Here and there

"Here" being Brighton (where I live) and "there" being Falmouth.  My brother moved to Cornwall when he retired from the police and is now living in a small village a few miles from Falmouth.  I have taken to checking the weather reports on the back page of the paper every morning to compare his weather and mine.  Given that many people head to Cornwall for their summer holidays it is perhaps surprising to see that Brighton is regularly sunnier, drier and warmer than Falmouth.  Indeed, one day last week Brighton was actually 10 degrees warmer than Falmouth.

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I don't know if this is a case of great minds thinking alike or of fools seldom differing, but I was musing about spam comments on this blog and, lo and behold, Buck goes and posts about the same thing.

I have rarely been hit by a spam comment - until the last week or so - and now I get two or three a day.  Fortunately, as Buck says, Blogger has its act pretty much together and only one of those unwanted comments slipped through the net to appear for all to see.  But I certainly do not want to revert to using word verification if it can be avoided.

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Unwelcome visitors.  It's that time of the year, or - rather - that time in the ripening of the pears.  Every year when the pears reach a certain point in their growth - long before they are fully grown or anywhere near ripe - jackdaws flock into our tree and gorge themselves.  It would be less of a problem if they would refrain from taking a peck at one pear and moving to another.  This means that half our crop (when we eventually harvest it) has bits missing and discoloration round the missing bits.  But at least the pesky birds usually attack only those pears towards the top of the tree.

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More unwelcome visitors.  I decided the other day that I could manage a very short walk in the woods and drove to the Coldean Lane car park for Stanmer Great Wood only to find that travellers have once again dug through the bank and moved a dozen or so caravans into the clearing. They have also taken over half the car park.  Unwilling to run the gauntlet of the camp, I decided on a different, longer route which I found exhausting.  But at least I was able to enjoy a walk through the Pudding Bag and it's beech wood where the leaves are a delightful green and there is gold on the ground all year round.