Almost perfect day

A lovely, lazy day, spent mostly at home with a brief sojourn to Hankley. An almost perfect day which could have only been improved by an appearance of the sun.

We realised we’d not been to Hankley for ages. However, given that we only returned from Australia in mid January then Mirinda went to Miami and I was sick, causing quarantine conditions to be enacted at the house, it’s probably not surprising.

The day was grim and grey (though not cold or wet) but Hankley was still beautiful. It changes with the weather but there’s always that wide open vista aspect that makes you stop in your tracks and wonder at the artistic skills of nature. I know that some people would look at it and think it proved the existence of some sort of intelligent designer but I look it and think the opposite.

You can look at a landscape and see what has happened to create it. You just need to know what you’re looking at. I guess most people don’t know what they’re looking at and, therefore, they assume it must be some supernatural power. With that in mind and given I have no idea what makes a car work, I suppose I should think it was god.

Which reminds me…at the conference last weekend, we learned that the MoD leave archaeological traces behind them when they use areas for training. One of these features is something called a ‘scrape’.

We were told the story about an archaeologist, walking around Salisbury plain with a group of soldiers, pointing out features on the landscape (“That’s a Bronze Age barrow, that’s a bit of a cursus, that’s a monolithic rock, they’re tourists…”) when he came across a slight depression in the ground.

He looked at it and shrugged his shoulders, saying he didn’t know what it was.

“A scrape, sir!” Came the answer from the soldiers around him.

As we walked around Hankley, I couldn’t remember the name given to these military things when, from deep within her subconscious, Mirinda suddenly said ‘scrape’. She has no idea where it came from or why. Still, she was right. And I was able to explain what it was. You can find out more here.

The poodles, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about the beauty of nature or the intricacies of man’s footprint on the landscape. They just love walking through puddles, trotting along beside us and running away from little cavalier/poodle crosses called Ossie.