Andy Murray!

After 77 years with no British Wimbledon champion, Andy Murray has finally made it all the way. We have a British Wimbledon champion again at long last!

Andy Murray and the cup

The entire country will be celebrating! I pointed my camera at the TV so you can all see what you've probably already seen on the news - a picture of Andy holding the champion's cup.

Perhaps the longer a person (or a nation) struggles to win something, the more significant it seems when success is finally achieved.

Andy Murray is not English, he's a Scot. The entire UK will celebrate wildly, and his win is richly deserved. I hope he will savour it and go on to win again and again.

Andy Murray has done it! Ivan Lendl has clearly been an excellent coach, but it was all down to Andy on the day and he didn't falter.

A great day in British tennis history!

But I also wonder how much longer it might be before that cup rests in English hands? Tim Henman tried hard, but didn't quite get there. Are there promising young English players coming along? If so, do they include some who might stand a real chance of emulating Andy Murray and doing for England what he has done so magnificently today for Scotland?

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Fish, flower, tree

It's our first day back from the holiday, and we did some jobs around the house and garden to catch up after our week away. So I took the photo at home too.

Goldfish, orchids and a weeping fig

In our conservatory we have a pond with goldfish in it, an orchid on the window ledge is in flower and we have a potted weeping fig standing on the floor.

It struck me that the grouping would make a good photo and two fish obliged by swimming into the field of view at just the right moment.

The orchid is a Phalaenopsis, a slow growing plant with rather dull leaves and large aerial roots that has amazing flowers a couple of times each year. Like most orchids it's easy to grow and the flowers last for many weeks.

The fish are common red goldfish. At least, they were sold as red goldfish but I think one is actually something else. It is larger, faster growing, and has changed from red when it was young to mostly silver now.

The weeping fig grows in warmer climates than ours, in places like the Canary Islands it forms medium size trees but in the UK it is an indoor pot plant. Ours is a silver variegated form, 'Starlight'.

It seems to me that these three juxtaposed in the photo have an oriental feel to them. The picture makes me think of Japan or China or Thailand.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Mosaic and Lego

Friday 5th July - We spent our last morning exploring Bucklers Hard and having a farewell lunch at Steff's Kitchen, then we headed for Winchester, avoiding the motorway to dodge the weekend traffic.

Lego table and meal on a Roman mosaic

We soon decided that Winchester is a lovely old city. Neither of us knows it well.

In Saxon times Winchester was the capital of Wessex after about 686 AD. Later it became the capital of the whole of England until the Normans moved the capital to London where it has remained to this day.

While Donna went shopping, I took half an hour for a quick tour of the City Museum. While there I was amused by this Lego table loaded with Lego food, standing on a Roman mosaic floor excavated in the city.

The museum has a set of four magnificent models showing Roman Venta Belgarum (Winchester) in its heyday, the early Saxon first minster built among the Roman ruins but on a new alignment, and two more recent states of the city's development.

After an evening meal in the city, we finally left Winchester to head back home to St Neots. It had been an excellent holiday!

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Our holiday home

Thursday 4th July - We've been staying in a converted yachtsman's shelter at Baileys Hard in Hampshire. The land slopes down to the Beaulieu River (you can see it in the background) and our holiday home is one of eight built in woodland.

Our holiday home at Bailey's Hard

Baileys Hard is within easy walking distance of Beaulieu (up river) and Bucklers Hard (down river, not far from where the river meets the sea.

Inside, the house is lovely. It's small, with just one double bedroom. There's a loo, a bathroom with an excellent shower, a well-equipped kitchen, and a moderate sized lounge with a TV.

Boadband and Wi-Fi is included although it was poor throughput and the Wi-Fi seemed patchy. I think it's a difficult area of the coast for networks and poorly served by broadband.

We put out some bird seed and suet the first day we were here and have been rewarded with a lot of activity and a chance to see some birds that are, for us, rather special. A jay and two greater spotted woodpeckers have visited us daily, and there's been an assortment of finches and tits as well as a blackbird and a nuthatch.

It was fun to live upstairs in a stilt house, it felt rather like a very well-appointed tree house.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Flowers on a building

Wednesday 3rd July - Donna's Mum and Dad were with us today. We ate at 'The Pig' and then returned to our holiday home at Bailey's Hard and watched the birds on the veranda for a while. Then we walked to Beaulieu and back along the footpath, stopping at Steff's Kitchen for coffee.

Flowers in Lymington

After waving goodbye and watching her parents drive away, Donna and I drove the short distance to Lymington, bought fish and chips, and ate them near the yacht club in Milford-on-Sea.

Just before buying our fish and chips we spotted this fish restaurant in the old part of town near the harbour. It had a glorious show of flowers.

Isn't it amazing how a bunch of plants in flower can brighten up any building? Adding a bit of living material to some bricks and mortar brings the entire place to life. Suddenly it's more than a building. It's a structure supporting life in all its crazy mix of tumbling colours and fragrances.

It's the same with people, I think. Inject some real life into a person and suddenly they blossom. Smile wherever you go, laugh with people, give gifts, encourage everyone you meet, help those in trouble, listen attentively, be sympathetic. If you do these things, those around you will come alive and will blossom and flourish like plants in a well-tended window box.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Getting up close

Today's outing was just a short walk away, the Beaulieu estate with its famous National Motor Museum. We had a lot of fun at the 'Top Gear' exhibition, every bit as crazy and funny as the TV show!

Close-up of a waterlilly

There's a lot to see. We walked through the Motor Museum, rode on the monorail, visited the remains of the 13th century Abbey, and explored the gardens.

I like nothing better than to take images that are close up and personal. It comes from several decades of microscopical research in the 1970s and 1980s. I studied flower development and pollination in fruit trees.

I can't get quite that close, of course, with my trusty old Canon G12. But I thought you might like this shot of a water lily in the rain.

The water drops bead up because of the water-repellent properties of the petal surface. The cells are coated in wax, often in the form of fine fibres and the water sits on top of these, barely touching the epidermal cells beneath and rolling off with ease.

The yellow structures you can see are the anthers that will produce pollen in the next day or two. Bees and other insects will come for nectar and pollen and will also carry away a dusting of pollen on their bodies, transferring it to other nearby water lily flowers. In this complex way, the life cycle of the water lily is completed and seeds are formed.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Japanese maple

Somewhere we wanted to visit was Exbury Gardens, and today we had the opportunity to do it. We drove through Beaulieu and crossed the river, then headed south to Exbury, found the gardens, and left the car in the car park.

Acer palmatum atropurpureum

We bought tickets for the gardens and for the little railway that runs around parts of the garden.

Although the rhododendrons were mostly over, it's true to say there are other things worth seeing here. Most of the garden is woodland with extensive pathways and exploring was fun.

We interrupted our walk to take a train ride, but returning to the walks later, we spotted this lovely Japanese maple.

It goes by the grand Latin name 'Acer palmatum atropurpureum' which means it's a maple (Acer) with 'hand' shaped leaves (palmatum) that are a purple-red colour (atropurpureum).

As the sunlight filtered through these lovely, purple leaves, it made them glow a delicate luminous colour. It's almost a deep, autumnal amber, even though autumn is still far off. Just beautiful!

How amazing that a little corner of a garden in a tiny area of a little country on a small planet around an average star can be so beautiful. And when you think how fragile this beauty is and how it will all be gone forever by the time winter arrives, it's even more poignant and significant. And it would be here even if nobody saw it!

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)