South of England Show

Well, I have not been to the South of England Agricultural Show for some time and the forecast wasn't great but we were looking forward to it all the same. T was sleeping over at his friend Joel's house, so we only needed to provide lunch for the girls - in other words, enough for small family rather than an army.

We arrived at the showground in good time and headed for the tea section for the first round of refuelling:

Then it was off to see some animals :-)

We stopped off at the Hound Show first where, as part of the judging, the hounds were released - presumably to show off their movement and ability to chase biscuits and sniff things they shouldn't.

Organised chaos in the Hound Showing Ring

We then headed over to the cattle show rings, which were conveniently close to another tea tent. There were some beautiful Charolais and Sussex cattle:

Sussex Cows being judged

Championship Charolais beef cattle

We also went past the pigs:

More organised chaos

It was starting to try to rain so we headed for the Fur and Feathers tent to get some 'ahhhh how sweeeet!!!' out of our system as my companions had thus far not joined me in thinking the cows were adorable for some reason.

Amber with prize-winning Brahma

I was not allowed to take these home

We stopped for a spot of lunch on wet seats and then started to make our way back to the Red Entrance which seemed to be diagonally opposite where we were. But no matter - Amber got to milk a real lifesize plastic cow called Buttercup:

Quite the milkmaid

And Rosie got to stroke a pig:

So I think everyone enjoyed themselves.

I'm going to try making some rose petal jelly as my roses are so gorgeous it seems such a waste to throw them into the wormery, even though I am having as many as I can in vases.  Well, I say vases; random vessels and beer bottles with pretty labels but it still seems a waste. I have only made jelly once before and it was like trying to get a knife through a trampoline - I think I had over-estimated the time it took to reach setting point. Watch this space...