How do you get tennis elbow when you never play tennis? Anyway, I have it and I'm told it's down to too much keyboard bashing and mouse clicking.
So, blogs and blogging are banned for the foreseeable. But I can't resist just a quickie while the osteopath is looking the other way to put on record that we woke up to our first frost of the winter today.
A clear blue sky and ice crystals on every surface. The sun has soon melted it all away, but I did get the chance for a bit of macro photography experiment with my new extension tubes (a bargain at just £5).
They seem to work really well, although the depth of field is a bit challenging. And I'll have to do something to deal with the camera shake - this is an iced-up ice plant taken with and without the tubes.
I came across a great blog today called 'The Square Metre at TQ 78286 18846'. It's the work of an ecologist called Patrick Roper, who is documenting the natural changes in a square metre of his Sussex garden.
He started it in 2006 and so, over time, the story unfolds. It's a great idea, watching something so intensely for so long. Who'd have thought there be beauty in something like a rabbit dung fungus?
PS And I love Patrick's choice of template too. Somehow it looks familiar...
This sounds like the November morning blues, because it should start 'got up this morning'. I did, and when I drew the curtains the garden seemed to be full of birds.
Which is good, but also says winter is on the way. Lots of the activity was focused on the hawthorn hedge close to the house, where blackbirds and a mistle thrush were busy breakfasting on berries.
Taking a closer look I spotted my first redwing of the season too. It was gulping down the shiny berries (are they called haws?) whole.
While I was watching it got through three one after another. Then it sat watching the world go by, presumably while all that fruit settled. Again this year the hawthorns are heavy with berries. The leaves are mostly gone now and from a distance the branches look red where the sun catches them.
Going around the garden this afternoon I have been feeling a bit blue though. When I picked my 'watched' tree back in spring I hadn't even heard of ash dieback; plenty of other tree-killers (and warnings about the damage they could do), but not ash dieback.
Now we know too much. We have so many ashes here that it is hard to imagine the landscape without them - they are 'the' Cych valley tree.
My watched tree is part of the our boundary hedge that is mostly ash. It has been cut and re-grown so many times that its base is so thick I couldn't get my arms around it.
It must have been there for at least as long as the house, which dates back to the 1880s, and possibly longer. Sad to think its days could now be numbered.
