Being Here

I admire my dog. He has many fine qualities, not the least of which is his ability to live entirely in the moment. Faster than you can click your fingers he will go from being deeply asleep to bouncing off the walls when you mention the word 'walkies'. He always exhibits total absorption in the here and now, whatever may be happening. All dogs do this naturally, indeed so do all animals, with one exception. Yes, us, of course.

I want to be more like my dog, but it takes a a lot of practice.

Snowbound

The last time we had snow like this was around 12 years ago. I know it probably doesn't look much by some people's standards but for us it's a real event. Being fairly near the coast and in a comparatively sheltered area it's far more usual to see grey skies and rain here so when it started coming down I had to find my walking boots. Unfortunately, as I haven't worn them since the last heavy snow I discovered that they no longer fit me!

Weird, huh? Well, one of the lesser-known 'joys' of getting older is that your feet start to spread and in consequence I now take a full size larger shoe than I did about fifteen years back, hence too-tight boots. So, yes, ridiculous as it seems, I have no suitable footwear and am effectively snowed in!

Today's lovely photographs come from Vincent (slightly edited by me).
 

Walk in the Park WIP

One of the things I love to do is what you might call illustration work. I like being able to invent places and stories and have fun putting them into a painting.

This is a work-in-progress scan of my latest piece, inked and ready for paint, which I think will be watercolour in this case. I have whole towns and villages in my head and this is a small portion of one of them. It looks sort of French or at any rate European to me but it doesn't have a name yet.