A dull day in every sense. Also the last day of life for this chilli plant, which as you can see has put all of its efforts into this single great fruit, and spent itself like the one-hit-wonder pop group. The chilli went today into a very nice curry; and the plant, with our thanks, was put out of its misery.
Late July, a time of year when certain things are fated to happen. I have time off work and do as little as I can, and the garden begins producing fruit. Fate has done its duty with both in 2020, despite everything.
I went on a Lakeland walk today. I didn’t feel like mentioning this story when using this photo on my walking blog. If you’re having a day full of the joys of summer, and don’t feel like having it spoiled, admire (or not) this picture of the lamb. (The mountain in the background is Black Combe, where several years ago now, I took another picture of a sheep that I still rather like.) Then move on, your day unblemished by tragedy.
Sadly, this lamb is in trouble. A minute after taking this shot I came across its recently deceased mother (I warned you…). Although I didn’t conduct a close inspection, the ewe could not have died that long ago: probably from an attack by a fox or some idiot walker’s unleashed dog. I hope the local shepherds find this orphan before too much longer passes: after all, that is what they do, and are good at. But people, please — keep your dogs on a lead when there are sheep about. You knew that, right?
Another day with not much happening. But at least it marks the end of the present stint of work — I am now off until the start of August. I doubt this will lead to any radical changes in the content of this blog, at least not immediately. Although it would be nice to see people feature more — there have been no people at all, even in the background of shots, for ten days now.
Now the pubs have reopened, dogs are once again obliged to spend their Sundays wondering why their owners are not letting them just clamber over everyone else in the beer garden. This one has given up on it all, and decided just to keep a close eye on the piece of litter: before it dozed off, anyway.
When the sun shines, we all deserve to perch on a fern somewhere and stretch out at 5.25pm on a Friday evening. Lockdown or no, it’s been a busy week. And butterflies have a lot still to do.
Well into our fourth month of paranoia and I (and this jackdaw) can’t be the only ones looking like this. I remain just about functional in a technical sense, but I’m just pointing my camera at things at the moment rather than being creative. There is so little to appeal about the world right now.
Plenty of rain over the last few days has swelled Yorkshire’s rivers, including the Wharfe: and high winds last night and today presumably have brought this big chunk of tree down into it somewhere upstream of the weir at Wetherby, which is where this picture is taken. For now, it waits here… doubtless to continue its journey toward the sea once the next swell takes it over the lip.
This is a follow-up shot to last Monday’s shot. As we have more flowers on the squash/pumpkin/potential producer of large orange fruit, but a lack of insects buzzing around inside our house in the brief hours of flowering, we’ve been doing our own pollination, with cotton buds. It’s a good thing my hay fever has gone down over the years — though the weather was so revolting today that I doubt there was any of this stuff doing the rounds outside. If you don’t believe a whole country’s weather can turn from Mediterranean to Arctic in three days, you’ve never been here in June.
This squash plant is growing on the window sill of our room. Now I’m no expert on botany, and it is true that one rarely gets the chance to observe flowers in such controlled conditions. But I have never seen a plant that blooms in such an ephemeral way. This flower had not opened at all last night: here is what it looked like at 8.30am. But it was already withering. By 11am it was visibly drooping and by not later than 4pm it had shrivelled away to the state of the one visible behind it — which had done all this two days ago.
I hope it got what it wanted out of its few hours of glory, anyway. You have to hope that evolution still knows how to build things that are fit for purpose.
Being 42 