A walk in the Park

First of all, I should point out that a lot of the time I'm 50-something going on 12.

With that established, I want to tell you about my latest Favourite Thing.

For the longest time I've been scouring the internet for a 3D virtual reality to play with. Not one of those "games" where I'd have to kill monsters or race cars or scale sheer cliffs or do anything like that. Or do anything at all! Just somewhere that I could wander around and explore. Somewhere calm and restful and pleasant to be.

I've found it!

Real Park - free from Schillergames.

Wander around, ride the train, go for a swim, chat with other visitors to the park (or not - you can visit offline) or just sit on a bench, watch the sunset and listen to the birds twitter.

At the moment, all visitors are blue-jeaned males with their nicknames emblazoned on their white tops, but different characters and wardrobe options are in the pipeline.

Hope to see you there!

Things that go munch in the night

We'd known for some time that we had a fox visiting our garden in the night.

He first came to our attention last December when he appeared a couple of time at dusk, helping himself to the crispies put out for the birds - "crispies" being the bits of batter that break off when you deep-fry fish. They are skimmed off and discarded, but our local chippie is good enough to save bags of them for us.

When we told them about our latest diner they started putting in the odd piece of fish and battered sausage - bits that had sat too long under the warmer - and these we left out for Foxy after dark. They were usually all gone by about 2 in the morning.

Naturally, the staff at the chippie hoped we'd have pictures... So we decided to treat ourselves to a trail camera, and were lucky enough to have success straight away.

That's a great lump of battered cod in his mouth. :-)

Yes, we'd known about the fox.

What we hadn't known about was this guy:

A European Badger - generally more placid than his North American cousin (unless threatened, then watch out!) and quite willing to visit peoples' gardens if food is on offer.

Chuffed to bits we were! We now put peanuts out as well as fish. Boy, does he love peanuts!

Here's a few more nice photos:

Peanuts! Nom, nom, nom...

What is that light?

Ah, and this is Blue, our outdoor cat. We get lots of shots of him and his little feline friends.

Garland

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

-- Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words)