Sunshine and Woodmansterne Green

I met Jon on Woodmansterne Green, which was nice as the sun was shining and all was well with the world. Well, perhaps not with the world if you consider the global economic crisis, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, the shooting in Denver, Colorado and so on, but yes, in terms of today being a nice day, it certainly was.

Yours truly and Jon on Woodmansterne Green, 21 July 2012

In fact, the mark of a good day and decent weather to come is flying ants. This afternoon there were loads of them and I checked it out on Google only to find that for ants, the whole flying thing is to do with mating which, apparently, they do mid-flight then go off and set up another colony somewhere else. Nice one, ants.

So, flying ants but no stag beetles. Haven't seen any of them for a long while. There used to be so many of them during the summer months of my youth.

The subject of one of today's conversations was what would you do if you won £80 million on the lottery? Would you tick the box for publicity? I was telling Jon how I read somewhere that unless you do tick the box, you're on your own as far as help and back-up is concerned from Camelot. How true or false this is, I don't know, but the deal is simple: you tick the box and they support you with advice on all sorts of stuff.

A can of Lilt just left, along with other rubbish, on the green.

The downside, of course, is that everybody knows you've won and they start sending out the begging letters.

We both agreed that if we did win, we'd probably end up buying that elusive house on the beach we've been talking about ever since dad first took us down to the South Coast as kids. After that we'd spend the rest of the time cycling around, staring out to sea and generally relaxing.

The green was looking good, apart from a load of drinks cans and crisp packets that some idiots had simply left on the grass, making the place look untidy. We normally sit on the large tree trunks on the green, but were forced, by the unsightly mess of the litter, to sit elsewhere. We chose Jean Merrington's memorial tree and surrounding bench. Jean must have been a local resident, like Joyce Lowther who also has a bench on the green dedicated to her memory.

Jon and I drank two cups of tea, supplied by yours truly, and then we both went our separate ways. I reached home around 0950 and then had breakfast and a shower.