The Deer's Behind

If you look very closely at this pic, you'll see the backside of a deer disappearing through a gap in the fence, into our neighbour's wilderness garden. CleanSteve says it's a muntjac, and that he saw a pair. He's blipped the faces so I don't have to! It wasn't dawn, more like 10am, so we were surprised to see them pottering in the garden, even though we live next to open fields.

This shot is the best I can do today as I have a self-inflicted migraine, probably caused by my eating a lump of Cheddar last night while cooking the tea. Since I grew up with Cheddar and Edam as the default cheeses in my early life, and the slogan "Choose a chunk of Scottish Cheddar" still ringing in my ears when I go to the supermarket, it seems a little harsh that I now can't eat it!

However, there is a joke implicit, which only TML will get, so I'll explain. When we grew into our teenage years. we began to call our mother "The Dear" and the name stuck. When Tanya/TML paid us a surprise Christmas visit from New Zealand, with Christina, who was then aged three, my mother was doing a massage when she arrived, and didn't know they were there.

We began to talk about The Dear, and Christina said,
"When are we going to see the deer?"
She was very disappointed when she found out that the Dear was a person, not an actual deer or even reindeer!

My mother, on the other hand, looked through the kitchen door (it has a window in it) and thought to herself,
"oh, there's a person in the kitchen with a child who looks just like Christina".

It took us all a while to settle down from the shock of their arrival, and the Dear not being a creature from the woods.

As for the rest of today, I stayed in bed, ordered some course books for my WEA literature and social history course which starts next month (1950s this time). I also watched the second half of the film Broken Flowers, (Jim Jarmusch, 2005) and started Effie Gray, a film which came out this year, which certainly didn't make it to Stroud. It's about the young wife of John Ruskin, who was also his muse. Emma Thompson plays a formidable titled lady, and there's the obligatory snobbish mother-in-law with whom Effie has to live. I'm enjoying it.

As you have worked out, it's not the mother of all migraines. Darkened room not required, but I'm certainly not doing anything that requires physical effort.