved and I drove out to Carding Mill Valley in the Long Mynd for the afternoon.  It was busy and I was pleased to see so many families there enjoying the great outdoors, happy children playing in the stream, fishing for tiddlers in the pool with nets and buckets and listening to the National Trust ranger's geology talk with rapt attention.  The Best Beloved and I wandered up the path, through the ford, a little further and into the bird hide where we saw ... three empty feeders and a rather shy robin.  Harrumph!  We came out and I sat by the pool; a very small girl threw pebbles in, one after another, and I watched as the ripples rhythmically worked their way out to the edge.  I felt my mind slowing down.  The Best Beloved wandered about with his camera.  It was good to be out beneath the big sky but it would have been SO much better if that sky had been blue. Instead, it was unremittingly overcast and dull.  There was not a glimmer of sun. 

 

We asked The Mathematician to keep Wednesday free so that we could take her out for the day.  Our plan was to remind her and her friend, a language student who has spent the last year in French Martinique and Italy, that their home county is lovely too!  Again, we drove to the Long Mynd, this time up to the top, and although we could see where the sun was shining, we just couldn't quite get there.  Above us was that thick veil of grey cloud, AGAIN.

 

On the way back down we stopped and got out of the car to look at the views and while the girls wandered off together, chatting, the Best Beloved and I saw something rather wonderful: a hen harrier hunting over the heather!  Hunted to the edge of extinction in the UK, only ten chicks have fledged in England this year from three nests (four more nests were unsuccessful), and yet here was a male right in front of us, ghostly grey with black wing tips, rising and swooping, dancing in the air for a good fifteen minutes.  He was the silver lining in the cloud and we were SO glad we had packed our binoculars.

This morning the sky is blue and full of promise.  About time.

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x