Thursday 31st May 2012

Thankfully, the sunny weather continued into the new week. Although sitting inside a non-air-conditioned office, looking at the sun beating down outside is never easy. So, to make the most of the sun, we decided to head back up the Elham Valley in the evening to snap the orchids again. This is because last week the spears were not quite out, so a return visit was required, as we’re not going to be around for the next week!

So, after work, I head to B&Q to pick Jools up, we feed the cats then go to pick up Gary from his gaff and head off towards Folkestone. The light wasn’t perfect, the radio was burbling about heavy thunder showers in the north of the county, and certainly the skies looked anything but blue; but in the end it did not rain at all, and we had sunshine for most of the evening.

Finding the meadow was now easy as it was the third time we had been here; and after parking the car we headed up the down towards where we hoped the orchids would be.

At first we saw nothing, but then hints of pinks and purples could be seen, and in time we could see there were dozens of Monkey Orchids, all looking wonderfully delicate. We spread out to snap them. After a while I went to inspect the next field as we had been told there would be Musk Orchids growing there. Although there was none of those, there were dozens, if not hundreds of Monkeys all over the hill. I snapped more and more. Until, and lets just whisper this, there was no point in snapping any more as I had nearly 300 shots of just orchids.



We headed back home to look at our shots and for Gary and I, to edit them and upload to Flickr.

The next morning I got to work from home as we had a heating engineer coming round to certify the system for the year; I got up as normal and was walking down the stairs when the next thing I knew was that I was flying through the air, then landing on my arse and bouncing down every step until I got to ground level. I got up and waiting for the pain to travel to my brain.

It took some time.

By gosh that smarted. Just sitting down was painful, and my half-hearted intentions to go back on the cross-trainer were out of the window. I now had a fair sized bruise, and its done no good for my bad back either.

And that really is about it for this week. Well, apart from the great cat roundup this morning. We are going away in the morning, and rather leave getting them to the cattery until the last minute, we thought we would do it a day early. Only the cats are way too clever.

Jools got up and Molly and Scully were in. We set the flap up so only cats could get in. Or so we thought. I took Jools to work, came back fully intent on getting the mogs to Denton. And I could find just Molly. Bugger.

I made a cup of tea and waited. And waited. In the end I had to go to work and we hoped to round them up in the evening.