Gallery

I'm home. I've actually been home for a week, but I've been doing a certain amount of catching up on sleep, oh, and a little bit of study too, but rest and sleep have been my priorities. I've had a little more energy today than I have the rest of the week, so perhaps I'm picking up now.

Despite being tired, and having rather a lot to be tired from, I did enjoy (most) of my time away in Lancashire, and I thought I'd share some of my photos from it with you. The most random photo of the holiday has to be this first one:

Having looked this up online I see that it's probably a story about a controversial art exhibition at the Harris Museum, but still the mind boggles. O and I actually went to the Harris Museum, but rather than seeing any giant moles we saw a rather good exhibition by Shirley Craven and the Hull Traders, which I'd certainly recommend if you happen to be in Preston.

I haven't been to Preston before, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by it. I'm not sure what I was expecting ... perhaps a rather industrial town, but no, the centre of it at least was full of old architecture, and all the people we met were very friendly (particularly those in the Harris Museum, who seemed so encouraged by our enjoyment of the place that they insisted on imparting all their knowledge). Of course, Preston also gets brownie points from me for getting my car through its MOT despite the bump in the back and the missing rear windscreen wiper. So anyway, here's a pic of a row of old telephone boxes O and I came across in Preston and were looking particularly photogenic.

I wrote in my last post about the mini saga of getting from the centre of Preston to the garage where we'd left the car. I told how we hadn't known the bus route and had ended up getting off at a stop rather a long way from where we'd wanted to be. Well one of the benefits (or possibly the only benefit) of this diversion was that we had the opportunity to stop on our walk to the garage to take a photo of the rather wonderful sunset. At least I think it was a sunset, rather than the moon. Everything was foggy. Everything was frosty. The sky was white. The sun/moon was also white. I haven't changed the colours or converted the photo below into black and white, but this is the scene:

Do you think it's the sun or the moon? I think it's the sun (it was only about 2.30pm) seen through the fog, but it could be either.

When it wasn't foggy we had a couple of evenings with wonderful sunsets. We had brilliant views of these from the cottage as it was some way up a hillside. Here are a couple of the lovely sunsets we saw:

The opposite end of the day was the most active time at the bird table in the garden directly outside the kitchen/living room. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get a photo of any of the chickens pecking away at the food on top of the bird table - something I hadn't seen before so I found it quite amusing - but here's a photo of one of the cockerals that came to snaffle some of the scraps on the ground:

And the reason for most of the scraps on the ground - other than the chickens and occasional grouse that would also come and scrounge the food on the top of the bird table - were the little birds. Mainly these were bluetits, but there were also great tits, nuthatches, chaffinches, robbins, sparrows, and various other little birds. Here are just a couple of photos of some of these to finish off my little holiday gallery:

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I'm not sure what's happened with the formatting of the sunset photos. There doesn't seem to be a lot I can do about it unless I delete and re-upload, and quite honestly I can't be bothered ;oP I'm sure you'll cope :o)