Twitter is good at telling you about news, and today, the news has been: snow.  I know.  Who saw that coming???  Apart from the short-term weather forecasters, I mean.

Here are some snow pictures:

That would be a photo of the Shard.  Would be because it is mostly a photo of snow, and the Shard is only just make-out-able behind the snow.

Here are two more conventional snow photos, where you can see buildings but very boring ones, the ones outside my kitchen window:

On the left, the snow descends.  On the right, my neighbours make a bendy triangle of footmarks.  I didn’t find those photos on Twitter, for I took them myself.

Without doubt my favourite snow-photo today was this:

Says @MisanthropeGirl: Satisfying.  I agree.

But if we are talking about snow and cold, nothing since then has touched 1963.  According to that story, in 1963 the sea froze.

Ah, 1963.  Marlborough lost its entire hockey season that term, early in 1963.  The frustrated school hockey captain was a famed future hockey international.  I still regret that I never got to see him play.

It gets worse.  That Christmas, the “house”, Littlefield, where I was a boarder at Marlborough College Marlborough Wilts, got burnt down, just before the “spring” term began.  We lived in huts, like prisoners of war.  The dormitory was another hut.  I had a hot water bottle.  When other Littlefieldsmen first saw this hot water bottle they sneered, but they were soon wanting to hire it from me, but I wasn’t having that.  I needed it in my bed.  And I distinctly remember, one morning, that this hot water bottle, in my bed, in the morning, had … frozen.  I swear.  There were icicles in it.

So, February 2018, I spit on your cold.  Your cold could not even freeze my spit.

A commenter on the piece I did yesterday at Samizdata, about Twitter and about Facebook, says of Twitter (the one I now greatly prefer), that it is …:

… like entering a beehive. Opinionated fools screaming at each other. ...

I know what this commenter means.  Personally, I like a bit of opinionated screaming, in among the other stuff I follow.  But I already think I know enough about how Twitter works to believe that if Twitter is a beehive and if you don’t like that, then you should be following different people.  And that’s pretty easy to make happen.

My Twitter is partly beehive, but partly it is other kinder, gentler things.  So, for instance, one of the people I follow pointed me to this, I think, excellent photo, of an owl:

I don’t know if you think that’s as good as I think it is, but you would surely agree that this photo is not an opinionated fool screaming at another opinionated fool.  I have added the lady who took this photo, The Afternoon Birder, to my following list.

I have lost track of who it was of my followees that I should be thanking for linking to that.  Twitter is difficult like that.  I rather think that it has a habit of muddling up the order in which postings (tweets) appear, in such a way that scrolling back to find a particular one gets difficult.

By which I mean me on these two things, yes (although I’ve not posted anything on either so far), but also me writing at Samizdata about me being on them.

At the moment, I greatly prefer Twitter.  If you’ve been following recent links from here, you’ll probably already have guessed that.

Said Sir Clive Woodward, no less, yesterday morning: England will return from Scotland comfortable winners.

Oops.

No, I’ve not bought yet another camera.  I refer to the new Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I bought myself, as a late Christmas present, in January 2012.  When I look back through my photo-archives it becomes clearer and clearer that this was the moment when my photos really started looking pretty.

On February 1st 2012, I posted nine of the photos I had taken on January 30th, of my fellow digital photographers.  Here are nine more photos of photoers, that I took on that same expedition:

In these photos, we observe some dedicated photographers, with their SLRs, some hobbyists with what are still only cheap cameras, and, inexorably on the rise, smartphones.

One more for luck, an example of a genre I grow ever more fond of, the perhaps rather (in this case very) blurry bird, in flight:

I cropped the original, to hide the photoer’s face.

Yes, I picked nine good ones to show you, back in February 2012.  Now I can easily show nine more just as good, and then another that I only now noticed.

That was the change that new camera brought with it.  Before it, I took the occasional good photo, and many bad ones.  When the FZ150 arrived, I took quite a lot of good photos, and as many bad ones as ever.

I’m watching the France v Italy rugby game, which happened earlier this evening.  It kicked off at 8pm.  But I had a meeting at my home, which also kicked off at 8pm, so I had to ignore the rugby until now, late in the evening.  But I set my telly-recorder, and all was well with that, so now I am watching it.  As of now: France 5 Italy 7.  Two imperfect teams, both desperate to “play rugby”, which means run like mad and score tries, which makes for a great spectacle for the neutral.  The game, so far, has been what is technically known as “frantic”.

I am now on Twitter, observing but so far not contributing, and normally, following my meeting, I’d be catching up with that.  But one of the Twitter things I follow is rugby, and I don’t want anyone to tell me the score.  The only way to be sure of that not happening is for me to ignore Twitter, until the game is over.  As in: over for me.

As for my meeting, it was addressed by Jordan Lee.  Superb.

One of the good things about these meetings is that because there is no camera running, and because the aim is basically only to make sure that we don’t have the same damn conversation month after month, I can take a chance with speakers.  I knew Jordan Lee would be okay, by that standard.  But I had no idea he’d be as good as he actually was.

He talked about his work as a teacher of troubled children, the kind that have got spat out by regular schools, at a place with the wonderfully made-up-sounding but actually real name of Wishmore Cross Academy.  Cross is right, judging by some of the dramas that Jordan described.

The gist of what Jordan Lee said was: there’s no easy answer to what the rights of children ought to be.  They can’t be completely free, like adults.  Nor can their parents own them and be allowed to tyrannise over them.

France are now winning, after fluffing a lot of earlier chances.  Commentator Jonathan Davies said that they needed to be more clinical, and finally, they are starting to do that.  France 24 Italy 10.  I was hoping for an upset, but it ain’t happening.  Later: 34-17, which looks like being it.  France have only three tries and need another for a bonus point.  France pressing, but no, France couldn’t manage that fourth try.  France 34 Italy 17.

