It’s spring!!!

Leaning against a farmyard gate during a weekend stroll, we were admiring a happy pig in his mud wallow when the farmer appeared from an outbuilding and asked if we would like to see the lambs. Thinking he would just lead us to another field where his sheep would be grazing, we diddn’t know what a treat we had in store!

He led us into the lambing pen where expectant mothers, new mums and their newborns are kept. Laying with their mothers on a thick bed of straw we saw lambs only a few hours old.

This lady had twins the previous night…

This little one was only born a couple of hours before I took the picture. Shall we take a closer look?

But most precious of all was this little one. What we diddn’t know when the farmer appeared and invited us in was that a little lamb had just been born. The mother had a difficult time, and the farmer had to help her out. He’d just stepped out of the lambing pen when he saw us and invited us in. I think he was very releived and proud and wanted to show off mother and baby. Without his help they might not have made it.

It was very moving to see this tiny scrap of life being gently nuzzled by its mother. It was six minutes old.

Amsterdam

So at the beginning of this month I was lucky enough to do a little travelling. Check out my pics from Amsterdam!

Bikes are everywhere, I wish I’d done a whole photo essay on the cheerfullness of a city that travels by bike. People cycle about with big buckets full of kids, furniture, the weekly shopping and each other while chatting on their mobile phones and missing one another by millimetres. I never saw anything even approaching an accident though. If the first thing you can remember is being scooted along on the front of your parents bike, your sense of speed and balance must be phenomenal.

It’s hard to get across just how ridiculously pretty the whole place is

Almost chocolate box sweet and yet quirky, with quite and edge.

The window of a completely bonkers shop. The window shopping was divine; alas as we had spent all our money on the trip its-self, window shopping was all it could be. However with window shopping this good it’s hard to complain.

It ranged from kitsch…

…to rather more expensive kitsch…

…to mind bendingly kitsch…

…to the downright terrifying!

I took this in our favorite bar, during the week it’s pretty quiet but from Thursday onwards it’s packed and super friendly. The landlord is really smiley and has the best handlebar mustache ever. I was to shy to photograph him, so check out the lager and the weird lock winding mechanisms you can see out of the window.

Hot chocolate with a neat gin chaser? That’ll be Pat Allosaur’s order then!