They hide in the lee of the beech hedge, rarely getting any sun, but this morning before work I noticed a little scalene triangle of light brightening up the place.

We all need little slants of light in our lives to brighten up the darkest corners. Like the elderly man today who told me he’d like to be thirty years younger, so he could take me dancing. And the lady who reached out to touch my hair as I knelt in front of her to dress her leg. These things counterbalance against the less enthralling aspects of daily trudging – trudging as I am, through February, waiting for Spring.

or comment on this post and that will give me your email address to send the password out to.

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, but I’m glad I looked down in Longwall Street, to see the golden puddles.

For this Photo Challenge

It was a dull and dreary day, threatening rain as we left.
We arrived in Oxford and went our separate ways for a while, the boys to HMV for music and Cyclo and I to M&S for more mundane purchases. True to form!

We then met up at the Ashmolean for a browse of the Egyptian Exhibition. I am fascinated by this culture we know primarily through pyramids, the artifacts found there-in and mummies, especially Tutankhamun -  I missed seeing the exhibition in London when I was  child and I missed the more recent one that came to London.

The Ashmolean 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 now 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

and here a close up of a mummy

Afterwards we left the museum to find lunch: it was raining. In the end we went back to a place we hadn’t been to since dating days, a burger bar called Maxwells, which felt just the same as it had been all those years ago. At least 27 years ago, maybe nearer 30.
When we left it was still raining.

But on our way home, the sun came out!

The vet examined, weighed and injected a sedative into her shoulder while I signed the consent and we joked about the Doberman while Pippi tried to get back in the cat carrier again. I didn’t ask what the dog had come in for, but I rather thought it was something to do with reducing his testosterone levels.

Before

I collected Pippi this afternoon, three hours earlier than anticipated, spayed and chipped and a little lethargic. She had a shaved area and dilated pupils I noted. The vet nurse explained she’d come around quickly and she’d had a small meal. He then explained her aftercare.

“A little to eat when you get home and then maybe a little more later. Not too much or she may be sick. You’ll probably find she’ll sleep the rest of the day and even tomorrow may be a little dozy.”

Dozy, my foot.

I took her home and gave her a little food which she scoffed at the rate of knots. Then I left her in the care of a concerned Cycloman as I rushed off on errands. When I came back she had been banished to the (f)utility as she had been rushing about madly and clawing carpets, papers and anything she could find to claw. She greeted me as I entered and jumped down off the side. No apparent pain. No sickness. I fed her a little more. She scoffed and completed the first sachet of two.

She has now just scoffed a whole new sachet of food and a bowl of a water and I have shut the utility door in case of food rejection.

Somehow, and I know I may be speaking a little too soon… but somehow, I feel she’s going to make a rather quick recovery. And it may be difficult to keep her in for the first few days as required, as she’s already attempted to use the locked cat flap.

I didn’t forget, really….I made him one, this year, using one of my photos mounted on card. In fact last night the dining room was a production line of card making.

On Saturday, late afternoon I went to town with a memory stick loaded up with the pictures I wanted to print off. The shop door was wide open. Bear in mind this was a day of minus temperatures. Minus 5c.
‘Shop  management policy,’ I was told, ‘to keep the door open.’ It makes me want to cry.
However, it was for this reason and no other, I sat at the computer furthest from the door.

The staff member who came to see me was helpful. I wanted matte (now known as lustre, apparently) -

‘Just let us know at the end when you place your order,’ she said, ‘as there’s not an option on the screen.’ It turned out that the computer I had sat at was for the speedy service, but that I was too late for the speedy service. I hadn’t wanted the speedy service anyway….

I placed my order, re-iterating that I wanted matte. They’d be ready Monday at the not-so-speedy service price, thank goodness, which was half the original quoted price.

I worked yesterday, on the other side of the patch, but rushed over afterwards to collect the pictures, having decided I wanted to make my Valentine’s card. I arrived after 5pm. You’ve probably guessed it…. the photos were ready, but when I looked them over they had been done on glossy paper.

The man was very sorry. Luckily he believed me, as no-one had written anything on the order sheet to ask for ‘matte’ -or ‘lustre.”

‘We can re-do them for you.’

And re-do them he did. They were ready at 5:40 pm, after the shop would normally close. For this I was most grateful and impressed. And I had double the photos – the glossies and the lustre prints all for under a tenner.

I have only ever printed photos with a similar machine once before and they were a lot more expensive. I had forgotten the limitations of the set up. I had cropped my pictures quite tightly in my editing soft-wear at home, editing them exactly as I hoped they’d come out – but the screen in the shop had a different ratio of length to width, so on some of the pictures I lost the edges of shots… very important edges as the prints took off spiders legs and suchlike. I shall just have to try to remember this next time.

A few years back a very dear family friend died around Valentine’s Day and I wrote a poem. Just don’t tell Cyclo.

Winter Flowers

When it comes to Valentine’s Day
don’t buy roses.
Roses are for the long hot days of Summer.

Chalk white rime edges the trees
and crows call against wintry skies.
Snowdrops in the Churchyard
bend their heads to the coffin bearers

so hard to believe it is Pat’s body
in the box.

But even as the Church bells ring
and sadness pulls inside
I hear a black bird sing and feel
somehow that Winter is edging out.

When it comes to Valentine’s Day
don’t buy roses.
Roses are for the long hot days of Summer.

A frosted rose against the front wall

Belt, sticker, fog, interview, blur, ransacked, weeping, visions, confidential, customers, charms, trade

The interviews with the mother
lost in her grief, blur the boundaries–
as they delve into confidential details
to ransack her life with no regard to privacy.

The vision of her distress provides the drama
needed to sell the news, and
the charms of the journalist
are lost in a fog of driven ambition

while every parent watching
or reading  is torn
between revulsion and judgement
and their own fear of loss.

The intrusion will stop at nothing
as details of her diary published without permission
are belted across the red-tops
with photographs of the woman, not weeping

and the father, and the child. The child relentlessly
the same age as the day she was lost
the image imprinted with significant details
of her special eyes, run across with a sticker

‘Have you seen this child?’
to draw the customers
to boost the newspaper trade
and just possibly trigger someone

somewhere to put two and two together
to make five.

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 enjoyed eating the milk globules

Later I cleared out the bread bin and threw the crusts out into the snow for the rooks – and it didn’t take long for the usual crowd to descend. Normally they take the bread and cache it. I don’t think caching was an option today.

Here’s one of them, so starkly black against the snow

It was so beautiful as the light strengthened. I went out for a walk, leaving the plumber and his faulty flange or what ever it was in the capable hands of Cycloman and took my camera to meet a friend.

Ice capped lichen

Frosted ivy

Gravestone lichen

Later, after the walk and lunch I sat and sorted photos.

I have rarely printed any pictures, but a few things have spurred me on to do so. Firstly Milly has asked for some pictures of Pippi-long-Stocking and secondly I have been planning since before Christmas to make my own birthday cards, using my photos. Over at the ‘kitchesgarden’ Ceci is busy making her photos into postcards…. and here am I months after the idea came to me and still I hadn’t done anything!

I copied photos to a memory stick and went into town. 45 pictures will be ready on Monday.

Is that my tail?

Photo challenge Regret