Before the big lockdown!

No bull!

No it's not my photo but I spotted a couple of bullfinches this morning caught in the early morning sunlight and they were just stunning - I've seen bullfinches before but they always seemed to be a rather pinkish colour but maybe at the height of breeding season they are a fair bit brighter. Which didn't half brighten up the morning! This was the reddest bullfinch I could find online but this morning's birds seemed to be even more scarlet.

Still got a sprint finish!

Not knowing that this would be the last weekend for parkruns for a while we headed for Falmouth for a couple of days and zipped down to Helston for the beautiful Penrose parkrun. This heads out and back along a fairly flat trail up to the Penrose Estate which is a National Trust property and we both achieved pretty quick times, in fact at 32:20 Vicky got her best time since last July. We followed this up with breakfast at the Penrose House cafe. We were especially impressed with the camellias in bloom in the Falmouth area, the climate here seems to suit them down to the ground. Overall it's a pleasant town, perhaps it might be a bit overloaded with tourists in summer but at this time of year it was very relaxed. Falmouth was the scene of the Great Gold Dust Robbery of 1839, £47,000 worth of gold dust had been offloaded from a ship from Brazil and was bound for London. A young shipping clerk named Lewin Casper misappropriated the bullion but was quickly apprehended. Together with his father and accomplice he was transported to Tasmania and the unfortunate lad, despite being commended for good behaviour whilst in prison, died there of Scarlet fever after a couple of years. His father on the other hand was released after serving his time and built a successful business in Australia as a clockmaker.

Here we go, steady at the start!

I'd spotted a few days before that the Falmouth Half Marathon was due to take place on the Sunday.Rather optimistically I looked to see if there were any entries left and was surprised to find that I was able to get a place - perhaps runners had pulled out in anticipation of a crackdown on travel, etc. And as it turned out this was my last run for a while. Starting at the impressive Pendennnis Castle the race looped round the headland and snaked off into the countryside on some very undulating backroads. I stuck at it and was happy to find that I'd finished first V65 (beating all the V60 runners as well) and came away with a nice bottle of wine for my efforts. And so we're all locked down for some time now, parkruns were very quickly suspended and other races that I've been interested in are in abeyance.