Another miracle cure

After yesterday’s lack of a guest picture, I have had many kind offers which I will get to in time but this one from my younger son, showing the world’s most elegant young lady, had to go in first.

I woke up full of aches and pains and although I am well known for my abilty to suffer in silence, I might have broken several national and international records for mooching about and moaning today.  I did put a week of the newspaper index into the Archive Group database and was slightly cheered by finding that it was the first for 1891, meaning that another year had been ticked off.

I was also amused by a blue tit doing ‘chin-ups’ outside the kitchen window.

It did manage to pull itself up in the end.

On the whole, though, it wasn’t a very productive morning.

After lunch I looked out of the window for a short while….

A siskin blows away two sparrows with one blast but doesn’t see the threat from an incoming chaffinch

A sparrow has the tail flaps down as it comes in for a landing.

…before deciding to see how good Dr Velo might be at curing my ailments.  As usual, the good doctor turned up trumps.  As soon as I got on the fairly speedy bike, the aches and pains slipped away and I found that both my legs and my lungs were perfectly in tune and ready for fun.

Because I wasn’t certain how well I would go, I had settled on doing the roughly six and half miles to Wauchope Schoolhouse and back three times, the least strenuous way of doing twenty miles that I know.  Some might think that doing the same route three times is boring but I find it quite satisfactory as  it lets me challenge myself to improve on my times for each segment as I go along.  Today I went up to Wauchope Schoolhouse slightly faster on each repetition and came back down the hill only marginally slower each time.  This resulted in a very cheering average speed (for me at least) and I was completely cured of any tendency to moan at all by the time that I got home.  Mrs Tootlepedal was quite pleased by this.

I then spent some time watching professional cyclists on the telly cycling at twice the speed that I managed.

Although a very light rain had started, I took a quick walk round the garden before tea.

The ligularia positively thrive in the wet and gloomy weather

As do the phlox

The dahlias seem impervious too and this pale specimen grows prettier every day

The special grandma rose, in a sheltered spot, also laughs at bad weather.

Day lilies keep coming too.

The most surprisingly pretty flower in the garden at the moment is this hosta.

The hostas in general are flowering profusely.

I couldn’t go past the tropaeolum on the yew without recording another formation of flying flower buds…

…on their way to becoming flowers like these.

They too seem to have enjoyed the damp conditions.

Mrs Tootlepedal had once again spent a lot of the day hard at work in the garden and among her many other tasks, she had made a very neat job of the lawn edges.

I had dug up a row of Mrs Tootlepedal’s early potatoes  yesterday and in spite of the wet, they were slug free and in good condition.  By chance, each seed potato had produced a crop of  exactly twelve…

…a rate of return which would surely please even the greediest financier.

I had some of them for my tea today and they tasted very good so a day which had started out in great gloom, ended up with great satisfaction.

A siskin once again appears as flying bird of the day.