Status-Q

Just around the corner from my house, where the footpath from Cambridge to Grantchester begins, is Skaters’ Meadow. In the 19th century, the meadow would flood, freeze, and people would pay a penny or two to skate around the lamppost in the middle (which you can just see if you click it and look at the larger versions on Flickr).

These days, it’s managed as a nature reserve, and is no good for skating, partly because the winters aren’t cold enough any more, but mostly because it very seldom floods. So I snapped this picture after some heavy rain last week; it’s the nearest I’ve yet seen it come to being a skating rink again. There was a little ice around the edges…

Wouldn’t it make a great setting for a story, though?

On wintry nights, it is said that the ghosts of skaters past can sometimes still be glimpsed, twirling under the lamppost in the moonlight. The most beautiful, and the most graceful of all, is young Annie Crompton, a maid at one of the great houses nearby, who mourns the loss of her love, an adventurous lad who skated too far out onto the River Cam, fell through the ice and drowned. She circles endlessly, awaiting his return…

More photos of the meadows here.

This church advertises ‘holy cross yelling’ – which must be pretty wild stuff in the life of English ecclesiastics!

(The very pretty village of Yelling was on one of my weekend dog-walks.)

A frosty morning.

I never feel quite comfortable without a camera… and I don’t really count the one in my iPhone, which is useful for quick snaps of things I want to remember, but I’ve seldom got a really good image from it. So for much of the last year I’ve had a Canon Powershot G9 strapped to my belt. It’s in many ways an admirable little beast, being built like a Lilliputian tank, but that did mean one needed a certain amount of dedication to carry it on a daily basis, and I wasn’t always up to the challenge. I’m not sure, either, whether I’ll be up to the challenge of paying to have it repaired after it suddenly expired last week, just two months after its warranty did.

So its successor is the new Powershot S90, with which I’m quite delighted so far. It’s substantially smaller and lighter than the G9 – it will slip in my shirt pocket – and it shoots RAW, has a better sensor than the G9, and boasts an F2 lens, though it seems to have a greater depth of field than most F2s I’ve seen.

Definitely much more pocketable, and, in the words of Chase Jarvis, the best camera is the one that’s with you.

All in all, a very pleasing, if rather pricey, toy. The only thing I need to fix now is the rotten British weather this week, which has given me only the gloomiest light in which to play with it. You see, once a bad workman can no longer blame his tools, he has to resort to the failings of the climatic conditions… but I was quite pleased with my first few shots:

Nothing earth-shattering, but I could only manage a few shots before the factory charge on the battery expired, and I had to go home and unpack the charger!

Hello, everyone, I’m Tilly!

I came to live with Quentin and Rose just a week ago, and they haven’t had any time for blog posts since!

I was allowed to go out in the big wide world for the first time yesterday, and it’s a very strange place – all white and cold! But I can bite lots of it, so that’s good.

It looks as if there’s a very big world out there to explore!

But exploring too much of it is very exhausting so I need to have a snooze afterwards.

The publisher asked me to take some pictures of Rose for the Polish translation of The Blackstone Key. I’m quite pleased with this one:

I think part of its appeal for me is the Mona Lisa smile: What is that girl thinking?

On a country walk today, I came across this wonderful beast. It’s hard to get a feel for scale here, but it was very big!

Do you think this is the sort of thing farmers dream of getting when they win the lottery, where others might aspire to Ferrari-ownership?

More rural, autumnal pictures here.

…everything looks like a tripod!

I’m a big fierce bird.

No, really, I am!

You think I’m only small, but I’m going to be big and fierce one day.

Are you scared yet?

See – I’m practising already.

There, that’s a pretty fierce look!

Rose and I have been removing some foliage today. This was the second load…

The undercroft at Old Soar Manor, in Kent. Light has shone through this door for over 700 years.

I pulled up behind this enormous truck, which towered over the (not insubstantial) car I had borrowed from my in-laws. There was one person in it, the driver, on his way to work, I should think.

There are two stickers on the back. The left one says, “Out of a job yet? Keep buying foreign!” and the other, “Please don’t fly MY flag on your foreign car!”

Somehow I think that’s not the real problem…