All Hail!

Beannachtai na Feile Padraig - one for all the Irish readers. And poor aul' Mammy's gotta work late. Yo Silverwoods! Yo Steak lady! Yo Theo!

We're no sooner indoors from our walk, than the heavens open and a hail storm blasts down, turning the terrace white (briefly). Winter has not quite lost its grip on us yet.

The frogs in the pond - after what seemed like a month of messing about and croaking, have finally produced some frog spawn. Just one lump, but it's a start. It seems like a full month since First-Dad announced theirs and Pud-Lady even longer. We may be NE facing on this bit of Kent, but that seems like a very long delay for a distance of 25 or so miles. We have seen toads too, in the pond, but so far none of their long strings of spawn, just a froggy lump.

We like frogs - we patrol round the pond encouraging them to leap in off the sides, with a splash. The we look in wonder and amazement in the direction of the splash, apparently unable to suss where the leaping thing has vanished to.

We have a new tree. Our poor old flowering cherry was struggling the last few years to produce any flowers or leaves, and was a bit of an ugly shape - one huge thick trunk, then a "starburst" of inch-thick mini branches all coming out of one boss 3 feet off the ground in all directions. Mum and Dad decided they'd had enough, so that's been decapitated, and replaced by a 15 foot tall whip of a very white-barked silver birch.

Hope it likes hail!

Deefer