Wild rose

This song has been in my head for about a week, since it came up on my iPod. Taking the ferry to the Isle of Wight reminded me, and my sister TMLHereandThere, of our trips between Belfast and Ardrossan, or Dublin and Liverpool , in our childhood. We lived in Dublin for the first ten years of my life, in a wonderful house with rambling garden, so it's not surprising that I often go there in my mind. Perhaps nothing else in my childhood ever matched up to the amount of city/country space, freedom from care, and friendship we enjoyed there.

This idyll could not have continued: The Troubles began to make themselves felt, and my parents had their own Troubles, every bit as devastating, and so my mother and her six children left Ireland, for Scotland, in 1974. Yet I have friends who stayed in Dublin, who did not experience any violence; and later I lived in London in the 1980s, where I was arguably more at risk from IRA bombs. Again, nothing dangerous ever happened to me.

I have been a little quiet, lately, not even bothering to comment. For this I apologise, but on Sunday at Carisbrooke Castle I ate a cheddar-topped roll, and the resulting headache has been of epic proportions. I work with addicts, so I don't even like taking paracetamol and Codeine, because I am paranoid about it it being addictive. Still, there are times when it's either that or splitting my head open with a machete to relive the pain. Thankfully, headache's on the wane now, I hope; and today's meeting passed off ok, so all that I had to do after coming home was buy a camera...

Decisions are not easy for me, so I have been going round the bend for almost a week, but ultimately chose a tough camera that will withstand the kind of cruel mistreatment I may accidentally inflict on it. It only has 5x optical zoom, but that is what I had on my (now broken) camera, but apparently it is a quick starter, for a compact, and has a good macro, which will please me while I try to capture bees on flowers.

Tonight's offering comes from a wild rose. I spent about two and a half hours in front of the Mac, then finally ordered the camera (should arrive Friday or sooner) and then stumbled outside to capture something before darkness covered the land. The two cats, Bomble and his friend Illium from next door, were scampering around, but they capered too quickly for me, and it was the rosehips that had drawn me outside in the first place. In this shot, though, the hips are out of shot. I prefer the bud: rosehips remind me of going back to school in September, and making 'itching powder' to stuff down the back of an unsuspecting friend's collar!