before and after

The bad news is that the boy child, in a cottage below, has been given a vuvuzela, unfortunately he is known to be persistent - he still bounces every day on his big garden trampoline usually kicking his beloved football at the same time, so I don't hold out much hope that he will lose interest in blowing his own trumpet for some time.
It sounds like a lost and weary elephant calling for his herd.

This is not the elephant, it is the hay binder that caught fire and set fire to several barley and potato fields plus some woods on Wednesday.



Driving back from stewarding I could smell the smoke two villages away and my eyes were smarting as I got near home. Visions of wet dog, cat and Retired Person dripping on the lawn while old homestead smoked in ruins.
However it was up aways and across the road and the firemen had doused the worst.
The poor old Millennium hedge has taken a bashing, which is a shame it took a lot of time and money sticking all those plastic tubes with twigs into the ground - so I am told.
We were hoping to live long enough to have the branches meet over our heads as we walked as they used to when G'dad was a boy

Hot work apparently, one doesn't think of these practicalities.
I remember being driven back to college and all the fields seem to be on fire to my urban eyes, I wondered if war had been declared [we were living under threat of the Bomb [not terrorism] but it in those days the farmers used to burn off the stubble. Not allowed now, naughty dirty smoke.
Naughtiness will always find a way it seems