Winter Lite

I would love to say that my latest silence was because I was taking a break on my yacht in San Tropez, or that I was owf skiing at St Moritz. Then again I'd love to say that Jennifer Anniston keeps bugging me to be her Friend on facebook. Dream on...

Nope, the simple truth is that I've been snowed under. I seem to have had so much on my plate just recently that all you can see of the Willow Pattern is a swallows tail.

Recent storms haven't helped either. On 3 seperate occassions in the last month, we've had winds of nearly 100 mph. Thats 180kph in new money. What that means for us on the ground is that it's a battle to move about the hill, a greater battle to shoot straight and- when you eventually get some time to yourself- there's a power of tidying up to do back home.

And in the past month I've had to reglaze half our greenhouse, re-fix some of the corrugated iron sheets on our shed, cut and split some fallen trees... and I've yet to get round to re-felting the kennel roof and raking up the ton of branches littering the garden.

And yet, this could never be classed as a hard winter; anything but. We've hardly had any snow and hardly a frost. This has meant that our deer are keeping an extremely healthy (for them) distance from us. Recently I've been spending a lot of my day hiking out to where the deer are. And then it takes another big chunk of the day getting it horsed home.

The soft weather also means the deer haven't had the edge knocked off their condition. As a result, as soon as a shot is fired the rest are racing for the horizon. Last week, for example, I had 10 beasts for 10 stalks. That's just plain hard work.

All this might be about to change. The weather does seem to be getting a bit more seasonal. You'll see from the pics that we had some heavy snow showers today- and we managed some outdoor curling at the weekend.

They say 'be careful what you wish for.'

I say "Bring it on!!"