I’m here to spend my first holiday and it feels wonderful not to have to rush back to London as usual. It was also the cats’ first visit. They are getting used to it – Percy, true to character, is the more curious and has been following me about; Dixie has spent quite a lot of time in their basket and under the sofa. Percy is quite scared of the cows in the field opposite which he can see from the windowsill, and they are both spending quite a lot of time creeping about in a crouch.
Completely mystified by the discovery of a dead bat on the kitchen doormat. I have no idea how it could have got into the house. All three doors into the kitchen had been shut while I was away, as were the windows, and there’s no way in via the extractor fan. The hatch to the loft was shut. It was interesting to look at, as I’ve never seen a bat before: about the size of a mouse, the colour of Dixie, with little black folded up legs and crepey wings. Some of it seemed to be missing, so perhaps it had been brought in – but by what? Perhaps it got in while Boy and I were here last and hid itself somewhere until we left.
I finally assembled my bed and was delighted that it didn’t need the two people recommended by John Lewis. A couple of wooden crates took the place of the second person with no trouble. My life all over again.
While I was doing that, I glanced out of the window and saw a red deer grazing in one of the fields at the size of the Enmore road. It was lovely to watch it through my binoculars – it was a female – a hind, I think lady-deer are called. Quite difficult to see, as it was waist high in whatever the crop is, so it looked like it was swimming. Later, I saw about four more running through whatever crop is growing over there. The farmers must love them. There is deer poo in the field immediately behind the house, so sometimes they must come very close.
Later, I startled two pheasant in the garden, who scuttled away noisily sounding affronted. They really are the most lovely looking, but ungainly, birds. I wonder whether people shoot them because they seem to find it so difficult to escape, uttering their cries of outrage.
Very annoyed to find that I’d burnt my back pottering around in the garden. Hadn’t realised that I’d spent long enough out there for that and since it was intermittently spitting, it was also quite surprising.
The cottage is hot upstairs under the roof, but the living room is cool, cool, cool. In fact, I put the central heating on for a while as the sofas actually felt rather damp. Damp is obviously a bit of an issue here, especially when there’s no heating to counteract it while I’m away.
As I write this, sitting in bed with a cup of tea in the morning of the first of July, a cow (a steer, really, but it doesn’t sound as nice – I shall call them cow-boys, instead, as coined by a dear friend) has wandered into sight to scratch its head against the telegraph pole’s tensioned steel wires. They are beautiful – all browns and greys, none of the dull black and white Friesian variety, which is good to see. The trouble is they bring a lot of flies with them and I’ll have to buy something to stop that. Oh good—pilgrimage to B&Q in the offing.
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I think they must have been attracted by the growing crop of ripening blackberries a the back of the house. I think they were juveniles as they didn’t have long tail feathers or female colouring.
