Friday 7th August 2020 Day 136

7.00   I open my eyes to find he is still there, sitting on my towel, how dare he? Staring at me from a safe distance.  The question is:   Have flies got enough brain power to know when you are trying to kill them?    This is one of those kamikaze flies that appear in your bedroom just as you are getting into bed and zip past your head at great speed making that horrible ‘zzzzzoom’ noise as they go.  Usually I will persist in trying to swat them until I get them but this one was having none of it, every time I brandished my magazine, it went quiet and disappeared, so I would wave the magazine about hoping to disturb it out of its hiding place but it wasn’t going to zzzoom again until I had put it down.  I had to give up in the end and now there he is this morning standing rudely on my towel.

I move, stealth like out of bed and pick up the magazine very carefully and approach.  Zzzzoom, off he goes again and lands on the window.  Something out there must have caught his eye because I am able to creep up this time and ‘Thwack’, he is done for, unfortunately, without going into graphic details, the magazine is done for too.

9.10  I just have to take Audrey out today, she was fine all day yesterday without a walk, until about eight thirty in the evening when it must have occurred to her that we hadn’t been out today, interminably throwing the ball up and down the garden doesn’t count apparently.  She tried all her wiles to get me to take her then but it was no go.

So off, of course to the meadow and the woods where it is always cool, except that today with temperatures set to reach thirty six degrees, it was pretty hot even under the trees and the little brook that runs through the trees and she makes a beeline for, was all but dried up, just one large puddle left.  One of the fields we can see from the edge of the wood has been cut for hay and newly baled up.  Unlike all the other fields around, this one has both the large round bales and the old-fashioned rectangular ones piled up into mini haystacks which reminds me of my youth when we would rearrange the bales to make camps or play hide and seek. Oddly I don’t ever remember the farmer telling us off, perhaps we were just lucky that no one saw us.

13.30   It’s reasonably shady at the bottom of the garden so I am able to do a bit more tidying of the veg patch but now the sun is full on so I am going to have to go indoors for a while.  It strikes me that when the weather gets to these sorts of temperatures, it is as restricting as rain.  Good luck to all those heading for the beach with no shade.  I love the sun and the sea but not when it’s this hot.