I miss living en el pueblo, where the skies were clear for so much of the year and I was always aware of the phase of the moon.
There, unless it was full moon, I had to remember to carry a torch to walk back from the village if I was coming home after dark. The Milky Way stretched high across the dark dome of the sky and we saw plenty of shooting stars even when there was no talk in the news of meteor showers.
Continue reading “unawares”
The other morning, after heavy rain in the night, one of the neighbour’s shrubs – perhaps a Cotinus coggygria – was covered in a silver sheen of water droplets, the effect of which I fear I have utterly failed to capture in the photos here.
I was reminded that when I first lived in California I was convinced that the weather there was perfect: sunny and warm all day and rain every night. I’m not sure how long I’d been there before I realised that in fact the song is right – seems it never rains in Southern California – and the cool green lawns were due to timer-activated sprinklers.
Continue reading “a world in a drop of rain”
The day’s nearly over, but I still have time to publish a post commemorating the anniversary of the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. The main image above is a detail from a stained glass window he designed for St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham.
I knew I had a photo of one of the Burne-Jones windows, but had forgotten that it was entitled The Last Judgement. Now its subject matter has reminded me of the sky I photographed one evening recently, which was a beautiful, if somewhat disturbing, brimstone yellow.
Continue reading “day’s end”
It’s that time of year again, when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet and our skies light up with shooting stars. (They aren’t stars in the photo, of course; I don’t think they’re even moon daisies: but daytime weeds are a lot easier to photograph than the sky at night.)
In the village in Spain, you only had to step outside onto the lawn and look up, and there was the Milky Way speckle-splashed across the sky as if someone had flicked a paintbrush from one side of the valley to the other.
Continue reading “star feature”
Tomorrow is the first day of August and we’re well into the period corresponding to the astrological sign of Leo. So I’m posting a photo of this rather lovely – and, I think, benignly superior and suitably august – lion, which I found in one of the local churches.
Continue reading “august”
don't confuse the narrator 