A misty walk

A misty walk with Joe and Georgie through the island’s one area of actual coastal rainforest. (As opposed to all the other second or third or fourth grow woods.)

It’s such a beautiful place, but there’s no ball throwing allowed, so we haven’t been there for quite some time. With Georgie on a no-ball-chasing regime for now, it was time to go back.

She’s made the transition to walks only amazingly well. The first few times she kept looking back to see if the ball was finally going to be produced, but now she’s more than happy to concentrate on all the fascinating smells. And running through the streams which flow freely this time of year.

Of note a rotten tree that has clearly been a woodpecker buffet recently.

For a long time we would meet for walks at 2pm, which was always fine. Then a while ago Joe suggested 1pm instead. This was proven to be a bit more challenging, given my tendency to binge watch shows or read until 4am. That combined with my ability to sleep through three alarms means it’s not always to make a 1pm walk when I don’t open my eyes until noon or later. Not for the first time I had to text Joe as soon as I got up to ask for a 1:30 meet. He is now going to ring me at 11am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which should do the trick until (if) I manage to sort out this sleep thang.

Anyway, as lovely as it was to be there today it was also disappointing that not one of the many ladybird stones I discovered last summer was still there.

Sad to say there are some whimsy police on the island, people who will not tolerate the sight of anything in the woods that isn’t naturally occurring. To hell with the fact that said object brings smiles and delight to most of us. (I hope whoever removed them at least had the decency to give the stones to a child.)

For example, on a different walk last April Joe and I came across this. 

Some clever individual had noticed that this stump could, with the addition of two stones and the bottom of a push broom, be given a face. How delightful. With that particular “moustache” we dubbed it the Charlie Chaplin tree. It lasted a fortnight before the eyes and moustache disappeared. 

Perhaps someone was upset because they thought it looked more like the actual great dictator than Chaplin’s version.

Perhaps, but my suspicion is the whimsy police. So far neither Joe nor I have spotted an old push broom at the local recycling depot, but we do replace the eyes whenever they’ve been removed. Fuck the whimsy police.

And now, just because I have one, here’s another Georgie pic.