We are now basking in hot, sunny, weather. To celebrate I walked the Mill Lane/Emery Down loop in sandals.
Near the farm holiday cottages at the top of the lane, in addition to the usual crop of ponies, two young donkeys grazed in a field. Even from a distance I could tell they were asses because their ears were clearly elongated.
The millpond’s streams are now less full and the lake, for that is what it is, now bears irises and waterlilies.
Many of the roads and lanes around 
Minstead have barely enough room for one vehicle. Passing tends to be a pretty dodgy affair. Whether driving or walking you have to take care not to be persuaded into a ditch. The road leading to Emery Down on today’s route is particularly narrow. 
Despite signs indicating that there are passing places, some cars are forced to back up quite a long way. All the roads were very busy today. At one point a car meeting two others and a motorbike head on took the better part of valour and went into reverse. As there was no way a pedestrian could thread himself through there, I could only ‘stand and stare’. Well, I now have plenty of time for that.
There is far more concern for those on foot as one enters Emery Down. 
Especially as there is also a blind bend near the village hall, the sign warning drivers what they may encounter is really rather necessary.
Whisking and flicking at flies, mares’ tails were much in evidence today. (Anyone who cares to humour me may wish to read yesterday’s post to glean a full appreciation of that sentence. It will, after all, be my birthday very soon after this ramble is posted.)
Jackie hoped to retain her resolution to be rather mean with the birds today. Except for the two near the feeding station, her myriad of hanging baskets are now chock full of gorgeous flowers. The exceptions are suffering from a surfeit of guano. They have required mucking out, which means they have been shorn of clumps that had the misfortune to lie under the avian post-prandial evacuations. The miscreants were punished by being sent out into the forest to forage for a day.
Later this afternoon I began reading my friend Michael Kindred’s book ‘Once Upon a Game’.
For dinner Jackie served up Dandy and Beano style pork and leak sausage and mash with which she drank Roc Saint Vincent sauvignon blanc Bordeaux 2011. I finished the Maipo red and began a Cimarosa shiraz cabernet sauvignon of the same year.
Later Mat and Oddie turned up to eat the last of the sausages and a tin of Butcher’s.