Shining

A day to get on with life - a day of sunshine and blustery wilds, feeling more like March than February. Uffington churchyard was filled with sheets of snowdrops and a scatter of golden-yellow winter aconites, lighting up the grassland. Later there will be goldilocks buttercup, bluebells, wood anemones and daffodils... 

Back home for lunch -  a favourite Portuguese-inspired recipe of onion, potato, chorizo, kale and good stock - simple but tasty comfort food. Then an hour or so tending the garden, where the first early dog-violets are just coming into bloom. I stood very quietly for about ten minutes watching one of the ring-necked parakeets feeding on the fatballs - we now have three in the vicinity!

In the late afternoon I spent a very sociable few hours with a close group of neighbours, welcoming home a family who'd returned back to the street after spending a year in Malta. Two year old M is a treasure - bright, cheeky and willful  - I think he's going to have a lot of local adorers, being one of the very few children in the street just now.