Here are a few photos of some of the helpful signs that greeted us in England and Wales (in photo no. 3, please notice the Welsh text on the left, under Perygl, which must come from the Latin periculum…in Italian, pericolo) just as we were about to embark on a trek up to a ruined castle perched atop a rocky crag or a steep hill overlooking the sea or a valley or a river…or at the entrance of the most rickety castles…

Reassuring, right?

Uhm, did you notice the words (photo no. 2, get out your magnifying glass…): “Ministry of Works”? For one split second, after reading that particular sign, I wondered if we had somehow wandered into Diagon Alley (=for those of you who are not devoted fans of the series, that is a Harry Potter reference)…now, wouldn’t that have given me some excellent fodder for a blog post!!! But, sigh, no, the Harry Potter one was the Ministry of Magic…Still, I couldn’t help glancing about to see if there were any spare wands lying on the ground…

Seriously, though, I am all in favour of safety and accident prevention, and of course Stefano and I were very VERY careful, wherever we were. We never strayed from marked paths, especially on Skomer Island where you have to have eyes on the back of your head in order not to step on any birds (ah yes, the puffins come that close to you!).

For Paula: that is the photo I took of a baby short-eared owl (see previous post). No, silly billy, of course we didn’t upset it! It was happily perched atop a burrow right off the path that we were following early one evening. It was probably no more than five metres away from us. And it just kept sitting there, looking at us rather benevolently while we snapped about a million photos. Yes, that was one verrry lucky shot. This must be a good year for owls (and voles!) on Skomer Island, since last year we didn’t even see one owl, whereas this summer we glimpsed and took photos of at least five…

Oh, as you can see (photo no. 4), the dire warnings written on signs extended to puffins, too…

And, like us, they paid close attention…

Yesterday I tested several blog themes, and the one that I liked best was this very simple, “bare-boned” one. Not having a blog banner photo anymore might actually turn out to be a positive thing…by putting more focus on blog content, not appearance…

Well, this change was necessary–the old theme was causing the wands of the Healthblog wizards to break in half…obviously, not a good thing! We just have to get used to it…

It is unbelievably hot and damp in Florence these days…and I do not do well in heat, let alone extreme heat (it was more than 10 degrees cooler in the UK…sigh!). Yesterday evening, as we gathered around a table to play cards, even my heat-loving girlfriends were complaining…that’s how bad it is!

My next post will probably be about our UK trip…but I am still going through the hundreds of photos I took…Here is a photo of an extraordinary-looking creature we spotted on the island early one evening…this goes to show that there is more, much more!, to Skomer Island than “just” puffins and Manx Shearwaters…

Just a super quick post today. Stefano and I got back to Florence early Monday morning from our fabbbulous UK holiday. This morning I began looking through my photos and had the bright (…) idea of changing my blog banner. Well, something went very wrong–I couldn’t publish the new photo OR return to the old one. Argh!

Oh, but it gets, er, better: I can no longer see any of my published photos (nor can you, I imagine!). The images have all vanished from my “Media Library”…in their place is an ugly “X.” That means that I will not be able to publish any photos from our trip to the UK until the wonderful Healthblogs technicians manage to fix the problem. I really hope it won’t take very long…I must say, it’s very odd not to have a blog banner photo…and where have all my photos gone? Any ideas? 😉

P.S. THAT was fast! I had barely published this post when I noticed that my photos were back! Yay! Thank you, BM!!!