I have, as ever, been watching the birdlife.
Despite the heat, B&B insist on walks. Since they are both very fit (and have also been acclimatising themselves with lots of sunbathing), I'm not too worried about them, though on truly baking afternoons we stick to shade and grassy paths, and try to find the breeze. The other afternoon I was dawdling along with them when I saw a buzzard soaring overhead. There was another bird above it, dark against the bright blue of the cloudless sky, which for a moment I thought was a crow, heading in to cause the buzzard as much hassle as possible.
Then it moved relative to the sun and I simultaneously saw the pale underside, and also its shape. It was a young buzzard, much smaller than the adult, and as I watched all I could think was that it was having a flying lesson. The adult would wheel and gyre up an air current, and then glide down, and the youngster, above it, would seem to be trying to imitate the manoeuvre. Sometimes things didn't go quite to plan, and it would slide elegantly sideways, and then have to flap a bit to get back to whichever parent had sacrificed a restful afternoon in the shade for the sake of its education.
I followed the dogs through the copse and thought I'd lost sight of the birds, but as we walked along the grassy drift towards the farm, I spotted them again: the adult swinging expertly upwards, sometimes tipping one way or the other to capture the best of current and send itself exactly where it wanted to be with the bare minimum of energy expended, and the youngster still above it, watching and imitating. The adult would glide down and the youngster would more-or-less follow. Over the course of perhaps ten minutes, they worked slowly higher and higher into the sky.
Possibly the youngster was also being educated about where to hunt, because they gradually slid away across a field of SFI planting - legumes and phacelia - which will be a lot more productive for them than fields of standing grain. I only stopped watching them when they were very high and so far away that the pallor of the younger bird made it invisible against the bight pale blue behind it, and if I lost the adult, it was hard to find it again.
Watching them for so long was also educational about swallows, who hunt far higher in the sky than I had realised and who, it turns out, have zero fear of buzzards.
Besides that, DH and I went on an outing, and I had the chance to watch some coots. I don't seen many of them - we seem to be moorhen country. I discovered that not only are young coots extremely fluffy and endearing, they also produce long and quite loud squeaks. Lots of them, like those talkative toddlers who can't shut up: 'Mummy, I here, I here! Look, Mummy! Mummy, where you gone?' Squeeeak squeak squeeeeeak! (Not my photo.)