It was early morning French day for TG which helped me to get started early on my work. I didn't do any yoga, but it meant I had time to go for a three mile walk with M after lunch. Early in the walk we heard some birds making a tremendous racket and realised it was a flock of starlings in this tree - you can just see some in the photo around the top.
We chose a route round the fields that had been one of our regular walks during the summer, hoping it might be a bit less muddy than the woods. It wasn't. You can see the puddles of water in the tractor tracks, and there were some very squishy bits. This field and its neighbours had been used to grow maize (sweetcorn), I suspect for biofuel or cattle feed. I read that in the UK maize can damage the topsoil, and these certainly did not seem healthy fields, with so much water sitting on top and not draining - it isn't low lying or particularly heavy soil, and to my mind it really should not look like this.
The next part of the walk was through much healthier looking grassed fields and down a track, also on the muddy side.
This brought us out to what had once been a separate hamlet, but is now on the edge of the modern town. This building was once a watermill, and has been converted into houses - when she was at middle school H was friendly with a girl who lived in one of them. What must once have been the millstream runs along the side of the track running down to the mill. From here we walked back up through housing estates and just managed to get home in time for M to go and collect TG from school while I got on with some more work. More rain is forecast for the weekend, so it was good to get out and enjoy a bit of blue sky.
TG had a late dance class, so we waited for her to finish and ate late. I made a beef pie with sweet potato wedges and sautéed cabbage. Good autumn comfort food. The news was a bit depressing. Covid deaths are growing and there was a spike in cases (probably infections from the last few days before lockdown just now coming through the testing system, so hopefully the numbers will now start to fall again). There is infighting among government advisers which has become so acrimonious that one senior adviser walked out and others are apparently threatening to go - not in itself a bad thing, but it is ridiculous that they are bickering like this in the middle of the Covid crisis and with the end of Brexit transition only weeks away, with no deal in place.
More cheerfully, I made a fun discovery while I was doing my archive work this morning. I have been looking for pictures for an Instagram account, and someone mentioned a postcard showing a bull in a bedroom. That one was too good to pass up so I went hunting and found both a copy on our catalogue and a newspaper article about the incident, which took place in 1900. Apparently a bullock escaped while being taken down an alleyway to market and entered the kitchen door of a hotel. It then climbed the stairs, giving the lady of the house (who was busy putting a child to bed at the time) something of a shock, and went on the rampage in a bedroom. It was cornered and recaptured, but not before someone had taken a photo of the devastation it caused, with the back end of the bull just visible to one side of the picture.
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