I love the smell of Tiger Balm in the morning OR The JOYS OF SUMMER

Butter Your poem is BEAUTIFUL.

Our white lanes, which crisscross the landscape
Give form and beauty, bordered with fields
Of barley, blown in ripple formation,
A soft bed, shadowed, sunlit.
And edging these flowing fields
Lies a wild country growth,
Full of a multitude of grasses, poppies,
Sweet cow-parsley,
Daisies,
Just there, every year.
So natural in their calm constancy.

Well we have hailstones, did someone say its May

Love the colourful picture, soop. Can just see the greens, orange and pink! . Fabulous.

Lovely, soop! Hoping for some of that here before long. The NW wind is certainly shifting the clouds and giving my laundry a good blow!

The sea is deep teal green and the waves are white-capped. Sea-Pinks cluster between silvered rocks. A pair of Oyster-Catchers rootle along the pebbled shore with spear-like orange bills. And the is welcome.

B - Hope it stays on the hills (well, not for too long) and doesn't reach your burgeoning spring garden.

Have just looked out of the window to the north. There is new snow on the hills that were bare this morning. Oh well, it's only May.

Throughout our drive to Campbeltown we were treated to seemingly endless ribbons of bluebells. We watched the lambs leaping up into the air with the sheer joy of living. The pink clover-like clusters of blooms are spreading between the rocks along the beach. Any day now, the wild yellow iris will come into bloom. A large cluster have made their way from the wild wood into the wetter area of our garden.
Came home to find a black cat, half asleep on the warm stones of the driveway. He opened an eye. Licked his lips. Stretched. Sauntered to the kitchen door. Waited and was duly rewarded with a bowl of Tesco's finest cat food. After which, he washed his whiskers [half heartedly] and left. We haven't see him for almost three days. Having filled his belly he's away on further walkabouts. Said it before - that cat treats this place like a hotel staffed by personal servants. And still we love care for him!

Yes thanks Butternut just unattractively scabby.

Oh, well that's a positive sign - we have lots of dunnocks around here - may yet get lucky

There are also lots of dunnocks around here. Dunnocks' nests are one of the favoured kind in which cuckoos deposit their eggs.

Heard our first cuckoo on 27 April this year. See one most days too. My sister in Norfolk didn't hear one until a week after that. Odd really, since we are further north (and west), but we had the better weather in April so that might explain it.

The cuckoo migration websites are reporting cuckoos arriving back in the UK during the last few days, mainly in the south and Norfok Broads, where some cuckoos were tagged last year. Seems the population has dropped by half in recent years. I would love to hear a cuckoo, but it's years since the last time I heard one when on holiday in Normandy.

Anno -I first heard a nightingale a couple of years ago, about 10.30 at night - the sky was a deep violet. I remember stopping and saying, "what's that?". Magical.

When we lived near King's Lynn, a cuckoo, annually resident on the common, made its presence felt every morning in spring - along with the permanently resident donkey. What a duet! We also had the thrill of visiting a fen where nightingales sang at dusk at about this time of year.

Smiling, B. Simple pleasures.

well I am on the edge of the South Downs there has been a road built but still relatively the same.

Are you still on the edge, whitewave? or has there been more building around you?

when I was a child - living on the edge of a Brighton suburb I heard cuckoos regularly, and owls all night and foxes and smelt grass and herbs when I had the window open at night. Now even though I live in the same area that has all Gone Also does anyone remember the huge amount of flies that died on the car windscreen when going on a long journey Now nothing no wonder the birds find life so difficult

I WANT cuckoos! I had two jays fighting with a pair of blackbirds while I was getting dressed this morning! What a row?

Check out the RSPB Lakenheath Fen Nature Reserve, nonu! They have cuckoos.

We don"t get cuckoos here in suffolk

Hearing cuckoos all day
From up the hill,
Half-way over the field,
And even from across the loch.
Hearing the wild call of buzzards
Wheeling, sometimes within sight,
Sometimes over Umphra's Know,
The hill brow.
Seeing flowers erupting
Wherever I walk.
Some are so little that you'd miss them
If you didn't look.
Finding an old pile of logs
I cut five years ago
Covered in moss.
Scraping moss off logs
And piling them in the wood shed
For a lovely fire
On a cool evening.
Listening to blackbirds now.
Good things in my life today.
I am content.

B -