Bereft and breezy

Today’s picture comes from Bruce and shows his walking companions in inquisitive mood.

After the exhilaration of actually getting out on the bike yesterday, today was a marked contrast.  It was grey and ferociously windy all day and the greyness was compounded by the departure of Mrs Tootlepedal to southern climes to stay with her mother for a week.

I didn’t even have the consolation of communing with the birds as very few of them felt able to brave the 40-50 mph winds to get to the feeder. Even when one actually made the trip, the light was so poor that I had to bump the ISO up to 6400 just to get a picture at all.  Stationary birds were the order of the day.

A chaffinch above

I was reduced to trying to get a picture which might show the strength of the wind but that proved very difficult even using Mrs Tootlepedal’s grasses which which were waving violently.

You really need a field of ripe barley for this shot.

When I got back from taking Mrs Tootlepedal to the train, I went up to the moorland feeders to do a turn at filling them up.  I was hoping to get the car near the gate and take a picture or two but the place was filled with the enormous vehicles of a shooting party so I filled the feeders and sneaked off before I got shot.

I had another go at the garden feeders…

A brambling and a goldfinch provided a small burst of colour

…but it was rather pointless so I gave up and went and had lunch (cold turkey and ham, very delicious).  Then I improved the shining hour by putting a week of the newspaper index into the database and reading some of the many blogs to which I subscribe.  Looking at the weather in America, it seems that we should make the most of our present warm spell as cold weather seems to be the present state over there.  It was an unseasonably warm 10 ° C here today  but it didn’t seem very pleasant in the heavy wind.

In the evening, after a splendid meal of a sort of bubble and squeak, I went off to the first proper committee meeting of Langholm Sings, our new choral group.  We were a disparate group but the meeting was appropriately harmonious and we now have plans in place for the new  season.  Any local reader of this blog should know that they would be entirely welcome if they decided to come along and join us, experience is not necessary.

The fact that the daylight hours tomorrow are going to be nearly a whole minute longer than today is little consolation as I sit here by myself with the wind howling round the corner of the house and the forecast saying that it is going to last for at least two more days.   You would think that such a strong wind would blow the clouds away but it doesn’t look as though that is going to happen.

I did my best to find a flying bird.