Woodpeckers stretching her wings again

By the time I surfaced this morning after my deep and long hot bath Eileen, Woodpeckers' great friend from their days at Edinburgh university, had arrived with her daughter Kirsty. They were already playing Bananagrams, Helena's favourite game of the moment which absorbed them for quite some time, so I started to heat the delicious soup Eileen had brought with them for lunch.

After lunch we headed off for a short walk up to the top of Painswick Beacon, an ancient Iron Age camp perched on one of the highest points on the Cotswold escarpment, with fine views across the whole of the Severn Vale, from the Bristol, Channel in the south west to north of the Malvern hills to the north-west. Although it was beautifully sunny with only occasional scudding clouds, there was a strong and cold westerly wind once we reached the top of the Beacon. I have put some pictures of the views from there on this Flickr gallery.

As we walked back down from the beacon along a path which traversed one of the rampart ditches, Helena walked ahead and started to jump up and down in the wind. It was time to take another picture of her, but this time in her Woodpeckers persona as she began to fly into the new year.