Creatures Great and Small

Thank you so much, everyone, for your lovely and wise comments yesterday. I'm glad quite a few of us are in the same boat, and found all your comments reassuring and generally lovely. Thanks!

In amongst all the blogging chat, I was interested to hear your favourite woodland creatures... mine (and I have given this some thought, you can tell) oscillates between red squirrel, badger, and deer. Today it's the badger - you and me, Bloomsbury Bell, we know where it's at.

If any of you are ever in the North of England, you must pay a visit to Freshfield - we used to go there sometimes as children. It's a forest filled with red squirrels! Not sure how they've managed to keep the grey squirrels away, but it's quite a wonderful place - in my memory anyway. One of the few places I would sit quietly, apparently... these squirrels will come towards you, and eat food from your hand - oh I *need* to go on another visit there. Do you think a 24 year old would be out of place there?

Anyway. I do feel a little sorry for grey squirrels, because everyone now hates them for killing off red squirrels. Hence the sketch today (hope you like).

My housemate Mel is sitting next to me at the mo, and has plumped for the bat as her favourite woodland creature. We look for different things in animals... fluffy cuteness vs. 'mad skillz'.

I realise that today's post has had absolutely nothing to do with books... but after yesterday's intense thinking, we needed a bit of light-heartedness didn't we? If you're *desperate* to be bookish, you can think of book with a squirrel in the title. Good luck... back tomorrow with proper literature and whatnot.

[Edit: I've just remembered something! When I was searching for 'Simon Thomas' in the title-search on the Oxford Library catalogue, the nearest result was 'Simon The Squirrel Who Wouldn't Wash'...!!]