I’ve mentioned the children’s poem Dorothy Rose on the blog before now, and how the world can seem very different, depending on where you choose to look.
These photos, taken within a few yards of each other this morning, serve as a reminder that the bare, dripping branches of winter don’t tell the whole story.
In fact he was wrong. The subject matter isn’t always the most cheerful, but I do tend to find a bright twist to things. Like the owl in the photo – the Midnight Moths owl from Birmingham’s Big Hoot Art Trail – I can’t help but see the stars.
Coincidentally, yesterday I came across the word eigengrau: the colour that we see when there is zero light.
It seems that even in perfect darkness we don’t actually see black: our optic nerves make us see a dark grey instead. Perhaps we should re-name them optimistic nerves. Perhaps I should write a poem about that.
Three weeks ago I wrote that my external hard drive was refusing to boot. Faced with the prospect of losing ten years worth of photos, writing and other memories, I managed to remain optimistic.
I finally took the drive down to the shop earlier this week and have spent a tense few days waiting for news. The chap now tells me that he thinks he has managed to recover everything. To avoid a repetition of the problem, he recommends that I start storing things in the cloud.
Continue reading “in the clouds”
Although I understand that they simplify the process of marking tests and correlating results, I have never been fond of multiple-choice-style questions: all too often there are ambiguities that force you to second guess what the examiners want you to answer.
This shouldn’t be a problem when the question is just asking you to rate how you feel about something, but the following question from a recent YouGov survey had me confused:
Continue reading “feeling positive”
The field is stippled with mole hills
and I am glad
I am not an ant
I could also be glad that I was in the sunny field and not in the distance beyond, where the sky is decidedly ominous. And that we’ve had a few mostly dry days and I wasn’t knee-deep in mud trying to get a decent picture. And that they were mole hills not cow pats…
There are, as has been pointed out by others, many reasons to be cheerful.
don't confuse the narrator 