Garden chaos

This morning we packed the car and waved goodbye to Riumar. With great regret on the part of Mystère, who loved it there -- I've been feeling advance guilt all week for tearing him away from his adventure playground, not to mention his own personal sunlounger on the terrace. A five-hour drive later we were back home. Since then we've caught up on village news and done most of our unpacking. Mystère has wandered round the house howling.

Due to a slight contretemps with the delivery of my longer lens for the Olympus, which I bought on eBay two months ago, I had to get it delivered to our neighbour here while we were away, so I didn't unpack it till today. I thought I'd better try it out, so I took it with me when we walked down to the garden in the early evening. The completely untended broad beans were struggling bravely through a dense carpet of weeds, but there were enough for us to eat for dinner this evening, in addition to the ones we ate raw straight out of the pods -- delicious! I took this photo randomly while we sat enjoying the gentle sunshine, so I'm not claiming any artistic qualities -- I just like the spikiness. I took a much more arty photo of this palm here.