How long can it take to do a bit of grouting?

CH drove to Exeter today because of a sudden urgent need to upgrade part of the guitar collection; and I tagged along for the coffee and cake company, and because I've never been in Exeter city centre and I thought there might be some photos to be had.

I took a couple of lenses, but in the end I stuck with the new Sigma superzoom - I spend so much time these days swapping lenses around that I'd forgotten how convenient it is to use one of these wide-range zooms, and the image quality from this one is way better than I was achieving with the old Tamron 18-200 that it has replaced. It's not wonderful  at 18mm - but to be honest by the time I was needing 18mm I could really have done with using the Canon 10-18 anyway, to give me extra scope. The stabilization is great, when I finally remembered to turn it on (*facepalm*), and in fact the only thing I don't like about it so far is that it doesn't have full-time manual focus override (not that there's any problem with its autofocus, but the zoom and focus rings are reversed on the barrel from my previous superzoom and - well, I probably don't need to say any more, do I?). So in short, once the idiot operator learns what she's doing with it, it'll be a really useful lens!

I was on the lookout for something for Derelict Thursday, and in fact I did find St Catherine's Chapel and Almshouses, which were destroyed during World War II and deliberately left derelict as a memorial: there is more information about this here. But in the event I preferred this shot of what I think is a juvenile herring gull gazing at the scaffolded Cathedral from its perch on Richard Hooker's head. I think I'd be pushing my luck trying to persuade freespiral and Himself that a bit of scaffolding amounts to dereliction, so I'll have to delay coming out to play with them till another day. 

A few more Cathedral and gull shots here; and one showing the juxtaposition on the High Street of a couple of surviving C16th and C17th buildings with some rather heartbreaking Tesco Brutalism here.