Snake's-head

A fairly packed day, despite feeling tired after my expedition to Surrey. I dropped Chris and Pete at the station around 8 am, and then did some shopping at Waitrose before dropping in Pete's books at the accountants just after 9.  Usually one of the more junior staff opens the door, but today it was opened by Martin, an old friend from our home-education days. We had a long and very pleasant chat, catching up with each other's families.

Alex and I then headed off to survey a site in Nottingham - a bit of a rush job. It was larger and more complicated than I'd envisaged, but we got it done in good time before heading home to prepare an early dinner, as Ben had an evening tutorial at the local college for his OU course . 

The evening sun was beautiful, so after I'd dropped him off him, I had a walk down to the river to see if our local fritillaries were flowering. The ground was still quite damp after the Easter floods, which have only recently drained away, and the smell of silt was still strong. Despite the flooding, the main population of fritillaries had largely finished flowering, probably hurried along by last week's high temperatures, but I found a few in good conditions in the next field along. It's good to see that they're still doing well, even if I couldn't actually carry out a full count.