This plant continues to flourish in its tiny pot, bearing hundreds of fruits and overtopping the wall.
July 2026 was just above averagely warm but it was our sunniest July ever: 271.107kWh and our third sunniest month since our records began. It was also our driest month of all time at 0.6mm, though the accolade on our weather records will always go to the 0.3mm of May 2025 when it rained plenty but our weather station was out of action.
A2 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw.
Category: Weather
A Great Tit
Another common bird which we have never photographed before. Sadly we didn’t see a pair of great tits.
June was averagely hot and sunny and somewhat drier for the time of year.
A2 is rereading Clown Town by Mick Herron, which completes the series so far.
So Now We Know…
…who’s been stealing our cherries.
Today was the hottest day of the year so far, at 33.7°C. In fact, it was the hottest day since the notorious 19 July 2022, when we got to 39.2°C.
Web Surfing
A very warm and humid day (31.9°C) to start the heatwave, so we opened the windows in the bedroom. It was gusty, and down came a very impressive cobweb.
Here’s the Met Office forecast for the next couple of days. It’s not often we get red temperatures (max over 25°C) at midnight, and it looks like tonight might be tropical — which is when the temperature stays above 20°C.
Gold at the End of the Rainbow
Woke up this morning, sun shining through the rain. Looked for the rainbow and instead saw, through the rain-blurred glass, what seemed to be a giant black and yellow bee sitting on a cornflower. Got a better look; it was a goldfinch eating the cornflower seeds. The rainbow arrived later. Here it is:
Meanwhile A1 is reading The Third Nero* by Lindsey Davis.
Phew, What a Scorcher
Our hottest ever day in May at 32.2°C, beating 32.0°C on 28 May 2012 (but that was with the old weather station, which over-read by 4 or 5 degrees in direct sunshine). Record-breaking throughout the country, too.
A2 is chilling out with a reread of The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason; a frozen corpse is discovered in a glacier. Cool.
The Rain It Raineth…
…over Roundhay, seen from the library roof.
A2’s bathroom book is Think like an Engineer by Guru Madhavan.
May Is Out
Hawthorn blossom, aka May. When it is out we can cast a few clouts, or could if it wasn’t so cold and blustery.
A2 is reading The Light of Day by Eric Ambler.
Cloud of the Day: Cumulus mediocris
Thanks to Beth for this cloud which looks like a flying crocodile, or so she claims.
A1 is reading The Light of Day by Eric Ambler. A2 is reading Journey into Fear, also by Eric Ambler.
May Flowers
The garden after an April which was middle-of-the-table warm and wet but the third sunniest, including five of our all-time sunniest April days and the earliest ever >12kWh event.
A2 is reading Desperate Undertaking* by Lindsey Davis, which was er um OK as thrillers about serial killers in ancient Rome go, but part of a series that would take too much effort to read all the way through.
Cloud of the Day: Virga
A jellyfish takes to the skies on the second warmest day this year so far: 21.2 °C.
A2 is reading A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon.
Flowers in the Rain
Our front garden is full of tulips, bluebells, magnolia and camellia and they are all getting a battering.
A2 is reading Cause for Alarm* by Eric Ambler; reads like a historical thriller but it was contemporary fiction when it was written in 1938.
Double Rainbow
An evanescent flash of colour on a drizzly day, but now the rain has washed the clouds away and the telescope is out watching Markarian’s Chain. Many frames were ruined by passing satellites; curses Elon Musk.
A2 is rereading MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood. Reading this trilogy in sequence has been a magical experience.
Ring round the Sun
It’s too cloudy for astronomising but the clouds have their own magic. A2 is rereading The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.
Storm Dave
Dave blew in today and rattled all the trees but the night is calm and clear and A1’s telescope is out looking for pinwheels and cigars.
A1 is reading Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A2 is rereading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
Critter of the Day: House Sparrow
Passer domesticus, a very common but also extremely endangered bird. We’ve never photographed one before.
March was more or less average on the sun, rain and temperature fronts, but it was frequently unpleasantly windy. In like a lion and out like a lion.
A2 is reading The State of the Art by Iain M Banks.
Blooming Dandelions!
Spring is here, the sun is up and the weeds are out in force.
A1 is reading The Bookseller by Tim Sullivan. A2 is reading Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.
The Sword in the Lake
This mythical object is actually 2 sticks in a puddle, gilded by sunlight.
A1 is reading Nonesuch by Francis Spufford. A2 is rereading Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe.
A Nice Coq
Dish of the day was coq au vin with mash, spring greens and garlic puff pastry spirals, followed by apfelstrudel with runny custard and the GSQ at which we scored an OK 11.
February 2026 was the third coldest, second wettest, and all-time least sunny February on our records.
Mist-trees
Another foggy day as a change from the unremitting rain.
A1 is rereading Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds.
Frying an Egg on the Pavement
But it can’t be done this month which is the coldest, wettest and least sunny January on our records.
A2 is reading The Watermark* by Sam Mills,in which the protagonists are tricked into and trapped in a series of bad and boring novels.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Props to A1 for this lovely photo: shadow of the chimney in the fog.
A1 is reading Labyrinth* by Kate Mosse. A1 usually enjoys loopy conspiracy thrillers, full of secret histories, shadowy organisations and ancient artefacts. This is a Grail quest set in the 12th (the Albigensian Crusade) and 21st centuries, and given the novel’s reputation I was expecting writing, if not of David Mitchell quality, at least a step up from Dan Brown. But … oh dear. It’s not a patch on Neville’s The Eight, Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Gentle’s Ash — plotting is all over the place, characterisation non-existent (all are pretty indistinguishable, apart from good/bad), and the writing, while not quite down to Dan Brown level, is at best workmanlike. Very disappointing.
There’s a section about the siege of Carcassonne which was a bit weird. It reminded me very strongly of the Battle of Helm’s Deep as portrayed in The Two Towers film — there are a number of coincidences of events and speech. So much so that A1 is now rewatching The Lord of the Rings films. I’m not alleging plagiarism (both could be based on earlier, similar sources, and there’s only so many ways to lay a siege), but the similarities were striking.
A2’s bathroom read is I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That; Ben Goldacre’s self-described toilet book.
Night Fog
A1 has not been to work since he slipped on the ice, fell and damaged his intercostal muscles three weeks ago, but today he went back and took this photo of the Methodist Hall and a cone of streetlight (A2 took a strangely similar picture out of our back window but the hall with its Romanesque windows is an improvement on the nondescript semi in A2’s shot).
A2 is reading Glyph by Ali Smith in which a blind horse haunts a house (thank you A1).
Cloud of the Day: Cumulus
Another cold wet miserable day thanks to Storm Chandra or possibly Storm Ingrid, so here is a magnificent cloud from Zambia where rain is always welcome (thx Guida).
A1 has finished his Mick Herron fest and is reading The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukhergee.
Rain
A gloomy wet day.
A1 is rereading Smoke and Whispers by Mick Herron. A2 is reading The Starter Marriage by Kate Harrison, chucked out by The Leeds Library and given away on the street.