Rosy Red Cheeks

Why do English children always have such rosy red cheeks? Or do they?

In China we saw kids with bright red cheeks - they were the beggars, living it rough on the cold streets.

We have seen some kids here with those round appley cheeks, but not many.

Red cheeks are pretty much a winter thing, I would think, and this is summer. That's why the daytime temperature has been soaring to 14 degrees some days. And after our first week here of blue skies and sunshine - and the occasional threatening cloud, the clouds have finally made good their threats and we've had misty rain on and off all week.

Yep. We are definitely in England. Not that it has been unpleasant. It was 'orrible 'ot in Istanbul, and this is quite pleasant. We bought ourselves a couple of cheap little black brolleys - 2 pound each - and mine lasted a few minutes until a gust of wind turned it inside out and broke one of its little wires.

Beautiful Sheffield

Many people (like me) have (or had) an image of Sheffield as an ugly industrial city - an idea reinforced by the popular movie "The Full Monty".

Well, it ain't, not any more.



These are a couple of rather unusual flower displays in the city centre - the people are made of succulent type plants. All over town there are hanging pots, and stands of extravagant flower displays. It really is quite delightful.



And there are fountains - this one is rather fun, with the water coming up out of the ground and returning quickly into drains. We saw one like this in Zhengzhou, but with water shortages it was rarely working. Of course, as it's summer, there were little kids playing in the fountain - and it was so cold!



Where we live, a ways out of the city centre, there are the Botanical Gardens close by our place - great for an evening amble while we wait for our clothes to finish their cycle in the University Residences Laundry.




One of the fun things about wandering out and about in the evening is the squirrels chasing each other hither and thither and scrabbling around for - nuts ...? They are really fast, twitchy little critters ... but I did manage to pull my phone out quickly and catch this one.



So now it's the weekend, and we've no TV. There's nothing to do except sit here at the computer or get out there and chase squirrels. There's parts of Sheffield we haven't been near yet - I see a "boating lake" and all sorts of interesting stuff on the top left of my map. Time to fire up "Shanks's Pony" and go see ... when Peter wakes up.