Category: Photography

Garden maintenance

I remember reading once that 80% of gardening is the equivalent of housework…. keeping things tidy and doing the routine stuff.
In some ways this is a fair analysis: yes, the garden has to be kept tidy and ordered, the grass cutting and weeding are necessary…. but as comparisons go it’s rather incomplete.

Indoors the floor is washed and gets foot-printed again, the carpet is hoovered and gets bitty again. The toilet is cleaned and gets….. well you get the picture.

In the garden, especially at this time of the year each action brings on an even bigger reaction (sorry Newton, your law doesn’t work in the garden)

Today I have mainly been gardening. Well for three and a half hours. I got out the hoover lawn mover and did the grass, then trimmed the edges. Suddenly the garden looked sharper and more cared for. Where I didn’t cut the lawn, just where the snow drops are finishing and the crocus are boldly doing their thing the longer grass looks right: bright and strong against the colours.The bumble bees were out in force, exploring the flowers and getting covered in pollen.

Then I started on the borders, accompanied for a while by radio four and ‘Gardeners question Time.’ (My wind-up / solar-powered radio is my gardening companion.)

I cleared away all last season’s growth which had died back during the winter. And as I cleared new tips of growth were pushing up through the warmed soil giving me that feeling of hope that comes each Spring.

Of course time ran out before the jobs were finished. I had to come in to have a bath, scrub behind my fingers nails and assemble a fish pie before trotting back into Oxford for a poetry reading which was very entertaining and inspirational.

And I returned from the poetry reading to the rest of the fish pie and a glass of wine. Pretty perfick. Oh… and a slice of collapsed banoffee pie! (Not bad, with the topping scraped off.)

And in the morning  when I look out of the window I shall have a huge feeling of accomplishment which I NEVER get from housework.

 

Photo Competition # 24

“Food, glorious food!”

I know we have done ‘Eat drink and be merry’, but this time I want the emphasis on the food itself. Photographs of food in any shape or form. It must be edible by most sensible humans. Points will be awarded for the deliciousnessness of the subject. Hint, I am not a vegan. I appreciate that OZ, for example, would be turned on by a bouncy woolly lamb gamboling in the meadow, but he is more likely to succeed if that lamb is photographed on a spit, slowly roasting over a fire. Continue reading “Photo Competition # 24”

Looking up and down

An afternoon in Oxford on my own to attend a talk by the artist in residence at Modern Art Oxford, Tamarin Norland (who is exploring the interface of art and the written word…. ) turned into a meeting-up with several friends from a poetry group I attend. We stayed on for a chat and cup of tea afterwards.

By the time I came out the sun was going down and the temperature was dropping. Mainly my eyes were drawn upwards to the tops of buildings caught in the soft light

Continue reading “Looking up and down”

Order

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has recently had a grand make-over, but as the exhibition (New galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia) has been open a while, that is since November, I had hoped that there would be fewer visitors today so that I could enjoy it in peace and quiet.
Nah.
It was crowded and there was  great deal to see and take in. We borrowed the hand-held sets for an auditory commentary which was a little unsatisfactory being incomplete – and with so many people around it was difficult to be in the right place at the right time! In addition two things I had been keen to see (the ultrasound scan of a mummy which has been taken to show the insides of a mummy which has never been unwrapped and a CT scans of a child mummy) were both out-of-order… so I shall have to go back. However the artist Angela Palmer has used these scans to make a wonderful piece of art which you can read about here.

I took a few pictures, but it is difficult to capture the exhibition. The order and exactitude required to be a museum curator is illustrated here

for the Photo Competition

Frozen milk

We woke to the telephone. Being the first day of half term no-one had to be anywhere at any particular time and Cyclo decided that a bike ride was out of the question, so we hadn’t set the alarm. It seems the plumber had been up for hours and it was before 9am. I suppose it wasn’t surprising since the temperature was pretty low last night, down to -14c in some places. Anyhoo, the plumber was ringing as I had left a message last night – for a leak unrelated to the cold. The shower pump – again.

I got up and bought in the milk which had frozen and spilled out into small globules on the doorstep, then took a tray of tea back up to bed, where it was warmer.

Pippi-long-Stocking, the cat, enjoyed eating the milk globules Continue reading “Frozen milk”

A little something for the weekend?

Saturday:

The snow was forecast. We had been warned. And so it was, at about 4pm, a few small flakes fell as I came back from the shops. Not enough to stick. Not at first. But it was pretty cold.

By the time I had come in and made a cup of tea the snow fall had thickened a little: I could see that the bonnet of my husband’s blue car had a coating of icing sugar.

By supper time when we looked out at the patio we saw this

and laid the dining room table.

Continue reading “A little something for the weekend?”