Smoke!

Many sausages being barbecued out in the open on a rather windy day. The clouds of smoke amused me enough to photograph them, and I have to say that the smell was superb!

The occasion was a football tournament in the park. I am not ordinarily interested in football at all, but when we looked out of our window quite early this morning, we saw marshals already directing cars down the road opposite us, evidently to parking spots left vacant by the absence of office workers on a Saturday.

Curiosity, as ever, overcame our better judgement, and it turns out that a two-day football tournament was taking place in the park just behind us. The curiosity even went so far as to stroll into the park to see what was going on. And you see in the linked photograph the pitches beyond the buttercups. My wife counted TWELVE...

When we were there, it was evident that the smallest footballers were at work. We saw a stream of older people arriving in football gear, so they were clearly going to have their games later on.

The sausages are surely the necessary healthy sustenance for successful sport, and we saw many of the adult males (both participants and spectators) with case-loads of beer. The children had to make do with sugary soda-drinks on sale.

So this is how the English make do on a overcast, showery, and very windy June day. And then overhead, we had the pleasure of seeing groups of aircraft in formation, probably the tail-end of the fly-past for the Queen's Birthday on their way to base (I guess Brize Norton from the flight path).