Shy cosmos

Not a shrinking violet, but the first (late) cosmos flower, hiding in the margin between a huge lavender bush and some overgrown daisy things.

After a marvellously long lie in came a very frustrating call with eBay who had locked my account for no obvious reason. One and a half hours of 'live chat' and actual phone calls to sort it out. Sigh. Lunch outside was the tonic needed and, so beautiful and hot was the day, that I heeded the call of my book and dragged a sunlounger off into the shade to read for the whole afternoon.

What luxury. Can't remember the last time I did that. So I read, and I closed my eyes a bit, and I watched the sparrows dot in and out of their nests on our house roof, and watched a lizard climb all the way up the side of our house, only to tumble down just as he reached the top. Even had time to watch as a tendril of some climber or other grabbed a bit of long grass above my head and wrapped slowly and surely around it.

Good every now and then to stop and stare, to take a break from the endless to do list, from the endless sense that we must be Having Fun and Doing Something. Mr B, perhaps sensing my mood, offered to make the dinner and - since our roast chicken dinner is the easiest thing in the world to put together - I agreed despite it being fathers day.

A call to my Dad later brought the distressing news that my sister's cat had had to be put down while being looked after by my folks and it was my Dad who - as he put it - had to sign the death warrant. Big tough guy and all, he seemed a bit shaken by the whole experience. My Mam - who doesn't even really like cats - was similarly shaken but had to break off from telling me about that on the phone to grab her gun and shoot a rabbit she'd just spotted in the garden and she suspected of nibbling the tops of her pinks. So my snipping in half of slugs and crushing underfoot of snails is really nothing ...