Sunny.

It made a lovely change this morning to look out of the window and see blue sky. With the sun came some warmth, note cloud of midges in the photo above. Thin clouds drifted across during the day often giving what I call a watery sky but not a drop of rain fell.

This morning I finally gave in and took down the hanging baskets. There were a few flowers in some of them but generally they were looking very sad. I tipped the plants and compost on the wild side of the bog garden, dismantled the baskets and gave the plastic inner baskets a good scrub in the stream. The straw baskets will go down to the dump but the plastic tubs with their inner water reservoir will make good temporary homes for more of the plants we're taking with us.

The front of the porch looks bare and will stay that way as I shan't be hanging up the wind chimes as usual. Instead I collected up all the wind chimes, most of which were broken, and gave all the metal tubes a good wash. As well as the two remaining intact wind chimes there are 48 tubes of varying sizes which one day I shall use to make more wind chimes. I won't be putting any up when we move to Pilton because I know that any noise that isn't your own can be intensely annoying to your neighbours. Hopefully the home after that will be secluded enough for my wind chimes not to cause offense.  

Having planted up the old hanging baskets I now have my capsule garden ready for moving. That's another job done. Later in the afternoon we had a visit from a census lady to ask us or rather Peter as the oldest of the household, a number of questions. This snap-shot survey is supposed to give the government an idea of the nation's views and circumstances in between the full national census the next of which will happen in 2021. Apart from the usual stuff about work, income and health there was quite a bit about use of the internet and also about smoking. I wish I had been the one answering as a lot of my answers would have been very different to Peter's.