Dont mention the sunflowers.....

Lovely day in the garden, just generally tidying and digging over the ground to get ready for planting some herbaceous plants. Spring feels like it has arrived at least for today. Everywhere is full of bird song and the rooks are circling around building what can only be described as the equivalent of a high rise mansion house.

Its nearly time for the annual sunflower growing competition, this is a local friendly event which I won last year but someone up the lane thinks she will win this year (was a previous winner - might be fair to say a bad loser haha )...and today while I was sitting in the garden the ducks that (surprisingly) also live up the lane just blatantly waddled in and ate my cache of egg shells I religiously save to use as slug deterrents.... there is definitely an ulterior agenda here - these ducks have been trained!!! I strongly suspect this is an early tactic to sabotage my sunflowers.... evil plans afoot I wonder!!!! There's a lot at stake here - reputation and a trophy!!!

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Alesund

Our final destination stop was Alesund. This is a very pretty town in southern Norway built on a peninsula. All the houses are painted pretty colours and a lot of the architecture is all very Art Nouveau based. This is because the town itself was completely burnt to the ground In 1904 by a fire for which they never found the original cause. The whole town had to be rebuilt and this became a huge National Effort and a lot of prominent and up and coming architects flocked to the town to stick there 20 pence in. Consequently the town is very heavily Art Nouveau which was very fashionable at the time. There is this wonderful Museum just off the harbour which is a very beautiful Art Nouveau house. It has amazing panelling, doors, wallpaper, and it's all furnished with beautiful art Nouveau Furniture. It also house a collection of of enameled Art Nouveau Trinkets,boxes, spoons, jewellery, very very beautiful. There is an interesting collection of old books and paintings a...

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Kalamata and random stuff

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Planet Ruby Starrs

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