It has been a couple of lovely summer days: bright warm sun and a welcoming cool breeze. What could be better? Not much but as always real life has an awful way of putting a damper on things. Last year it was covid this year the cost of living. The results are much the same – staying close to home.
So I enjoyed myself in the local botanical gardens and then sitting on my favourite seat in the garden. There are far worse ways to spend the long summer day.
Is this the last time this person who is utterly unfit for high office will grace the posts of this small and insignificant blog? Somehow I doubt it. Just in case it is here are a few from the past. Enjoy?
I like to start a fresh each month but I haven’t had chances to publish these last two posts from June. This one is a selection of photographs I made as a result of testing me new 18mm lens.
Not sure why but the JPEG’s have come out a bit blurred but the originals are perfectly sharp! Honest…cross my heart and hope to die!
Another day another art exhibition. This time it was a return to Compton Verney and their summer exhibitions of David Batchelor’s work, a selection of portraits which were both photographs and a couple of paintings from the National Portrait Gallery and a selection from the Magnum collection called ‘Where ideas are born’. Of the three the Magnum exhibition was by far the best. It was a series of portraits of famous artists with one or two who were not in their studios.
As for the main exhibition, I guess you could call it a retrospective of sorts of well it certainly didn’t ‘rock my boat’ but I guess each to their own.
Corny I know but it does seem appropriate for the new Robert Indiana exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Before I visited the exhibition all I knew about Indiana’s work was the sculpture from 55th and 6th Street in Manhattan, New York. I now know a lot more which is a credit to the curators at the YSP.
Just in case you got a bit bored with all this Love…here are some numbers…
It was a hot, sunny day and was just a great day out. What better recommendation could I give it?
We took a short break in East Anglia which allowed me to go to Norwich and but a super wide angle lens for a very reasonable price. I then spent the next couple of days coming to grips with the lens and realising that it is a great lens for certain circumstances. It certainly isn’t an everyday use lens, which I knew before buying it, but that was reinforced over the couple of days away.
So here we go again. Another Boris psycho drama. The latest episode is all about whether enough Tory MPs feel their chances of winning at the next election are better or worse with Boris as Prime Minister. Forget the rest of we poor saps or the dignity of the office of the Prime Minister this will have nothing to do with the vote tonight. It will be about survival of Tory MPs at the next election.
For what it is worth I think he will win and then proceed to drive the Tory party into the ground.
To misquote the Bard only a little:
Boris “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing
This could also be the same for the confidence vote tonight.
Do bees have knees? I’m sure they must: they certainly have joints galore on their legs but are any classified as knees or is there some other name? I am not an apiculturist I couldn’t say. What I can say is that just at the moment the little creatures are working hard in my garden and thank goodness for that.
It is time that the latest brood of Blue Tit chicks that have been produced in this nest box to fledge. The parents have been patiently coaxing the chicks out of the only world they have ever known for the past day or so and finally they have started to take the hint and leave.
Unfortunately, they don’t really know how to fly at the moment so the first leap out of the box usually ends in the chicks crashing to the ground.
Eventually they recover and make it into the large number of trees, I know this as we planted them all, near to the nest box. Fortunately, we don’t have a great number of cats visiting the garden at the moment but even so it is unlikely many of the chicks that have fledged will make it to the end of the summer. Nature doesn’t care if the chicks are cute – only the lucky few survive.
Late spring i starting to merge into early summer. The garden is throwing off its spring splashes of garish bulb colours and slowly adopting its summer hues. Along with this the bees have returned in their frantic search for pollen.
Whilst this is going on the air is full of the frantic clicks and screeches of Starlings as the first fledglings are abandoned to the uncaring world of self reliance whilst their parents are once more going about the business of finding new nest sites for the second broad of the year.
And finally summer can’t be too far away as the swifts and swallows have returned. it’s not a bad time to be alive, at least here in my small corner of what will be forever England.
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