Curb your enthusiasm

Oh lordy me, what a day. Photographer's paradise, blipper's hell. Someone was smiling on me because I had just the best time bunking off this afternoon (I checked with my boss - me - and he said OK), mooching about in what was the most sublime light, the kind you get when it's thinking about raining but it can't quite get round to it.

The problem with leaving the office (these days aka flat) is that the world is full of all this cool stuff to look at! So today I had a hard time choosing which image to post, but I am being firm with myself and not posting anything elsewhere.

I'm also sticking to my "What would Jesus blip?" philosophy :D, in other words something that reflects my thoughts today.

So you could have had yet more rapeseed and blossom - although in this case it was Chocolate-Box Max Strength: a white-washed farmhouse in a sort of coral atoll of cherry blossom trees, lapped by an ocean of sulphur yellow. I may weaken and have to go back tomorrow.

Or the inside of a beehive - now that was cool. I'd never seen inside one before, and I spotted a couple tucked in beside the rapeseed (which is smelling really strong just now - I wonder if the bees use it in their honey?). Gingerly lifted the lid and watched the workers pottering about over their cells, at the same time remembering that the last time I was stung by a swarm of insects I had to be rushed to hospital to have an injection to counter the swelling (headline: "Man dies in killer bee blipping attempt").

They all seemed pretty docile though, so when I knelt down to take a shot of the next pair of hives I wasn't quite so guarded. These bees were a lot more frisky, and I'm just really glad no-one was around to watch the manic dancing about that ensued when one of them got itself tangled up in my hair and deafened me with its buzzing. I had one of those "Oh God it's all going horribly wrong" moments, but luckily both I and the bee emerged unscathed.

All this merriment took place just opposite the most amazing scrap yard (it's obviously 'scrap yard day') - except I'm not sure if it's actually just some weird redneck improvised habitation. It looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. I'd planned before to explore it some time, but in the fading light I did begin to imagine that a Mr Salad-Fingers type (see missing's post on SU's blip) might just use me to flavour his rusty spoons, so I decided to leave opening that particular Pandora's box until another day.

So much for just taking a few pictures! Made my way back to the car, only to have that gut-wrenching realisation that I no longer had my mobile phone in my pocket - noooooooooo! It was all going too well, I had cheated death (again), of course something would go wrong. Having let the awful truth sink in, that it must have fallen out while I was adopting one of my typical bending-squatting-writhing find-the-right-angle manoeuvres, I resigned myself to a possibly lengthy and probably fruitless retracing of my steps/wriggles.

Headed back towards the killer bees, and before I even got close, there was the phone glinting in the grass. It must have jumped out of my pocket during my wild "bee dance". Phew.

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss books when I was growing up was "Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?", which features such wonderful characters as the Bee Watcher-Watcher, and "poor Herbie Hart, who has taken his Throm-dim-bu-lator apart!". It must have stuck with me, because at one point years ago my screen name on AOL was 17thRadish. If you have never read it, stop what you are doing NOW and invest in a copy.

I had parked where the A68 crosses the Tweed to take a quick and predictable shot of the aquaduct, when I glanced down and saw this red rag fluttering forlornly by the curb. Such a vibrant rich splash of softness, discarded and all alone:

"Thank goodness for all the things you are not!
Thank goodness you're not something someone forgot,
and left all alone in some punkerish place
like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space."

Some of the things I see today will be there tomorrow, and some won't. I remember being there at the death of a balloon in Madrid - I watched this escaped balloon float down the street, then sink, land and roll under a passing taxi, where it juddered, then popped. It felt tragic, and such an ignominious end, but I was sort of glad for the balloon that at least someone witnessed its passing.

So today, I salute those things that life discards - and out of all the things I could have shared, I chose you, little red cloth.

And I feel muchly much-much more lucky than I did this morning :)