The road home

Yesterday was my last proper day at Ryton Gardens, and it's almost exactly a year since I started this blog with photos of sunny fields, flowers and butterflies. It's not like that this summer...

This is the River Avon between Wolston and Brandon, my route home. Fortunately there is a pedestrian bridge, or I would have got very wet going home after a pretty wearing day.

This is the River Sowe. It was higher than I've ever seen it before, though I couldn't get photos which directly compared with my previous blogs here and here without taking a detour of a mile then back again. My short-cut was well under water!

This is Stoke Floods, a lake formed by mining subsidence which the Sowe fills. I guess the name says it all... The interpretation board is usually on dry land, as one would expect. There were several lads out keenly fishing for disoriented carp.

Although everybody was enjoying themselves here (it was almost a party atmosphere in Wolston), it's been a pretty crummy couple of days for many people elsewhere in the county. All that water in the River Avon and River Sowe is now inundating Tewkesbury or Gloucester. I truly hope that this is not a harbinger of what is to come with climate change. I truly hope I'm wrong about what I think is happening to the weather. Even if it means that I needn't have stopped flying to all those places I would love to go to, and should have applied for all those jobs which I turned my nose up at because you had to drive around three counties (in your own car).

On Tuesday all my worldly goods will be travelling back up to Nottingham, where I lived till I was 18 and which I may well be making my long-term home. So this looks like the end for CovBlog. I'm sitting surrounded by cardboard boxes, and tomorrow the computer will be getting boxed up like all the rest. There will be no NottmBlog in the foreseeable future, and certainly not a TeacherTrainingBlog. I may do a 'best of' post of unpublished photos, if I get round to it.

Although it's been a pretty mixed year, and though things haven't turned out as I'd hoped professionally, Coventry has not been a bad place to live. Thank you for reading CovBlog during the last year - I suspect that I have had a small but very select readership!