dates & time – Page 23 – don't confuse the narrator

camera shy

Posted much later than I intended, but here’s an Easter bunny:

As you’ll gather from the photo, he wasn’t easy to find. I hope some of you had better luck if you went hunting for Easter eggs.

translation and otherness

Firstly, some daffodils for St David’s Day:

Secondly, a Welsh castle:
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baa, humbug

Alternatively, Happy (lunar) New Year.

And a fragment of a poem, which at least has sheep tracks if not the animals themselves:

   I’ve walked the sheeptracks of your dreams
in search of unicorns, but they have fled.
   Now they graze where honey flows in streams
       through pillowing hills.

Though perhaps it should be goats not sheep in the photo, and Chinese dragons not unicorns in the poem.

winter sunshine

This was not what I expected to find when I went for a walk today:

It is, however, a useful reminder that some blog readers are enjoying glorious summer sunshine today. For others, whether they donned their best bikinis to eat their Christmas lunch al fresco, or wrapped up warm alongside a roaring fire while a blizzard swirled outside, it is presumably already the middle of the night and Christmas is all over, while I still haven’t finished cooking lunch.

There is no doubt some moral to be drawn from all this. Perhaps it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t assume everyone else is seeing things the way we do – that we are all in different places emotionally and physically, and our perspectives will differ accordingly; perhaps it’s a reminder that “Old Time is still a-flying”; or perhaps it’s simply a reminder that even in the middle of winter there are bright spots we can focus on.

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Edited December 28th to include additional paragraph:

The time stamp on the original blog post would suggest that I was at my computer writing rather than watching the Queen address the nation in her Christmas Day speech. Apparently, though, her message reached out, carried on the loyal air, to influence what I wrote. For others who weren’t watching her and who have avoided reading reports of the speech, I understand that she closed with the reassurance that, “even in the unlikeliest of places hope can still be found,” – a sentiment with which I must agree.

unconsidered trifles and other seasonal fayre

Today is the shortest day, but that doesn’t mean there is any less to do than usual, so rather than try and write a well-planned single-theme post, I am going to gather together a whole host of notes I’ve jotted down over the last few weeks, none of which is really worthy of more than a few lines:

Last week, I posted about the hippo at the manger; since then, it’s been pointed out to me that it isn’t really so out-of-line in these days of modern nativities, and perhaps if I’d seen the lobster scene from Love Actually I might have been less surprised.

The hippos weren’t the only things to catch my eye at the local exhibition, though; there was a Russian nativity scene that had me pondering: