Wet stuff

4 km swim yesterday -- 160 lengths in 140 mins! Particularly pleased that I wasn't knackered afterwards, but able to settle down to 'working at home' -- with laptop on a tray across my knees, in my upstairs study comfy chair, with view of back garden and lots of little birdies playing around the bird feeders.

This weekend, we have the annual local street party on Sunday -- Joseph has made an info display on what being a 'conservation area' for local architectural heritage means; I'll be working on the book and/or plant stall. The last few weekends, we've visited Sutton Hoo in Essex, and Rye Gate House and nature reserve up the Lea. Next weekend, we're off to Lyme Regis and JN's parents for the end-of-August Bank Holiday.

Sutton Hoo is like Tolkien's Barrow Downs: a field where rich Anglo-Saxon burials, two of them inside ships, were found; the barrow down is on a ridge looking down on the Blacwater estuary, at the furthest point that ships could navigate up the river Debden. Around the pagan warrior burials there are later Christian-era Anglo-saxon bodies, some decapitated -- thought to be criminals who were hanged from a gallows up there, their bodies left with the ghosts of the heathen damned.

Rye House is just a local train trip up our river valley: it was one of the first houses in this country built of bricks, when they were a new-fangled architectural innovation. Then it was the base for an attempt to assassinate Charles II when he was due to ride along the road past it -- but he headed off early, so the assassins missed him -- but were caught when one of them betrayed the plot and got the chop themselves. Just the gatehouse now stands, on an island moated by a channel dug from the river. Beyond the old house, the wide flood plain is now nature reserve, partly managed by Royal Society for Protection of Birds, partly by the Wildlife Trust: Jospeh saw his first ever live kingfisher -- a fast-moving turquoise and russet streak that, every now and then, went into its nest hole in an artificial sandbank beside a weed-choked pool then headed back off towards the river to hunt more fishies. Masses of luscious blackberries ('please leave for the birds'), water buffalo keeping the grazing marsh grazed, grey heron, lots of wood pigeons.

Meanwhile, this is harvest season: masses of lettuce, runner beans, raspberries. Some blackberries. Tomatoes just starting to come ripe (a race against the blight which is taking hold on their leaves). Main job down the allotment is transplanting broccoli and cabbage seedlings so they can grow big and fat for winter harvest. Freezer already stuffed full -- but we think its time we got a new (energy efficient) fridge, and we've spotted one that offers an extra, fifth freezer drawer...

How are you all?