Who Would Have Thought?

Wild, windy and only a touch of blue in the sky first thing this morning. It wasn't until later in the afternoon that we had truly sunny skies.

When I got to the stables this morning I found that for a change I was riding Cadno. He's bigger than Margaret and more experienced but he does have a tendency to slow down. While we are warming up we are encouraged to ride circles or turn across the school coming to a halt on the centre line. This is to get the horse listening to the rider. Unfortunately as soon as I turned inwards towards the centre line Cadno would slow down to a walk before I asked him. Instead I had to reverse the process and keep him trotting without a stop and try again later so that he listened to me instead of anticipating the exercise. There were only four of us in the lesson which was good. We worked on riding a straight line, leg yielding towards the wall and leg yielding away from the wall which is harder. No cantering again today which is a bit boring.

Afterwards I had some bags of garden waste to leave at the dump. As I left the industrial estate I could see the traffic was solid all the way into town so I headed away from town taking the longer but clear route in. By the time I got to the roundabout which is the junction between the only east/west main road and the main north/south road (there is only one) the traffic on the other side of the road was stationary as far as I could see in both directions but not on my side of the road. There were cars backed up round the roundabout, the slip road from Morrisons and even in Morrison's car park. I've seen heavy traffic before on a Friday but never like that. Apparently there were temporary traffic lights adding to the chaos. But by the time I had done my shopping in Morrisons it was clear again. Today's shopping included four more plants one of which was yet another lavender. As can be seen from the photos there's plenty of lavender in the herb garden but it's the one with lavender coloured flowers. The one I bought today has the dark purple flowers and having seen one in a neighbour's garden I've been hankering after it all week. So how could I not buy it when I saw it at the supermarket?

This morning while sitting outside I got to thinking about all the things we take for granted in our daily lives that were only in the realms of science fiction when I was young- being able to access information and people world wide from a phone in our pocket (or in my case a pc at home), electric cars, being able to search for and play music with just the spoken word, robots running factories, automatic gadgets to hoover your floors unsupervised (I'd be wary having seen the damage to a laminate floor caused by grit caught under a Roomba), ditto an automatic mower, paying for goods by tapping a card on a box, self service checkouts, the list goes on and on. I use the self service checkout in Lidl but always head for the one that has lost its ability to speak. No annoying voice telling me to 'Place item in bagging area.' etc while I'm taking my time. Some things like driverless cars and the use of biometrics are only just appearing. I wonder what will emerge in the next 10 or 20 years?