Rhubarb, rhubarb

A spell of long-ish showers today prompted me to go and harvest some of the rhubarb in the garden. It didn't do very well last year: it got a bit straggly-looking and went partly to seed at one point, but in the early spring I earthed up its bed well and it's now produced a mass of really thick stalks. I put on my wellies and cut upwards of a dozen or so, which still leaves masses: you can hardly notice any difference. I've no idea how expensive it is to buy in the shops, but it's nice to get free home-grown produce, of course!

I couldn't be bothered to make a crumble or a pie, so I just boiled it up in a saucepan with what I thought was plenty of sugar. It wasn't - when I filled a couple of basins with the results about 15 minutes later and took a spoonful to taste, it was sour as anything. A nice flavour otherwise, though, and should be good with some ice-cream as a dessert!

More mud

It had rained heavily during the night (and had turned quite a bit colder, too), so wellies were once again the order of the day as I took Raggs walking in the woods this morning. I brought my digital camera along, as I was hoping to get some pics of her lying flat out in the mud like a hippo wallowing, but she decided she didn't want to co-operate and spent most of the time snuffling round in the grass - and apparently eating copious chunks of it.

So I took some pics of me, instead. I didn't lie flat out in it, but in places I did sink up to my ankles in it, hearing the now-familiar slurpy squelching sound as I pulled my boots free. Perhaps understandably there weren't quite as many other people out walking their dogs there this week. I daresay playing in the mud isn't everyone's idea of fun, though I must say I enjoyed it today just as much as I used to when I was a boy. Maybe seven-year olds don't go in for such simple pleasures as sploshing around in their wellies any more these days - probably not?

Dodging the showers

After a prolonged dry spell since Easter, the weather has turned much more like the normal seasonal British Bank Holiday weekend - wet with the promise of more to come! At least it was pleasantly warm this morning in a spot of brief sunshine, so I took the opportunity to mow the lawn. I'd in fact already begun to wish I'd done it sooner while the grass was still dry, but fortunately it hadn't grown too long and slippery, so wearing my trusty wellies I soon got it licked into shape with the mower, and snipped the long straggly bits down the side with the shears. Sorted!

Curiouser and curiouser

When I was going through all my old school and family photos and scanning them in, I uploaded all the images onto my Flickr photostream. I hadn't used it up until that point, and to be honest I wasn't sure how interesting they'd be to anyone else: apart from the Leamington College ones which any fellow ex-pupils would probably like to see, the remainder weren't much more than holiday snaps. Nevertheless, it looks from the statistics as if maybe other people have liked looking at my snapshots of Hong Kong in the late 1950s, which some people will undoubtedly remember.

I've taken some assorted photos of this and that when I've been writing entries on this blog, just to add a bit of colour and illustrate what I've been doing - so I thought I might as well upload those as well. I wasn't expecting them to arouse a great deal of interest: they're hardly unique and in one or two cases the technical quality isn't very good either. So it was to my great surprise that I found when looking at the stats for my photos that the new set of 18 images have clocked up over 220 views in the space of twenty-four hours to make it the second-highest number of views in a single day for my stuff, and by far the most popular are three of me in my muddy wellies on Easter Day. Huh? Go figure. Not that I'm complaining: it just seems an odd choice and not the one I'd have predicted. Anyway, here's the pic everyone seems to have latched onto as their favourite....

Mud-bath!

It had rained most of yesterday evening, and I could hear it beating against the window-pane well into the night, so I guessed that walking in the woods this morning, it was going to be extremely wet underfoot. I was right! I'd put my wellies on - smooth black shiny ones just like those I'd had as a kid when we lived in the village and I'd gone out to play wearing them, risking the wrath of my mother (who was fastidiously clean and neat), when I came back all mucky.

But today she wasn't around to complain, so I sploshed happily through the mud just as I loved doing when I about seven. In places it was quite deep and I could feel the suction gripping my boots as I pulled to extricate myself, and I heard the satisfying sluuurp sound. A bit further on there was surface water deep enough to wash it off, but only temporarily as I walked on a bit further still and started all over again. I guess I'll forever be a bit of a kid at heart, but it was a lovely fun way to spend Easter morning. I always find there's something innately satisfying about re-creating treasured childhood memories and experiences - especially those of things I wasn't really allowed to do at the time!