Souping and spicing up a dull day

Today’s guest picture comes from my Somerset correspondent Venetia’s highland jaunt. She was on the platform at Fort William when she took this shot. She took a ride on The Jacobite.

It was a miserable day all day here today, with wall to wall rain from dawn till dusk. It didn’t even have the decency to rain hard enough to fill our rivers and reservoirs properly. It just rained hard enough to make going outside very unattractive. Our local weather station recorded a meagre third of an inch of rainfall for the whole day.

We had visits from Sandy and Margaret for coffee to distract us in the morning, and we followed that up with a visit to the Co-op to top the store cupboard up.

I did take a walk round the garden in the drizzle before we went shopping, just to collect a little damp colour for this post.

A Sweet William seemed almost impervious to raindrops . . .

. . . and the overladen philadelphus coped very well with the additional weight of the water.

I made some tomato and sweet pepper soup for lunch, and while it was cooking, I finished off putting a week of the newspaper index into the Langholm Archive Group’s database. I noted that in 1904, a cyclist had been had up in the Burgh court for riding recklessly and knocking down a pedestrian. A van driver was fined for driving without lights. Some things never change.

After lunch, I went out for another quick walk in the drizzle before settling in for the afternoon.

The rambler rose is putting out more flowers, but they were bowed down by the conditions.

The grasses in the mini meadow on the drying green were even more weighed down by the rain . . .

. . . but they looked delightfully bejewelled on close inspection.

The only really dry flower in the garden was the self seeded poppy which grows in the greenhouse.

To while away a dull day once I went back inside, I made some gingerbread using the air fryer. I have had a go at this before without much success, so I tried a different recipe today and things went better. I only made half quantities just in case it wasn’t worth eating, but it turned out quite well . . .

. . . and I will try the full quantities next time.

I used the melting method so it was easy to mix, and the air fryer cooked it in less than half the time that the oven would take.

In the afternoon, I hung out the bird feeder for the first time for a few weeks. We took it down because Mrs Tootlepedal thought that it was encouraging sparrows to come into the garden, where they relentlessly nip the tops off her growing green vegetables. However, there have been just as many sparrows in the garden without it as there were before, so we don’t think that it makes much difference.

It didn’t long for some siskins to notice that the feeder was up again . . .

. . . other birds were soon there to visit the feeder or forage on the ground below.

It looks as though it is going to be another wet day tomorrow, but as I am going to get the Langholm Initiative newsletter ready for publication, that will be no bad thing. I won’t be distracted.

Talking of distraction, I am getting more forgetful all the time, and I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post that we were visited by our ex minister Scott. He had been out on a bicycle ride, and he showed us that his coffee radar is still functioning perfectly. He arrived at our back door exactly at the moment that Mrs Tootlepedal was picking up the cafetière. It was good to see him and catch up on his news.

The flying bird of the day is one of the pesky sparrows.