Birds and Flowers

It seemed pretty grey when I got up, but by the time we'd had breakfast there were bluer skies and the worst of my headache had worn off, so we went for a quick walk in Farmleigh.

A friendly, inquisitive robin perched on a gate in the walled garden.

C was focussed on another thrush pecking away in the dirt under a tree, but I spotted this one near it, hunkered down in the grass.

Also fossicking around under a tree was this blackbird. He seemed to be digging quite deep - a bit like that squirrel in the Botanic Gardens recently, his head was well down in the earth. All he seemed to come up with was a little seed!

Magnolias - little and large, white and pink...

A valiant last stand by a few crocuses...

We had bean and vegetable soup for lunch, and decided we didn't need a dinner. So I made jam doughnuts, using some organic unbleached flour I bought recently to try out.  You would want to be a fervent macrobiotic addict to have thought that the raw dough looked at all appetising (and in fact I nearly started again from scratch with bleached flour, only I couldn't bear the waste) but once they had puffed up and taken some colour from the frying, they were just as tasty as usual. However, I am not sure that the unbleached flour will be on my shopping list again. I think I was hoping for something more like an 81% flour we used to get years ago where you could still see the golden flecks of wheat-germ in it.