Walking back to happiness...

It's all dog walking and cricket here in sunny Lincolnshire. Since I got brave and started to be able to leave the house alone I've gone to the other extreme. I'm now tramping miles and miles every day.

I must admit I did have a slight raising of the heartbeat yesterday. I got to the remote part of one of my routes. It has a farm track that doesn't look like it gets used much. A car was parked there with a man in it. I swear he looked like an escaped prisoner (there have been a few of those in the news lately so no wonder I was suspicious). The car door was open and he was just sitting there. He didn't have a dog so I wondered what he could be doing so far off the beaten track. Riley went up wagging his tail to say hello which dashed my chances of pretending my dogs were ferocious. I walked at a pretty fast pace after that trying not to look behind and straining for sounds of footsteps behind me (I wouldn't hear a herd of elephants charging at me!) It was my lucky day, he wasn't up to no good.

Today I changed my route and thought about carrying an alarm, but what use would an alarm be miles from anywhere? By the way, that photo of Riley running through a meadow of yellow fields; they are all buttercups. The photo doesn't do it justice at all. It's stunning. This is a small reserve of trees and wild flowers donated to the community by three old ladies who planted as many different types of trees and shrubs they could. What a fantastic thing to leave behind.

Apart from being healthy for the body I'm finding it also healthy for the mind. It takes me right back to when I was ten or so and had a very good friend who used to be quite obsessed with nature. He and I would meet up in the village woodland and go looking for birds nests and butterflies. We were talented tree climbers and quite frankly I was probably more interested in climbing trees than peeping in birds nests. P used to scribble down notes in a pad and I used to draw colour pictures of what we'd found and identified that day.

I saw another unusual butterfly today, well I assumed it was a butterfly until I googled it. Life would have been amazing if we'd had google when I was ten! It turned out to be a very pretty moth called the Cinnabar Moth. The picture makes it look red but I'm pretty sure it was a deep shocking pink. It was also quite small, maybe an inch across.

J has played a second county match. He bowled well and got an opening batsman out and another who regularly gets over fifty runs. We were lucky it was a sunny day because the day after it rained all day. In fact now that the weather has gone back to 'unreliable' we've got a whole weekend off; no cricket! Time to get ahead with the laundry and stock the cupboard with more picnic food!