Snow day

Hooray for the snow! No school, no pre-school, no work, just fun in the snow.

We were up and out early.

Only the deer were about.

We had the place to ourselves.

For a while anyway.

Have a great snow day!

Autumn forest

There are a lot of things I miss about living in London - a decent flat white, people watching, having theatres, cinemas, galleries on your doorstep even if you don't use them all the time, takeout that goes beyond Indian and Chinese, buses that run more than once an hour, lots of people to call on to babysit (I really miss that!). In fact I thought I might not survive without these things, but I have and quite happily. And if I were in London right now, I would be missing the amazing spectacle of the forest in autumn.

Blackberrying

Between the torrential downpours and flash floods there have been some pretty decent bursts of Indian summer. I am definitely a summer person and any day spent in flipflops is a good day in my book. The sun came out while my mum and dad were over and we headed into the forest with the kids and dog in search of blackberries.

This is our absolute favourite tree. We call it the Totoro tree after the massive camphor tree in the movie My Neighbour Totoro. Whenever we pass by we all yell “Totoro!” at the tops of our voices. To date he hasn’t called back, but we are hopeful…

There seemed to be some kind of horse meet up going on so we kept the shouting quite brief to avoid a stampede.

Weirdly later on the horses all took off at a slow canter down to the stream. The ones already down by the water whinnied back to those still at the tree maybe to tell them to get a push on.

I think the horses had already done a good job of stripping the bushes, but we still got a decent haul of blackberries. I did notice the children put more in their mouths than the bags.

 

Anyway we got a very decent pie out of them.

And despite the falling temperature we gritted our teeth in a way that behoved our northern roots and had dinner outside under this amazing sky. 

I admit that I chickened out and came inside for my pudding.