Stormy landscape

Storm Ciaron brought a very wild and windy night and morning. We were fortunate to emerge relatively unscathed, with just a few broken branches and two short power cuts early in the morning. J's PA phoned to say she was too anxious to drive in the high winds and her daughter's school had just closed; I'd been expecting this, so was ready to rush around getting J breakfasted and ready to cope independently on the computer for ninety minutes while I joined my yoga class. For the rest of the day I supported J, first with the weekly film group chat, then after lunch with the film quiz she had prepared with some help from M. We joined her care centre online for J to introduce the quiz, then screen shared her Powerpoint slides. There were not a lot of people in the centre because of the poor weather, but a couple more joined online and they seemed to enjoy the quiz. 

I didn't go out, or even take photos from the balcony, but I did unpack my beautiful new book, which I had been coveting for a long time. I first encountered Don McCullin's work at the Side Gallery in Newcastle in the 1980s, where I was moved by his powerful images of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland and the landscapes of industrial decay in County Durham and Teeside. More recently I've discovered and loved his documentation of the rural and agricultural landscapes around his Somerset home, in the same beautiful, deeply contrasted black and white as his earlier war photography, but I've only seen a few of these online, so was hugely tempted by the book. It's a large format hardback which seemed too extravagant just to buy for myself, but last week I rediscovered an Amazon gift card from last Christmas under a heap on my desk, so used it to restock with flea drops for the cats and thus felt justified in buying the book on ebay as my belated Christmas gift.