This is Janet. I photographed her on the way to Boconnoc last year as she drove through our village. Her lucky (and I’m sure extremely talented) owners live in the next village to us. This year the whole family, including the dog, are at the show. It’s surprising how many traction engines come complete with collie or collie cross as part of the package.

We’ve been to the annual steam rally at Boconnoc today and discovered a couple of interesting things. The first was that it’s extremely quiet (relative to Saturday and Sunday) on Friday. When we arrived there were very few cars in the car park and Lucy P said it’d been deathly quiet even as late as 10am. Mind you, it’s a fat lot of good me knowing that given that I probably won’t be able to take school days off in the future. The other interesting thing is that the rally is getting bigger. This year the arena has been split so that the traction engines have their own arena and don’t share space with the tractors. Another caveat here is that this may have happened last year because looking back at last year’s blog I obviously didn’t go last year!

I also became aware that I have to be a lot more careful about how I’m dressed now I’m supposed to be a pillar of the community – I was wearing a Simon Drew shirt that had a message that was somewhat inappropriate when you consider I bumped into the parents of two of my children from school. Note to self…be more aware of who you might meet when you go out!

It’s a strange and wonderful quirk of fate that despite very changeable weather here since Colin and his friend arrived, we’ve not got wet at all – every time we’ve been out, the weather has instantly perked up and it’s been gorgeous. Too much so for me – I’m not a lover of high temperatures.