Sunday 4th May 2014

Friday.

work from home.

IT does not work. Again.

3 hours of meetings on the communicator, sorry, Lync. I feel my life ebbing away once again as I write about it, but that is nothing like sitting through the three hours of meetings.

I work away until after four i have written e mails to everyone I should have, and I can relax. I go upstairs and do a session on the cross trainer, 40 minutes of pumping lard to music from the left of the dial. I wait for Jools to come home, and then cook chorizo hash for dinner, washed down with some cheap plonk. And all is well with the world.

Somehow the evening has all but slipped away, just time to slouch and chuckle to HIGNFY, put the badger food out, check the locks on the door, switch off the lights and head up the wooden hill.

Saturday.

And so starts the three day weekend, as Monday is May Day when all good socialist workers get to spend the day at the seaside wearing knotted hankies and dodging showers, or the four horsemen of the apocalypse; that's death, pestilence, famine and the other one. Clarkson. Or Bieber.



So, we get up, grab a coffee and head out to a local site to check on the state of the Man Orchids. Now, it is not my fault that some orchids have odd names, Man, Lady, Monkey, Fly, Lizard, Birdsnest and so on. But each one is different, or fairly different fro the next species, and each grows on their favourite soil, location, or whatever. So, the Man Orchid, are quite uncommon. well, not so rare here in East Kent, but like everything, you have to know where to look.



So, on a wide roadside verge, Jools and I were out peering deep into the undergrowth looking for orchid spikes. And after a while I spot one. And another. And so on. On the exposed down, the wind and cool conditions mean that they are a little behind their more sheltered cousins, but I found some, snapped them. We move on.



To the butchers. As we feel the need for roast beef on Sunday, steak for Saturday night dinner and bacon sarnies for breakfast. And that is what we have once we're home. Bacon.

The weather forecast was not good, but said it would improve later in the afternoon. So we decide to stay home, whilst outside the sun beat down from a clear blue sky. Grrrrrr.



We head out at midday, to look for the Lady Orchid which I knew would be out, and at the same spot one of the rarest UK butterflies could also be found, The Duke.



We decide to find a new place to park, so Jools reads the map and takes us on a long dead end road, right into the heart of the wood, and the bank is a few minutes walk away. It is clouding over some, but still, should be nice enough.

We find a narrow track down onto the bank, and see a few people already there, all chasing Dukes. At least those who were there were careful on how they walked, avoiding the Lady Orchids that were already showing. I get a few shots of the Duke, and Duchesses, before moving onto the orchids. One of the other photographers was a Flickr contact of mine, down fro Sevenoaks to snap the orchids and butterflies.



We head over to another orchid site to look for the Flys again, as we failed to find any amongst the Ladys. we park at the bottom of the bank, and walk up the narrow lane to the gate of the site. And I find dozens of Flys, which makes the trip so worthwhile. I see Flys everywhere, some in bloom, many not. But there you go, Jelltex the orchid hunter.

Back home for dinner of steak and fried jacket spuds. Much better than it sounds, and once again the days slips away from us.