Round Purple Spiky Flower

As you can tell, my botanical skills are pretty limited. I have no idea what this flower is but I thought it looked quite interesting! Spotted it today whilst out walking. It was quite warm and the dogs were looking tired so I detoured via a drainage ditch / spring where they can usually get a drink, but it was dried up and just a patch of sticky mud. Poor things were a little confused.

We got our fibre broadband connected and it runs at a whopping 39mb/s - about 10 times faster than the old broadband - and do you know what - if I didn't know it was connected I mostly couldn't tell the difference! Web pages load a smidgen faster but not startlingly so!  

I did upload some photos and that was significantly faster and I am hoping that background updates (of which there seem to be so many - like hourly for antivirus and daily for Windows update) will take less time to complete and tie up PC resources. Also hoping that it will be more stable and reliable than the old system! We seemed to lurch from about 4 mb/s down to 56 kb/s (dial up speed!)