Walking, cooking and tootling

Today’s guest picture comes from my Lancashire correspondent Paul. He crossed the border to Yorkshire to see this nice scene at Linton.

We had another grey but mostly dry day here, after another night where the temperature didn’t drop very much at all.

My legs have been quite busy over the past few days, so they put in a request for a quiet morning which I graciously granted. We had coffee with Margaret and then went shopping at the Co-op. When we got home, I made some brown lentil soup for lunch, and while it was cooking, I made three pots of raspberry jam with some raspberries which had fallen into my shopping basket. The great thing about raspberry jam is that it is very easy to cook, and pretty easy to eat too.

Mrs Tootlepedal was keen to get some bracken to cover her bare vegetable beds over the winter, and after lunch we drove a mile or two up the Wauchope road so that she could collect some. I left her clipping away and went on a fungus hunt in the nearby wood.

I found plenty of fungus growing in the field before I even got to the wood.

And when I walked through the wood . . .

. . . I found a lot more.

It was a gloomy afternoon, with the threat of rain about, but the bracken brightened things up as I left the wood and made my way back to the road.

Mrs Tootlepedal drove home with a car load of bracken, while I walked back down the road, enjoying the contrasting leaves on a bramble stem . . .

. . . and noting the fall in the river at Bessie Bell’s since my last walk on a very wet day ten days ago.

Then:

Now:

Rather than follow the road the whole way home, I turned off onto Gaskell’s Walk . . .

. . . where I found more fungus.

It was rather dark to be taking photographs but at least the leaves have fallen enough to give me a chance to see the river dashing down the valley below the path. There are lots of leaves still firmly fixed to the trees though.

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I picked a few sloes as I went along to the end of the wood . . .

. . . and then went down through the park and along to the suspension bridge over the Esk. The water has fallen enough to allow for work on repairing the pier footing to recommence.

I walked along the river for a bit . . .

. . . before heading home.

Mrs Tootlepedal had laid her bracken on a couple of the beds . . .

. . . where it will stop the winter weather from compacting the soil.

She had noticed another quite separate outbreak of the slime mold . . .

. . . and I found prettier things to look at.

There were no bees or butterflies today.

It wasn’t a day for hanging about in the garden, so we went in and I made a batch of date rolls.

In the evening, the other three members of our recorder group arrived, and we had an hour and a half of most enjoyable music making. We feel that we are getting back into the groove after our long lay off.

It was raining heavily when we finished, but two of the group stayed on for a cup of tea and a fig roll, and luckily the rain had stopped by the time that they left.

Although it is going to get quite chilly in the early hours of tomorrow morning, we are promised a good spell of sunshine, so I hope to persuade my legs that a bike ride would be a good idea.

I didn’t get a chance to see a flying bird today but I did see a standing and a swimming bird when I was down by the river.