Frostbitten

I don't normally do this sort of thing, but when the boy held up his hand and the father responded...

NB all you Cat Stevens fans: stop rocking, and put those lighters out.

Ask what colour they are, and most people would say black or grey, and some would remember the speckles. It isn't until you look closely that you see the iridescent greens and blues.

This is Mum. Well, I'm not altogether sure she's really a mum, but a couple of evenings ago she was yelling and cussing and swearing, and I get the impression they have a nest just over the back fence, so...

There was something in next door's garden she wasn't happy about (perhaps the world's stupidest cat), and she was really holding forth (loud metallic tink tink tink calls):

Yesterday, though, she was very chilled out, and after a nice meal of worm, she had a lie down under one of my little maple trees for half an hour or so. She was only about twelve feet away, and very relaxed about my being there.

So this is Tom. Just Tom. No Danni. Not for about three weeks.

He hangs around the usual places (except for the nest), hoo-hoo-ing hopefully (he's up on across-the-street's TV aerial at the moment, watching me type this). But it looks like she's gone, and for whatever reason, she isn't coming back.

Earlier today, a sparrow was checking out the nest over next-door's halogen light. (I guess that's what you call an opportune-nest [ducks]). Ironically, the house has just been re-let - the previous tenants moved out last week.

FWIW, here's the last photo I have of the two of them together.

Entirely by accident, this was: I was actually taking snaps of the tumbling piles of snow-clouds behind them when they came wheeling into shot.

Last Thursday happened to be the warmest day so far this year, 17-18 C and calm, for once, so when I got home I took a mug of something and the camera out into the garden.

The Houselight family was there (in the tree at the bottom of next door's garden): Tom, Danni, and young Oliver, who far from being turfed out on his ear, is still getting fed. We spent a little time calling and bobbing at each other, as you do. (I'd claim I'm trying to see if I can get a reaction from them. Most people would just say I'm as birdbrained as they are.) And they preened and, er, stuff, and then, while Tom and Oliver went off to practise landing on TV aerials, Danni went up into the nest and laid an egg. As luck would have it, the camera was inside at that moment emptying itself into the computer. Suffice to say, it doesn't look like an altogether comfortable experience - think of Robin Williams's sketch about men "sharing" childbirth: "unless you've ever passed a bowling ball, you aren't sharing a damned thing!"

In any event, I'll spare you more dove photos - for now - because in the still-bare branches of the b*st*rd spiny tree from heck, this blackbird was giving an impromptu recital.


Tomorrow, of course, the Met Office is predicting up to 5 cm of snow.

I took this a good little while ago, with my little Olympus XA, an amazing little 35mm camera that fitted in a pocket yet let you adjust both focus and aperture.

The place is Godrevy, near Hayle on the north Cornish coast; it was the end of a nearly perfect summer day with the promise of more to come. And it looked like the sunset would be magnificent. Cornwall, however, likes to play little tricks, and its standard trick on such an occasion is to put a bank of haze low over the sea, so rather than setting the sea alight as it sets, the sun does this instead:

Which is nice, but...  (And yes, I did take one with the sun directly behind the lighthouse glass, but you need a much longer lens for that shot to work properly.)

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Photographic footnote: These pictures were rough-and-ready scans from prints, which worked rather better than I thought it would. The heavy vignetting was the one big shortcoming of the XA, but it kind of works for me here. [shrug]