Grey

R and I both went into Stratford this morning, he because he had a couple of appointments, and I in the hope of getting him to buy me lunch. There were still plenty of Banded Demoiselles at Lucy's Mill and along the river edge of the Avonbank gardens, but Odonata-wise not very much else. It was a slightly dour day though, with rain forecast, and the dragons, with more reserves to fall back on than damselflies, may simply have decided not to bother going out.

As we walked along the south bank of the river towards lunch town, I stopped to photograph this Grey Heron, which at the time was standing on top of the weir. I wasn't crazy about the photos though, because there was no way of excluding from the background the ugly boom that was installed by the Powers That Be a few years ago, to stop people ignoring the lock and boating straight over the weir. It's Health and Safety gone mad, if you ask me, so it's probably as well no-one did.

At this point R also spent a while trying to photograph me photographing the bird - a portrait he was hoping to title Meine Dame und Heron. Despite an almost anaphylactic aversion to puns, I was happy to go along with this project for the sake of securing a new social media profile pic, on strict condition that the finished product included more of my camera than my face. Sadly however he couldn't make the image work to his satisfaction, because the distance between me and the bird made it impossible to get us both in focus in a phone photo. That'll teach me to marry someone who knows more about wordplay than about crafting a composite image.

After lunch R went home, while I gritted my teeth and went shopping for trousers. Forty minutes later, still bearing the same number of pairs of trousers as I'd started with, I tramped glumly back towards the car via a second pass over Lucy's Mill Bridge - just in case the dragons had decided to come out to play. The fact that they hadn't should probably have warned me what was about to arrive: I was walking back up the southern bank towards the rec' car park when it started to rain - not especially hard, but extremely wettingly. By the time I passed the weir again and realised that the Heron had moved into a more photogenic position, I was already wet enough to feel that there wasn't much point in not stopping - so I stopped, and got my photo of the day. I've warmed this up a little, and cropped for composition, but otherwise it's as shot.