There is always hope...

Yesterday I lost my house keys when I was walking the dog with a friend on Ravensheugh Sands. I did not discover it until I got home. Fortunately we have a spare key. I went back to the car park where I had left the car and to the cafe where we had coffee afterwards but to no avail.

This morning my friends very kindly retraced our steps on yesterdays walk with a metal detector but found nothing. This afternoon I decided to go and look for myself as only I knew what the bunch of keys looked like, though I was not particularly hopeful. I thought I had probably dropped them when I pulled my compact camera out of my pocket to take yesterday's blip and so at least I would have the images to help guide my search. I'd forgotten that I had re-formatted my memory card after uploading them to the computer. After a useless search I headed for home reassuring myself that, at least my bunch of keys had a Sentinel tag on them which asked anyone who found them to put them in a postbox and they would be returned to their owner. On a previous ocassion, maybe twenty years ago, I had lost them in Edinburgh and they had found their way back to me some three weeks later. So there was always hope....

My next task was to take a blip on my homeward journey. I knew there was a small area of woodland which floods in winter and sometimes has absolutely magical light on it. The late afternoon sun was shining and the shadows were long so I had high hopes. When I got there the sun was shining but after I had taken a couple of shots it began to hail quite heavily. I continued shooting drying off my camera between shots. If you look carefully at my blip you will see the sunlight is still around but there are the tell tale circular ripples in the water indicating rain or hale. Press L for Large View

I returned to the car thinking what was the third thing that could go wrong. Could I have also mislaid my car keys, would the engine start. However, all was well and I set off for home and then I remembered the washing hanging out, it would be soaked.....