Spills Brook, near Clattinger Farm, Cotswolds

We set off this morning to look for a meadow full of snakes-head fritillaries. We found the site, it’s a nature reserve, but found precious few fritillaries. It’s too early in the season. How disappointing!

Decided instead to visit Moor farm, which is the HQ of the nature reserve as a whole. There’s a lakeside cafe there (the Cotswold water park is full of flooded gravel pits used as lakes for water sports or wildlife watching). The whole cafe experience felt like stepping into Piccadilly Circus. It was noisy and felt faux-rustic. I will return, but not at a weekend.

Steve dropped me off at the Trinity rooms, which was hosting a repair cafe. To my amazement, the repairers got my food processor going again! Turned out it was not a problem caused by the motor, rather that something inside the safety locking mechanism switch was broken (a tiny bit of plastic) so it was a superglue job, I learned a lot from watching the guys and thanked them profusely. A ceilidh band was also playing in the hall, and no one mentioned mothers’day, for which I was grateful.

Dozed a bit in the cabin when I got home. It was gloriously sunny, and I found some podcasts I liked. Then a package from Amazon was delivered, and suddenly I was building a metal shoe rack and rearranging all our shoes, getting stuff sorted into charity shop and clothing bank bags. Finding a new home for the old storage unit, rearranging more stuff… we’ve all been there!

When I stopped at last. I made supper, and then started looking for a place to stay over Easter in Dorset. I might as well have been looking for a purple monkey! We shall see tomorrow whether my enquiry was successful.