Last night Flo went out in the dark to attempt to photograph deer on the lawn. They barked at her.
On another wet and windy morning I popped into the shop on my way to Football Green, took the back road up to Bull Lane, right into Seamans Lane, and back home via upper drive. Anne, a customer in the shop, on learning that there was an increase in the price of what she was buying, said: ‘Everything goes up. Nothing comes down’. ‘Except the rain’, was the reply I couldn’t resist. Strangely enough this didn’t get a laugh. She wondered when it would ever stop. It is Anne whose village garden is waterlogged.
Along Lyndhurst Road long wiggly lichen-clad oak limbs bounced up and down in the blustery wind. 
Given that they host such slow-growing organisms these branches must be resilient enough to have withstood such blasts in the past. Many of these branches, fallen with the parasites still clinging to them, litter the forest.
In a field along the back road a dripping jacketed horse pressed against bare deciduous trees.
There was no chance they would keep the rain off, but they may have provided a windbreak.
The fastening securing the tarpaulin covering stacks of hay in a soggy farmyard was severely tested. 
It was the sound of its flapping that drew me to peer over the tubular metal gate to see the cattle chewing away under shelter. Raindrops hit the tops of the bars of the gate, slid round the tubes, reformed on the undersides, dropped to the next bar, and eventually reached to the ground. A bit like A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh bouncing, limb to limb, down his tree in E. H. Shepard’s delightful drawing.
In Seamans Lane Martin, driving for a change, stopped to ask me if I was OK walking. He fully understood my desire to continued being drenched.
Kalu (see 28th) is maturing nicely. This afternoon, on encountering the edge of a table, he would back away. Like Robert The Bruce’s spider he wouldn’t give up. Time and again he walked forward, reached the precipice, backed away, and repeated the process, until Flo put him on the floor, to explore in safety.
He now does this adventurously and without complaint.
This evening we revisited last night’s meal. It was still delicious. I drank Campo Viejo rioja 2010, followed by a glass of Fortnum and Mason’s late bottled vintage port 2007, sent to us by Wolf and Luci. Jackie’s choice of accompaniment was Peroni.
Afterwards, watching ‘Jurassic Park’, Flo thought it prudent to turn Kalu off.