Singing in the sun

Today’s guest picture is the last from my sister Mary’s visit to Regents Park.  It has been good to have such sunny pictures while we have been rather gloomy up here.

Being Sunday, Mrs Tootlepedal went off to sing in the church choir after breakfast and I set about making a lamb stew for the slow cooker.  I ideally like to go for a pedal on a Sunday if I can because the main roads are free from heavy goods vehicles and it gives me a chance to try different routes.  However I wasn’t sad to be cooking instead of cycling today as it was raining steadily again outside.

I interspersed the cooking with staring and was pleased to see a brambling…

…although it only paid the feeder one visit before flying off again.

Everything looked rather subdued in the rain…

…except some of the chaffinches who were in fine flying form, whether in the form of a direct approach…

…or creeping up from behind.

Almost exactly at midday, the sun came out much to my surprise so I had a walk round the garden. Although everything was still wet, the sun made the heart sing.

We are entering peak daffodil period

Chionodoxa and grape hyacinth

The one thing you learn about flowers when you have a camera is that the closer you look, the hairier everything is.

Pulmonaria

After another quick glance at the birds…

Obviously the chaffinches have a choir practice on a Sunday too

This one was late

…I went for a stroll down to the river.  In the sunshine, it was just like spring outside although the river was pretty full after several days of gentle rain.

It might have been fine weather for ducks, as they say, but one duck was trying to block the day out completely.

This looked liked a better plan that swimming in the river.

I walked over the bridge that you can see in the picture above and went past the front door of the church.  It is quite impressive…

…but the building constitutes a heavy responsibility for its congregation in terms of upkeep.

I went past the church and on into the park where I couldn’t resist an admiring look at the wall beside the river….

…which is a flourishing garden in its own right.

Then I walked over the Park Brig,….

…a modern replacement for what was originally a wooden bridge, and made my way home.

In spite of the sunshine, it still looked as though it might rain at any minute so I didn’t dilly-dally but I found a moment to take a photo of the fine flowering currant in our neighbour’s garden…

..and some new leaves on our elder as I went past.

Mrs Tootlepedal was worried that the orange trumpets on her Jetfire daffodils were rather pale this season but they have brightened up considerably in the last couple of days…

…and she is quite pleased with them now.

After lunch, we got prepared and set off for our choir practice in Carlisle.  We had our substitute conductor again and she put us through our paces while we made progress on a new song.  It is a setting of a poem by Yeats and it needs very good diction and sensitive singing to bring out the best of it so since neither of these are things that we excel at, we will have to work hard to make it succeed.  Good fun.

For the second week running, the humorous weather gods provided me with a fine sunset just to point out the fine cycling weather that I had been missing while we were singing. How I laughed.

The flying bird of the day is a sunshine chaffinch.