7.30   Very tempted to go back to bed with a cup of tea but decide to get up.  The weather isn’t looking a whole lot better today, it’s still raining.

Last night while I was watching tv, a  tortoiseshell butterfly appeared in the room, fluttering  all over the place, why tortoiseshell I wonder, it doesn’t look like a tortoises shell.  I have no idea where it can have come from and I caught it carefully and put it outside, which felt a bit mean on a rainy night but it certainly wasn’t going to survive in the house with no food or water.

So this morning I was very surprised to see another one flying around the kitchen which I also put out on the Guernsey lilies, one of the remaining bits of colour in the garden. I wish them both well on their journey through the winter, as I do the rest of us.

This morning I am making a start on the family Christmas calendar.  Everyone is sending me their favourite pics from this year. All my nephews and nieces who I haven’t seen for so many months, are looking so grown up now, it makes you realise how quickly kids change as they go into their teenage years and from the images smiling back at me you would never know anything has been different .

15.00  At last a lull in the weather and we set off for our walk.  No one about unsurprisingly  and the concrete-like mud paths of the summer months, are now like the quagmire we had in March this year when we had so much rain and extremely slippery, as I nearly find to my cost but I manage a sort of triple salchow that would have gained marks on ‘Skating on ice’ and manage to stay upright. I am very glad no one was here to witness it.

As we approach the woods we can hear children playing and we come upon two mothers with several youngsters who are having great fun climbing about on the fallen tree trunks and floating bits of wood in the now swollen streams. One of the Mums has a wheelbarrow full of stuff.  She says they have been here all day and I was the first person they have seen. We get chatting and they had decided that as they had had to cancel all plans for half term, they would come into the woods with a little primus stove and cook sausages and let the kids play every day, the trees giving some shelter from the rain.  I can’t help thinking as I walk away, that those kids will most likely never forget all the free fun and fresh air they have had this week, whereas the ‘organised’ games, visiting theme parks etc possibly would have had les effect on their memories.