There's a kind of hush .....

The family left after lunchtime en route for Manchester where they were to stay with their other grandparents for a day before returning home to Reading. It has been wonderful having them here and the house already feels very quiet and empty.

I took the dogs out for their walk mid-afternoon and noticed that the mild weather we have been enjoying for the past week had taken a cooler turn and a few spots of rain even threatened, although it has not come to anything yet. One of the joys of my usual hill walk is that there are numerous paths to venture down and so it is easy to vary the length and the route so it keeps both myself and the dogs interested in our surroundings. This afternoon I took a slight detour around the side of a densely wooded section of the hill and was transported into a tranquil, beige and white cosiness where the ground was thickly carpeted with pine needles laid down over numerous seasons. The soft carpet covered many of the exposed roots and lower trunks of the pine trees as shifting sand would and everywhere you looked, discarded pine cones littered the ground. Most interesting, though, was the difference between this part of the wood and others where tree coverage is less dense and more mixed. Inside this pine sanctuary, birdsong was completely absent and it was as if nothing stirred and we were in pause mode!

Coming out of this section of the wood was like stepping into a different world. Shafts of light filtered through the canopy and the ground became firmer underfoot and browner. The old tree stumps and broken branches which littered the ground were covered in dense green moss instead of decaying beige pine needles and birdsong joyously penetrated the silence.

Back home now and the dogs have enjoyed their tea, so I thought I would post today's blip while the house settles back into its usual quietness. I hope to return a bit later to resume comments on your journals which I have been able to dip in and out of over the past week although my comments I'm afraid have been few and far between! My apologies.