Reading blogs from around the world and particularly prompted by Sarah’s post Finding Your Normal, makes me aware of just how differently we live. Your normal, ordinary day is my extraordinary. Sarah knits with a lamb by her side as she waits for her cheese to set; Glenda has bucket loads of passion fruit to deal with whereas I buy a few at 60 pence each to use sparingly; Jane deals with heat and looks across a red, dusty landscape; Sam gazes from her home across an ever changing seascape …

Here’s a glimpse of an ordinary week at Slamseys. Nothing exciting. Just the normal day to day. But possibly quite different to yours.

I walk past this field of oilseed rape each day and have watched it grow from tiny seeds, been grazed by marauding pigeons and finally it has burst into flower. The poles carry the high voltage power lines that make up the National Grid, which are a pesky nuisance for tractors to negotiate around when they’re in the middle of fields but remarkably handy when you want to turn on the lights.

I try to always have something on my knitting needles but am between projects at the moment since I finished this sweater (Miss Rachel’s Yoke  from Kate Davies). This sweater was straighforward to make as it was knitted in the round and only needed real concentration for the patterning on the yoke.

The ducks waiting to be fed. Some days, they decide they can wait no longer and come to the kitchen window to chivvy me along. Before I kept ducks, I imagined they would spend most of their time on the pond, but instead they wander all over the place. Last week, I found them marching down the chase headed for the road and a few years ago they ended up sitting on the central reservation of the nearby dual carriageway.

Every day, when I shut up the ducks, I walk past a building with doorways that have been blocked with rusting metal panels. As I waited for one of the ducks, who was waddling particularly slowly that day, I noticed this little duck in the rust. How apt.

Drinking a tot of gin at the weekend seems a perfectly normal and sensible thing to do, especially when Beth needs tasters for some product development. This Slamseys Blackcurrant Cooler looks set to be my favourite during this spell of warm, sunny May weather.

Easy to make and oh so easy to sip.

What’s your normal, ordinary? Do share.

If you want to know more about oilseed rape, you might be interested in Fields of Gold, which explains why it’s grown and what it’s used for.