Not a lot

Today’s picture shows Dropscone’s youngest son looming above Edinburgh.

My thoughts today turned to a famous edition of the Hampshire Chronicle which carried this entry in 1822:

“The past week has been productive of no occurrence, either foreign or domestic, of sufficient public interest to claim particular notice”

My day was much like that.

We got up late.  It was grey and the wind was whipping the steam from our neighbour’s boiler chimney almost before it emerged…

I was intending to rest anyway as I was far from feeling at my peak so the wind and the intermittent rain gave me a good excuse to do nothing.

I couldn’t even raise much enthusiasm for peering out of the window as the light was so poor that a decent shot was mostly impossible.  If a bird sat very still I could just about catch it.

I wish the camera could make the real weather as nice as it can make it look in a picture.

I wonder if these two are the same pair that were posing prettily yesterday.

I did try to catch some movement but it didn’t work out well.

Two bramblings trying to ignore a chaffinch while they eat their elevenses.

The weather got worse….

…so I gave up.

I am giving a talk at the end of January so I settled down to use my time indoors constructively.  Two hours later, I had two sentences written down.  The trouble with speeches is that the possibilities are infinite, every avenue of research opens up new lines of thought, every thought quickly branches out in two or three different ways, every new path quickly diverges from your main route and soon you find that are are contradicting the very idea that you first thought of.   Trying to fine this mess down to something intelligible and digestible is painful toil.  This is not to mention the fact that your thoughts seem to be incisive and witty when they are spinning round in your brain but appear to be pedestrian and lifeless when you pin them down on paper.  It’s going to be a long haul.

Mrs Tootlepedal was working part of the morning and the afternoon so I did a lot of mooching around and even got so desperate that I started to read the camera manual for sandycam.   That made my head hurt so much that I ended up shooting pointless pictures of the fire.

I was trying to get the flames as clear as possible without blowing the highlights on the far wall.  Another modified success (or failure as we call it).

One event of note occurred during the day.  I was just cooking my tea when the doorbell rang and Nancy presented me with a prize that I had won in an Art Club raffle.  It was a knick knack or whatnot but after some consideration we thought that it might make a suitable repository for small articles of fruit.

In the evening, Mike and Alison arrived and Alison and I had an enjoyable time giving Handel and Vivaldi our best efforts.  We had some discussion as to whether Handel would have recognised his sonata in C as played by us.   I thought that he would but Alison was less sanguine.

Sadly then, there is no flying bird of the day for today.