Older, but no wiser

We'll be away for a bit, visiting family in Zambia. Feels like I ought to have more to say, but words have been in short supply of late. Maybe the trip will help them to flow again.

Note in passing: this blog was 6 years old a couple of days ago. The tide has ebbed and flowed since then. Or tides; tide of words, tide of friendships, tide of self-knowledge; it seems it's possible to forget what you once knew. I rarely look back over those old posts; I wonder who I'd find there?

A tricycle, two wheels at the front, and between the wheels a huge box. Forty years ago, ice-cream vendors used something similar, pedalling their wares in more senses than one; in their case, the box was a fridge-on-wheels, packed with ice. What I saw in this box though brought an instant smile to my face - three small children, presumably on some kind of seats; behind them, her delicate summer dress catching the wind and fluttering in her wake, sat an attractive young woman, managing to convey a sense of carefree grace in spite of straddling such an ungainly contraption; the foursome seemed to be in lively engagement with each other and with the world they passed through.

Oh yes, and this was waiting to turn right on a busy urban dual carriageway in the London rush hour, a right turn which would lead them inexorably on to a long an very steep hill towards Hampstead.

The epitome of English eccentricity?

of the storms last night...











Sunshine this morning though.

I need...

...more practice...

...at this.

Still less than ideal results, but there's a lotta luck involved. When's he gonna come out? Which way's he gonna fly? Which one has he gone in now?

"There is no such thing as objective reality. You color everything."

~ Deng Ming-Dao, via whiskey river

You wouldn't believe how many failed shots of tadpoles it takes to get just a couple of passable results. The combination of light loss through the polariser resulting in large aperture and consequent narrow depth of field, manual focus so as see through the water's surface, shaky hands holding a 400mm equivalent lens at a metre distance... yeah, I know; bad workman blames his tools and all that. But I guess these are taken at the border of what's achievable in the circumstances. One moderate success to a couple of dozen failures.

But who's counting, anyway? Sitting cross-legged at the end of the pond, the sun on my back, oblivious to the outside world, absorbed in the lives of those who populate this watery universe in front of me - what better way to spend to warm and sunny Saturday afternoon?

We keep fishing out the blanket weed (Spyrogyra) that drapes this fella's nose, but I read today that that just releases more spores and make it grow all the more.

Two way traffic (unless they're up to something else. I confess I don't know much about the reproductive habits of snails):

I'm still getting to grips with the 45 - 200mm lens on the Panasonic G1. Sometimes things come out okay, sometimes they don't. This one was okay-ish. It's not a macro lens, closest focus is a metre, hence this is a crop. Nowhere near as good a result as I could get with the old Olympus C8080. As far as I know, Panasonic haven't announced any plans for a macro lens for the G1 yet.

The pond's not a year old, yet it's fascinating how much life congregates around water. These Large Red Damselflies for instance:

Wildlife, did I say?

For sheer wow factor, today's APOD takes some beating:

Isn’t it enough simply to survive each day? To make it through the conscious hours unscathed, completing one’s allotted tasks, without giving upset to another, without being unduly upset by another; to be fortunate enough not to know hunger, or physical pain, or disease; to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that the hours until dawn will pass undisturbed?

For almost all of human history, from the time our ancestors came down from the trees to live in caves, right up to just a few generations ago, this life of ours would seem, if viewed from the perspective of those ancestors, just a couple of degrees short of heaven. After so many millennia of struggle, you’d have thought it would be in our genes to welcome such an easy life; to be content with days that contain so few challenges, so few fears. No tigers outside the circle of fire, no brigands at the door, no secret police in the dead of night.

Why then do I feel so powerfully that mere survival is so far short of being enough that it’s barely worth the effort?