Elephant sparrow

We have an occasional visitor to the garden who has a rather unusual beak. This long-beaked sparrow turns up from time to time in the crowds of sparrows who feed on the seeds hung from the laburnum in the front garden. Despite the excessive length of the top half of his beak, he seems to [...]

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Boxing Day II

John, Sam, Anya and Lily came to visit for Boxing Day II on the 27th and the twins outdid us all in their festive outfits, with beautiful red dresses and white fur bolero jackets. It rather made me miss my years of having party dresses to wear. The girls have always had very strong legs [...]

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7 Days: Day 7 – The third day of Christmas

Last day, folks! It’s been another great week and thank you all for playing along. My Day 7 contribution is a joint John/Sarah effort, as John’s is today. John’s holding the camera and you’ll see me with its remote, which is many times the size of the one for my D80, crouching by the girls’ [...]

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7 Days: Day 6 – It wasn’t me

We are at my aunt and uncle’s today for Boxing Day … and of course, being my cousin, Russ is here too. The outside tree is beautifully covered in lights and so I went out to admire them and take my picture. Not long after I returned indoors, Dad noticed that a swathe of lights [...]

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7 Days: Day 5 – Touching up the makeup

… with a little vanilla-coloured eyeshadow from the palette. There are some nice shades in this set and you can probably see that the mid-brown has been worn through to the base. That magnificent mirror was a present from Mum and Dad today. Whether it lives on my dresser or not, or only comes out [...]

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7 Days: Day 4 – Christmas Eve

Suzy and I celebrated Christmas Eve with Chinese takeaway tonight. The plan was to watch Love Actually too, but it turned out, I suppose unsurprisingly, that we can fill an evening with talking quite easily, so the DVD stayed in my bag. The Chinese food was delicious and we polished off a bottle of delightful [...]

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7 Days: Day 3 – Pumpkin massacre

This afternoon I’m turning my fingernails yellow as I chop, peel and cook 14.5kg pumpkin. The job should get done today, which is in sharp – and pleasant – contrast to the three tiring days the job took me for my last pumpkin harvest in 2007. Back then I had 32kg of pumpkin to deal [...]

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7 Days: Day 2 – Chocolate by streetlight

We spent the afternoon with John, Sam and Lily and Anya and were handed Twirl chocolate bars almost as soon as we walked through the door. I saved mine and ate it in the car on the way home, thereby having my pudding before the main course of scampi and chips that came at home. [...]

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