Monday 4th July 2016

Independence Day (USA and Nigel Farage's house)

Back to work, and the usual realisation at how quickly times passes at weekends as opposed to the way it drags during the week, especially during business meetings.

I wake up, once again from a night of fractured sleep as the pummeling i took at the osteopath seems to have failed to repair my shoulder. I feel fragile, but am able to make my way down stairs where there is a large cup of fresh coffee waiting for me. I think this particular morning will require at least another cup, maybe two.

Jools is up and ready for work, the cats have made themselves scarce, and so I am alone waiting for time to start work. I decide to start work as soon as I have had the second coffee, and breakfast. Monday, please be gentle with me.

But alas, I see I have a 5 hour meeting over Skype to endure, listening to people in the meeting room argue. And I just sit here at my table, listening, getting angry.

Some hours later, we are told that they have decoded to work though their lunchtime, I disagree and wander off, make sandwiches, tea and check the mail, come back and it seems I have not been missed or missed anything. Which is just dandy.

And then the meeting ends and a new one begins. FFS.

What have I done to deserve this? I suppose I should not complain, but then meetings are just the things that stop us doing our real work.

At four, I have had enough and wrap up work and decide to take a walk: just a quick one across the fields, check on the piglets, the butterfly glade and the usual.

I grab my camera and walk along the street in the late afternoon sunshine. The crops in the fields are nearing ripening, and over the weekend we saw a field that had been harvested! However, here up on the downs, it seems that harvest is still a few weeks away.

I could see away to Kingsdown, where there was a blue haze marking where the sea was. I wasn't walking that far today.

Over the winter, someone cleared the dead grass from the glade, and so where there used to be dozens of Common Blues and Brown Arguses, there was just a couple of Small Heath flapping around, the butterfly oasis has been just about destroyed. Seeing it so devoid of life on the wing wasn't pleasant. I hope that as the year goes on, some will colonise it again, there is still wild marjoram to feed on.

It is too hot even for the pigs to be out, I see a snout sticking out of the coregated iron house away among the trees, but there is no joyful snort nor the patter of tiny trotters.

I walk down the dip, well, to the iron gate anyway, take some shots and note that despite the recent heavy rain, the bottom is just dried mud.

I walk back, my back grumbling, but still, I tell myself I should get out of the comfort zone once in a while. If not more often.

There are cats waiting for me, telling me its dinner time; they may be right.

I suppose I should say that the de-cluttering is going well. I joined e bay to see some stuff, and managed to sell my collection of Empire Magazines; I could have made a mint with selling them off one at a time, as some are worth forty quid a pop, but in the end, wanting to clear the shelves from the hallway upstairs, and wanting rid of them, I settle for a ton. Finally someone has decided its too good a bargain and bought them; they now have to arrange a courier to come and collect, but in the meantime we pack them all up in 11 boxes. The shelves empty now apart from the Lord of the Rings special editions; they'll have to find a new home.