Well blow me its august, and where exactly is the promised weather. I wrote a letter recently to the board of directors of the Met office about the weather reporting and at the end I put please dont write me a letter full of platitudes, guess what I got!!! Not one reply about the problems I had pointed out. Oh well you have to try. Got the same crap from No 10 too!!..

Arabis is still not right, I tried to ask a question on a website that had interesting vet problems, but it did not work. She is a little more cheerful but a long way from the dog she was. I hate it when they get old and slip back, dogs don't live long enough.

The young birds are all doing well, had it not been for the rain yesterday we would have had a couple more loose, but the new Harris Hawk is called Bay Middleton and is a sweety and flying very well, had his first trip round the field yesterday in a lull in the weather. Perhaps today we will be able to get them all flown again. But despite all the grey weather the view out of my window is enough to give one heart. The greens are vivid, there is a rabbit on the lawn, some of the trees are thinking about autumn colour and there is a tinge of yellow to their leaves, which contrasts superbly with the copper red of the beech trees. The evening primroses are a paler lemon yellow which leap out againtst the dark green of the hedges and the house martins and swallows ignore the weather and just carry on.