A Birthday Party

I know that there are terrible things happening right now out there in the big wide world and believe me, I do think about, and care about, it all - a lot.  However, I do not blog about it and usually do not comment on other bloggers' posts about it. Not because I don't care, but because I don't feel that I have anything constructive to say that will make a difference to the rest of the world.  Confrontation and argument make me feel anxious so I generally just try to avoid it when I can.

So, to anyone that feels my blog posts are vacuous, sorry but here is yet another one.

Sunday afternoon we celebrated a friend's birthday at a little party in their garden. There were eleven of us all seated around the same table - minimal social distancing.  The sun shone, the birds were singing and we enjoyed fantastic food prepared by our kind hosts, with a glass each of bubbles to toast the birthday boy (well, I had two glasses but I wasn't driving home).  We were treated to the spectacle of a family of house martins making their nest under the eaves directly above us, totally unconcerned  by our company.

As we were leaving around 5:00 p.m. there was a terrific noise outside on the road (they live in a quiet village so this was a surprise).  Walking down their path to the road we came across a bit of a logjam of vehicles all trying to manoeuvre past our parked cars.  The vehicles trying to pass by in one direction all seemed to be boy-racer hatchbacks  whose young drivers were a little heavy on the accelerator.  Squeezing past them in the other direction was a procession of three or four open top Lamborghinis driven by some slightly aggressive looking males with equally scary looking female companions, all scowling angrily as they tried to negotiate the parked cars along the roadside.  There was a lot of revving of engines and squealing of brakes before the road was mercifully clear.  I have no idea what was going on but the rest of the journey was also quite traffic-heavy.  It seemed as if, with our lockdown eased, a huge bubble had been popped and all the younger generation had come rushing and tumbling out into the air to cause mayhem.

On the way home we stopped briefly to admire the section of road south west from Peel which still has a mass of Valerian in flower.  This display stretched along the side of the road for almost 2 miles, but I would have had to stand in the middle of the road to capture all of it, so this is all you get....