Flanders Poppies grow here as a weed, showing up just about anywhere that there are other weeds. They only show up in small displays of no more than half a dozen at a time. I thought I had it all figured out until we made the trip to Manchester - as the bus is driving along there appeared a whole field of poppies. They were gone before I could do anything and only in reflection did I understand what I saw. I figured that they were being raised for seed. The poppies lasted a couple of weeks and I had pretty much decided that they were gone.
On our trip to London on the M4, just east of Bristol, we spotted another full field of poppies - actually only part of the field had poppies but where they grew they were fairly dense. On the trip to London we spotted several fields with poppies but at 60 mile/hour they are gone before we could do anything. On the way back from London we dug out the camera so that we could at least try to capture the poppies on film (I mean silicon). It wasn't going to be easy with a moving bus, with tinted windows and sunset, but we didn't figure there would be any harm in trying. We tried to photograph just a plain field and got surprisingly good photos. We watched all the way home - camera ready and it wasn't until we were very close to Bristol and it was twilight before we final got a shot. Think of this picture as a Monet impressionist rendering called "Poppies in a Green Field." I may never get another chance, so this is the best I can do.
Paving stones, bricks and even cobblestones have their practical side. With all the construction that goes on in any city, the sidewalks are constantly being dug up to fix the plumbing, wiring, sewer, TV cable, etc. Paving stones makes this job easier: Lift the stones, do what digging needs to be done, back fill, replace the stones and you're done. The stones are recyclable.
My hay fever is starting to get better. It was pretty rough for a while. Hay fever seems to be a big deal here. All of the drug stores are out of the various hay fever remedies and even the newspaper gives advice on how to cope. Their best suggestion was to "leave England during June."
Sitting in California, before we came, trying to figure out the UK dress code was quite a challenge. Most of our information came from old movies and English murder mysteries on TV. We were almost twenty years too late on the clothes we brought. I did manage to sneak in one pair of jeans and I live in them. We didn't bring any hats and, God forbid, certainly no baseball caps. So, the first day the sun came out we had to buy Nancy a hat (red headed, fair skinned women need all the sun protection they can get). We've been through several hats that we've picked up at the "charity shops". The main problem is that they blow off.
While in Paris, it became pretty obvious that I, too, needed a hat. In Paris was so hot that it was wiser to seek shade than to buy a hat, but a hat was put on the shopping list. Just before we went to London, merchandise for the World's Cup (European Football - Soccer) started to go on sale and we picked up a hat for Jerry. When we got to London we found that Nancy hadn't brought a sunhat, but it was so hot and sunny that she had to buy a baseball hat from a souvenir shop just to try and be a little out of the sun - the good news was that the hat didn't cost any more than Jerry's bargain. The bad news was within twenty minutes the sun went behind the clouds and she spent the rest of the day complaining about having "hat hair".
History is a living thing here. A couple of years ago a man, digging a fish pond in his back yard in Thornbury, found a pot. The pot was of Roman origin and contained over three thousand roman coins. Those coins are now on view in the local museum.
This story is unusual only because of the size of the treasure. In talking to the locals, they find roman artifacts all the time, sorta like finding arrowheads in the Western US. Mostly they find things like potshards and sometime coins or knick-knacks. I guess the point is that two thousand years of human history can be found in the back yard. Cool.