Weather-wise it has been a strange day. Yesterday afternoon a thin mist would blow in through the trees a few gardens up and I thought it was someone lighting an anti-social fire in the garden. This morning we woke to a thick fog and it hasn’t really gone away as I sit here writing this in the early evening. Every so often the sun has tried to burn through and there has been a flash of blue sky or the white ball of the sun has appeared in the grey its brightness diffused.

But then this afternoon we drove ten miles to the other side of the Wirral to walk from Neston alongside the Dee marshes and there was nothing but blue sky and sun overhead. The marshes seemed to stretch on forever in the light until they came to a sudden end at a bank of low cloud that blanketed off the whole of North Wales.

There were lambs in the field and walking round a corner we came across a group of people crowded around a pinch in the fence. They were there taking pictures of a lamb that had just been been born and had not even had time to struggle to its feet.

Some of us felt a slight pang of guilt over the lamb stuffed with spinach that had been enjoyed last night and in some ways went down even better cold as part of todays lunch. But then we consoled ourselves by thinking on how good it tasted.