Holme Pond

Everything being calm and unable to face another coffee, I excused myself from Heathrow at around 1pm, confident I could be back north in time to collect Dan and Abi for the evening.

However, in sharp contrast to last Friday's drive down, my journey today was one of those where I endured the modern phenomenon of watching the arrival time on the Satnav slowly, inexorably rise, from 16:54 when I set off, to 18:55, when I stopped to take this photo, just a few minutes from collecting the kids.

This pond is one of those little hidden treasures, of which I've found so many in this area over the last twenty-five years: you can't even see it's there from the road if you are driving into Holme. Places like this - ones that you can so easily drive straight past - always remind me of 'Swallowdale', Arthur Ransome's book in which the Swallows, finding themselves without their boat, make camp in the valley that can't be seen until you are standing on its edge.