June's Tunes

Purplicious Caturday

Photo of a cat in my village, a few years ago (processed via sepia in the old Windows' Photo Gallery)

Six years ago today,

two young squirrels in the garden

Six years ago today,

in my back garden, the starlings were busy feeding their young:

Six years ago today,

there was a red rainbow.

I was at the edge of my village, photographing a cloudy sunset (first 2 photos)
when it suddenly glowed orange (3rd photo) because
I was photographing it through approaching rain. As the rain passed,
there was a very red rainbow behind me (4th photo).

High Q

Intense she came round
and hence he has found IMMENSE
her background absence.

Five years ago today,

it was sunshine and showers in the village...

Six years ago today,

a swan was bathing

Four years ago today:

Five years ago today:

Four years ago today

Six years ago today,

in the morning, I was surprised to see this male pheasant on the dew-spangled lawn:

*

*   By dew bejewelled,
ruby tulip beautified
... soon it putrefied.

Five years ago today,

this male chaffinch flew into a window. Before it flew away again, I got this close-up

Six years ago today,

there were ducklings at our local Koi shop

Five years ago today,

I photographed a swan

In times of uncertainty...

Time spent in nature is linked to lower stress, restored attention, a balanced nervous system, increased levels of cancer-fighting “natural killer cells”, the activation of neural pathways associated with calm, and decreased levels of anxiety and depression. Phytoncides (compounds emitted from trees and plants), relaxation, stress reduction and awe are known to enhance immune function.

Lucy Jones, In times of uncertainty, let nature be your refuge (The Guardian, Friday 20 March 2020)
I took the photo below, of a collared dove in a cherry tree (on a road in my village), on 20 March 2015:

The Wages of Sin

Had we done the right thing, we would not be paying such a high price now.

We knew that aviation fuel was bad for the environment (not as bad as our cars, which we can carry on driving because they will soon be green, and the economy makes us drive them, and they are not as bad as China, and so forth), and hence bad for us all; but we loved our cheap foreign holidays, which do seem to have been a vector in the spread of this pandemic.

I can hardly blame people for wanting to escape their boring jobs (in the economy that is howsoever they vote for it to be) and boring houses, can I? But the solution would have been more meaningful jobs, and houses with gardens. And we are all going to be paying a higher price now, for all those cheap foreign holidays. The world economy is going to be damaged by what needs to be done to limit the pandemic to something that austere public health services can cope with (health services paying for the effects of the work that we told our bankers to do). And that will have political consequences, with further costs, et cetera.

The problem was political, and the solution is therefore political. We should stop voting for scapegoats. Voters should take responsibility. Each individual voter can do that. And it obviously does add up, one way or another. Two-party politics is a social machine, whose cogs are jobs. The people filling the jobs can change, but the jobs are defined by wider forces. And yet, the world clearly can change. The world moves with the unstoppable force that caused such changes as this world coming from nothing in the first place.

Valentineys

These two wood pigeons were smooching on my roof, two years ago :

Here is a video of them dancing, to some free ad-free music from YouTube :

Kirk Douglas (1916–2020)

Waterbird Wednesday

Moorhen feeding chick, on a raft on the village duck-pond, April 2017 :