We heard them before we saw them, honking away as they flew across a post Ophelia blue sky in that unmistakable v formation.
A wedge of geese (don't you just love avian collective nouns?), necks outstretched, following the leader.
Boo, predictably (he's a gun dog, it's in his genes), took up the chase, barking loudly as he sped across the field, leaping into the air at intervals, conceding defeat as they continued their journey out of sight.
But were they coming or going? I have no idea.
The littlest and his parents live at some distance and they usually come to us. Last Sunday, however, we arranged to meet up at a more or less half-way point, York, specifically the railway museum.
The last time we visited was years ago, when the Boy was just a nipper (he has absolutely no memory of that week we spent exploring the city from our vegetarian B&B base), so another nose around the locos was well overdue.
Littlest is very much the train fan and was somewhat dumbstruck at that first sighting of all those impressive engines. We have a saying in our family when actors visibly overact, that they'd attended the Lost In The Woods School of Drama. Well, littlest did a fair impression of being lost in the woods. Actually, we all did as we entered the Great Hall.
I'd previously had no idea that, during the First World War, trains were used as ambulances. Initially, British railway companies supplied ambulance trains for use in this country only, picking up injured soldiers from ships and transporting them to hospital, but eventually thirty trains were in use in France and Belgium, ferrying thousands of casualties. Conditions on board were challenging and dirty. As one nurse wrote in a letter to her family, ‘Imagine a hospital as big as King’s College Hospital all packed into a train. No outside person can realise the difficulties except those who try to work it.’
As we wandered the museum's exhibits, memories of waving off my uncle (my mum's brother, Bob, now aged 97, the last remaining sibling and living in the US), aunt and three cousins at Darlington station when I was five or so came flooding back. Auntie Joan leaning out of the train window, waving the hankie she'd been using to dab tears, the train noisily belching steam as it left the platform, heading south towards the ship that would take them to a new life in Africa. All so very Brief Encounter in my head.
Comings and goings in the kitchen of late have included a loaf, baked from a recipe in a Sainsbury's magazine and more successful (well, it was edible) than yet another attempt at a cottage loaf (which fell off its warm perch in the airing cupboard and grew stubble in the process).
The other two here are fans of chocolate and peanut butter (I am, too, but they prefer theirs mixed with eggs and butter) so I re-jigged a favourite recipe and made a batch of brownies, complete with blobs of creamy peanut butter and a topping of chopped up Reese's cups.
This was more a case of they came, posed for a picture, hung around in the cake tin for a bit and then ended up in the bin. At least, most of them did.
'Don't you know brownies freeze well?', queried the baking clever clogs, after I'd moaned about wasted time, wasted effort, wasted ingredients, rejected love (not that last one, we're not at all soppy here).
Well, I know now.