Inside of the paperweight 

Piano and ancient presbyterian hymnbook 

Piano keys 

Now that the platypus and I are no longer proving, it's taken up residence in the front room to keep an eye on passing basket abusers... 

The cat from along the road basking on the roof of our garage the other morning. 

Note its snippety Cambridge cat expression. 

Multicoloured CD. It's surprisingly difficult to get this to work, I'm not sure why. Probably some sort of aperture thing...answers on a postcard please. 

Very high-key tealight. 

Shot of my pet rock - an amethyst. I've had it for years, but it now appears to be rusting, which is a bit odd. 

More amethyst 

Wildlife

Still more beasties continue to infest the house (it's just as well I have my trusty Spider Hoover to deal with most of them). Just had to rescue Michael from a ravening butterfly in the kitchen. Apparently it could have had his arm off, but is now flying happily around the back garden with the multitudinous spiders and wasps...

Raindrops on a web 

The whole web 

Folksongs are your friends

Things I learned from British Folksongs

Note that the English ones make things more difficult by disguising much of the advice in tree metaphors, while the Scots and Irish get stuck right in there with the birth/death/sex/love/tragedy/despair/getting drunk. I'm not sure about the Welsh, but Wales has scared me ever since I read "The Owl Service".

A purple flower bleached out 

The garden blackbird. 

Basketcases

The people in this town appear to be possessed of a terrible compulsion to be law-abiding and tidy, and yet completely incapable of distinguishing a bin from a bicycle basket. Nearly every day I have to remove assorted crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, empty beer cans, etc. from the wicker basket on my bike (it's parked in the street). Usually I nobly take them into the house and put them in the bin. But the other day, I was in a hurry and so put a couple of lovely apple cores out onto the pavement.

Today I came out to find that, along with the wrappers and a cigarette end, there were the apple cores again. Which means it wasn't some drunken person, but presumably some busybody neighbour who must think I sit in the front room eating apples and chucking the cores out the window onto the street. Why else would they think it was reasonable to pick them up and put them in my basket?

If I ever catch anyone at this, I'm following them home and posting the rubbish through their door.

Cavendish pond 

A horse at the Vet School. Apparently they tune the racing horses from Newmarket. Like pianos. 

Brambles (or blackberries as the English foolishly call them ;-) 

Ducks in the pond behind the Cavendish 

The fields behind the Lab. 

The Mirror of Reason(ing)

The Snow Queen