A very brief break from work (but not from answering work-related emails, or at least fretting over them) came with a trip to Canterbury with my wife. This involved a stay in a grand little - well, big, actually - hotel room, lots of Cathedral, a long walk from Dover to Deal, a visit to Leeds Castle, a few small museums and, at the tail end of the trip, 5th of November fireworks (that deserves a tale of its own) and a very damp tour of bits of London zoo. Here we saw the most depressed-looking flock of Unlabelled Birds ever - I would have judged them to be suffering from collective burn out had the weather not been so wet. The penguins, on the other hand, provided the usual (equally damp) exhilarating spectacle, too exhausting to watch. And there were butterflies, in a caterpillary-shaped tunnel which was marked (I think) Here Be Butterflies.
I discovered I am terrible at taking photos of butterflies, with my camera lens misting in the steamy air and a great blue monster feeding on a rotting banana insisting on opening it's spectacular wings for the slightest of instants at a time, and never when I was ready. I am not leaning to self-deprecation or false modesty - the pic above is not a butterfly, but a moth, and it was sleeping as it's only active at night.
Some of the highlights included a very attractive herd of black cattle grazing and lazing above the White Cliffs of D, a very special exhibit in the Canterbury Heritage Museum, and a particular store, a visit to which is very highly recommended, at the Canterbury Commons periphery. We did not leave empty handed.
