I wish you a very happy Christmas Eve (or Christmas Day, or Boxing Day, or all three, depending on where you are and when you happen to see this). Thanks for calling in at this special time.
I hope you’ll find some hours of peace and contentment over the holidays, whatever your beliefs may be. Continue reading
It may seem far too early, but cut me some slack: I’ve decided this blog needs some festive cheer. Not the cheer-on-a-loop designed to sell things, but pure, just-for-the-fun-of-it cheer. In this post, I’ll be putting up some festive blornaments (= blog ornaments; see definition at the foot of this post). Alternative ones.
For my first blornaments, stars, I’ve chosen the annuals pictured above, found tumbling from a hanging basket and preserved in pixels to brighten a moment. To my way of thinking, if the flowers featuring the stars are miniature trumpets, so much the better. Continue reading
My first was taken at one of Nature’s Halloween parties. The sweetgum leaves are dressed in fancy costumes and are waving their lobes in a scary fashion, pretending to be ghosts. An oak leaf is wearing a fake moustache. Skeleton seed balls are part of the mix. Continue reading
Nancy Merrill’s latest photo challenge is ‘Whimsical‘. My contribution is this shot of a display of red, retro, plastic kitchenware in the City Museum of St. Louis. Why the words in the speech bubble tickle my sense of whimsy / humour / irony, I’m struggling to explain. My friends would no doubt say it’s because I have a dodgy sense of humour: I can laugh quite a lot at things that apparently aren’t funny, including my own jokes. Continue reading
Cee’s asking us to share things people grow for her Fun Foto Challenge. Toenails might have been fun, in a chasing someone with a worm kind of way, but neither chasing with worms nor toenail pictures have ever really been my thing. Continue reading
Rosa ‘Wisley 2008’
I do try to keep my promises, but some are harder than others. If I promised not to eat smoked salmon, for example, that would seem easy. Smoked salmon is pretty much the worst food you could offer me. There may well be things I like less, but I have not so far been invited to partake of them. [Though dim memories of my friend Paul inducing me to eat wasabi peas do float to mind, and feeling the urge to roll around, pawing my face afterwards, like a dog might if it tried something it didn’t like. He meant it as a kindness.] Continue reading
Looking back on the summer of ’18, I’m pretty sure one of the highlights, strange as it might seem, will be stumbling upon a Scarecrow Festival in Kettlewell, in the Yorkshire Dales. The festival is all the nicer for being in a scenic, village of traditional stone-built homes with a long heritage. Continue reading
It may just be my strange way of seeing things but these plants all seem to have an anthropomorphic character. Geranium ‘Elke’ is surely offering a hand for the passer-by to shake? Continue reading
This yellow HGV has a story to tell. The artwork shows a butterfly soaring above domesticated rabbits in a flower field. It bears the dedication:
In memory of my loving wife Lynsey Ackroyd
but in spite of the sadness I felt reading that, I couldn’t help but smile to see this celebration on wheels. Continue reading
Now if I was cool, you’d think this was my aquamarine Vespa, flowery black helmet and dog. As it is, y’all know I’m not and it isn’t.
But we can all dream, can’t we? Continue reading
