Midsummer - Glorious June 2014

Merry Midsummer to all our friends and relations!

We had a great day, yesterday. We rose at 4.30 so that we could see the sun up. Jane, Jim and me walked to the ridge of the Gernos Mountain. If this sounds like a hard tramp, believe me it wasn't; we just went up to the top of the field behind our house, 200 m above sea level.  It was bitterly cold and we were wrapped up in gloves and hats, but steadily, this massive, red sun rose above the horizon. As it did so, the clouds moved and we could see the crescent moon, pale in the sky. We took strawberries with us. We're getting a pudding baisin of strawberries a day, at the moment - I've had to make jam. I'm hoping they'll last till Wimbledon! We also took some fizzy elderflower cordial that I'd made the day before. I'd popped round to see Mara and taken home 25 heads of elderflower (and 2 lemons) and make several bottles of cordial. Very lipsmacking, I have to say. 

It was a glorious June day and we worked solidly in the garden trying to catch up with both the flowerbeds and and the veg plot; nearly there, at last. It's great, watching the two mother hens, Henrietta and Ceredwen, proudly bring their chicks out for a constitutional, but there was a sparrowhawk hovering so they soon hotfooded it back to their enclosure. They're grand mums, and the two cocks are always in attendence...I get the feeling they both think they're the dad.

In the evening we over to Rob and Angie's for a Midsummer party, with a blazing fire and loads of yummy food. By the time the bats were swooping overhead, the guitars, squeezeboxes and drums were out and we had a grand old singsong. 
By the time we crawled into bed, we'd been up for 20 hours, but who cares. It's midsummer!