ladybird, swinger, outdoors

 Lots of aphids around this year and to enjoy them lots of ladybirds. This one is posing on the leaf of a runner bean plant.

As he passes beneath it, a lanky youth jumps and reaches up to cling for a moment to the cantilevered frame which supports the traffic lights in Frant Road. Is he doing it to impress his mates or just from exuberance and joie de vivre? He swings for a moment like a gymnast. The lamps sway above the traffic before he drops to the ground.

In The Ragged Trousers a dog sniffs my trousers leg and nuzzles me. "He likes you, " says the owner, a burly young man with a pint at the bar. "He's come all the way from Australia," he says. "He's an Australian sheep dog." "I've been in the garden all day, " I say: " He must smell the vegetation on me." "Yes," he says. "The big outdoors. He likes the big outdoors." The dog, as if  to prove it, is now pulling at the leash towards the door. "My favourite dogs are red setters," says the young man. "Now if this was a red setter, he'd be stretched out at my feet sound a asleep!"