Mystery blossom

It's not a mystery to me, but I have a feeling it's not all that common and I'm wondering if anyone else knows what it is? No prizes for guessing, sadly - just the glory of being right.

The bizarre rollercoaster of our weather took another huge dive back into the depths of autumn today: it was cold, dark and windy, and definitely not ideal conditions in which to be using a macro lens. I swathed myself in multiple layers (regretting having abandoned my newspaper and goose grease insulation during the last warm spell), and took a brisk hike round the garden, returning with frozen fingers and about half a dozen usable shots. Much fartnarkling then went on in Lightroom to brighten them up and bring the noise down to within acceptable tolerances. The grey bokeh in this is sky, believe it or not.

I do hope that the weather cheers up again overnight, because it's Shakespeare's 400th birthday deathday and there are all kinds of outdoorsy celebrations going on over the weekend. The Birthday Parade is happening in Stratford tomorrow, and after avoiding the event assiduously* for the past two decades, I have half an idea to treat it as a blipportunity - provided it's not actually heaving down. And then on Sunday (raining or not), I'm off to London to undertake The Complete Walk**, during which I fully expect to be accosting complete strangers and explaining to them that my little girl is responsible for all of the animation. R, who has a low embarrassment threshold, is going by himself tomorrow.***

Whatever you're up to this weekend, I hope you have a warm and wonderful time. As ever, many thanks to BikerBear for Flower Friday; this week's other entries are here.

* Over dinner this evening R and I were discussing whether anything other than avoiding is ever done assiduously: if it is, we weren't able to think what it might be.

** Or very possibly Part of The Complete Walk

*** This is only partly true. R does have a low embarrassment threshold, and a healthy relationship with his own introversion, but the reason we're going on separate days is that Arthur (whose fondest wish, once upon a time, was to be left in peace) cannot now be left on his own for more than a couple of hours.