Breakfast with mum to talk holidays. Cat was on edge, parading backwards and forwards and and miowing at us with disdain. I don’t know whether it was the fact I had gone or they had gone back or because she’d been beaten up by the ginger tom yesterday morning, but something had upset her and she wanted to be sure we all knew about it.

So, between frequent tickles we ate croissants and drank far too much coffee and looked at pictures of volcanoes then mooched upstairs to try and fix an errant PDA that would happily download email on the move but obstinately refused to do the comparatively simple task of storing addresses.

Half an hour of fiddling failed to fix it, so we’ve put it to one side until the next time I’m round, and we headed off instead for Ingatestone.

The road to Ingatestone is a winding country lane down which most people drive far too fast. Near the top of the hill, where thick woodland lines both sides of the road you often see bunches of flowers where someone has been remiss with the brakes and smashed into a particularly thick trunk. Invariably the trunks comes out of it in far better shape than either the car or the driver.

Slow down just a little, though, and you see some extraordinary things. Today it was a dry dead bush so densely covered in cobwebs that it looked like it had been draped in white candy floss.

It was a deadly thick mesh in which a million flies had been caught in the days it had been there, but nowhere could I see the spider (or probably colony of spiders) that had spun it.

In fact, it was such an extraordinary sight that I popped back later when I should have been tracking down sites for tonight’s slot on Through the Night, just so I could take some pictures, dodging the speeding drivers as they flew around the corners.

Breakfast was so large and so late I skipped lunch, but had tea and cake with Trevor and Jon, inspected their nice new conservatory and tickles the cats as we talked about plans for holidays and weekends in Paris. We’re all off to Spain in two weeks’ time, although on account of being away for the last week and so not turning over my calendar I hadn’t realised it was so soon. Guess I need to start thinking about my schedules at work.

Home to finally dig out the sites for tonight’s feature, and load a dozen new albums onto my iPod. I’ve been listening to the same six CDs on it for the last week and it’s starting to drive me mad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2003 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.