Departures, Arrivals and a Forthcoming Village Show

This week Jonny flew back to Shanghai along with his beautiful girlfriend, Ming Ming.

I really loved the fact that he was being met by someone who cares about him - so different from when he flew out there a year ago.   We took him to our local airport and waved goodbye, until some time next year.

In what is becoming something of a habit,   he very kindly gave me his best camera to use.

It is much bigger, much more complicated than the previous one.   I am a mere beginner - my style of photography is 'point and click' and now here I am having to twizzle this and set that - the quality of the photographs is amazing - it is the photographer who has much to learn.

I am totally allergic to having a camera pointed in my direction, I have been since childhood.  This is me, distorted by the double-glazing and hiding behind the camera - I was taking a photograph of a beautiful tub of lavender flowers, you can just see a few spikes of them at the lower edge of this vastly cropped picture.  Any other image you may see of me will have been taken from a long way off or possibly while I was 'merry'.

A couple of nights ago I had to get up and let one of the cats out, at some unearthly hour - the moon was very bright in the sky and as I looked up I was thrilled to see a pair of bats flitting around,  eating insects.  I keep getting up at a similar time, hoping to see them again, perhaps even snatch a photograph with Jonny's wonderful camera - alas,  no sight of them so far.

This is an image borrowed from Google, it shows a common pipistrelle bat, which is the kind most frequently found in Great Britain.

I was fascinated to find that there are 18 types of bat in this country - I had no idea there were that many varieties worldwide.

These marvellous little creatures can consume up to 3,000 small insects a night.

Last night saw a new visitor to our night-time garden - a hedgehog.  A large and confident one.

He/she could work wonders in our never ending work to save our produce from slugs.  I read that one hedgehog can rid a garden of slugs in three months....given that our gardens are quite large, I do hope he has brought his family with him!

Again, this is an image borrowed from Google, but I hope to be able to post one of our little nocturnal visitor.
The weather this year has not been kind to our vegetable garden, we have had many failures, but I won't dwell on those.  Instead, let me show you some of the successes.

The cucumbers in the polytunnel are positively thriving - and the flavour is superb.

The tomatoes are finally getting into their stride, we still need more sunshine to ripen them, though.  The runner beans, broad beans, mangetout, and onions are doing well, so I hope to be able to enter some in the forthcoming village show in just under two weeks time.

Somehow, I don't think we are going to be able to match our prize winning box of vegetables from last year.

We still have a few flowers so I may be able to enter a small flower arrangement, perhaps work on something to enter for the craft section.   I'll have a rummage in my photograph files to see whether anything I have will fit the categories listed.

By far the most hotly contested section is baking and cookery.  I swore that I wouldn't make lemon curd again, I found it so tedious standing and stirring for what seemed like hours...but maybe it was worth it.

I will certainly be making scones, Dominic.    For anyone who has never participated in a Village Show - think Vicar of Dibley meets Midsomer Murder, except that we take it very seriously.

Especially the scone category.