Bed.

There were so many fun things in Churchill’s underground wartime lair.  Some of my favourites were not to be seen among the genuine antiquities.  Rather were they mere reproductions, on sale in the gift shop.  Of these, I think this one, a wartime poster, spoke to me most eloquently, from that far off time, just a handful of years before I was born:

I have always been very careful to refrain from dressing extravagantly.

One of the photos illustrating this report:

Can we please have a Lego London?

I just typed “lego london” into google, not expecting anything helpful.  A Lego cow in London.  Lego shops in London.  General Legonic activity of all kinds, in London.  I did not expect to be told, right at the top of the list, about making London in miniature, out of Lego.  But, I was immediately shown this:

Cancel my request for Lego London.  It already exists, and it is very bad.  Indeed, I would say that using Lego to mimic a very particular looking thing on a tiny scale is the very essence of what Lego is bad at doing, and the fact that Lego seems to spend so much of its time and trouble and focus and resources doing this exact thing spells its long-term doom.  The whole point of Lego, surely, is that you can make everything – everything, that is to say, that you can make out of it – with a few generic shaped objects.  Just like the Meccano of my youth, in other words, but architectural rather than mechanical.  A big Tower Bridge, yes, good idea.  A big Big Ben, not bad.  But tiny versions of these, stupid and totally unrealistic? See above.  Stupid.

For that, what you need is a 3D printer. And the smaller you make your small buildings, the more of them you can have in one spread.

A subset of them could be made to be exactly the right size for making buildings to attach to miniature railway layouts.  So, do railway modellers use 3D printers, to make, not trains, but train layout appendages?  It would make sense.

I just image googled railway modelling 3d printer, and got mostly 3D printed trains and train bits, rather than architecture.

Could making such models be the domestically owned 3D printer killer app?  Because so far, a domestically owned 3D printer killer app has been conspicuous by its total absence, and any company which has tried to make its fortune making domestically owned 3D printers has gone bust.  Such modelling – trains and houses and mountains and stuff - was all the rage when I was a kid, but all that has since been replaced by computer games.  But might not those computer games in their turn come to seem rather dated?  As is not the making of things now returning to the rich countries again, now that the computer guys are applying their wizardry to stuff-making?  Conceivably, toys may some time soon become three dimensional and material again, with swarms of robot cars and lorries replacing the trains.

Probably not, because things seldom just come back into style like that, any more than dance bands ever did or ever will.  More likely, the kid’s games of the future will involve some variation on virtual reality, which is to say they’ll be computer games only more so.  If so, we might see a further reduction in the crime rate (see below).

These are experts whom I want to believe, so I do:

Violent video games may actually reduce crime as aggressive players are “too busy” shooting virtual enemies to cause trouble in the real world, experts claim.

I have long believed that television caused crime waves, in each country it arrived in, by immobilising the respectable classes inside their respectable homes and handing the world’s public spaces over to non-television-owning ne’er-do-wells, every night.  It is not the sex-and-violence-on-telly that causes the crime.  It is the near total absence of these things.  Violent people were repelled by telly, because it was so abysmally well-behaved.

I myself have spent a huge proportion of my life watching television.  Had television not existed, I would have been out in public places fighting crime, by looking like I might notice it and then give evidence against the ne’er-do-wells committing it.

But now, with the rise of video games, it is the ne’er-do-wells who are busy playing video games.  Video games are not well-behaved.  You get to kill people, and to commit grand theft upon autos.  If duty calls, it calls on you to kill yet more people.

Presumably, this evening, the public places are all deserted.  I wouldn’t know.  I am watching television.

Yes, still ill, so still quota-photo-posting:

July 2009.

I like the hands.

I am not well, so blogging here today will be perfunctory:

See what I mean.  Photoed by me at Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, last Thursday.

Investigate this further, if you want to.

I’m off to an early bed.

I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier.  My bank, however, doesn’t like this.  Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work.  In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them.  So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on.  Bye bye Tesco.  In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home.  But, I like the exercise.  In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do.  Good.

All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:

“Are you aware that you can now do all of this online?”

Genius.  K. J. Lamb, well done.

One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars.  And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are.  Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century.  Who the hell are you?  Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?

Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it.  The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers.  That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.

You wait nearly thirteen years at BMdotcom for a giant penis photo, and then, out of the blue, two come along.  That one, in the post before last yesterday, and this one:

Crikey, blimey, etc..  Or as we Brits also used to say: Well I’m blowed.

Fox News, so also “other creatures”.

You Had One Job calls this an “unfortunate helicopter shot”.  But I bet the photoer could hardly believe his extreme good fortune.

I like it when cars are old enough to have round headlights, and I especially like it when they have not just two round headlights, but four round headlights:

Photoed by me in Wilton Road, on my way to Victoria Station, earlier this month.  My camera does artificially lit darkness rather well, I think.  In reality, things were not nearly so clear, or not to me.

I know, I know.  Friday is the day here for cats and other creatures, not for antique cars.  But, this car looks American, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that it too is some kind of animal, like a Cougar or a Mustang or some such thing.  Anyone?

Some day soon, you’ll be able to feed a photo like this into Google and say: What kind of car is this?  Perhaps that day is already here.

But hey, how about this?!?  I’m definitely getting better at this internet searching malarkey.  On the bonnet of this car it says “R/T”.  So, I typed “r/t car” into Google, and straight away got to this:

R/T is the performance marker used on Dodge automobiles since the 1960s (much like Chevrolet Super Sport). R/T stands for Road/Track (no “and"). R/T models come with R/T badging, upgraded suspension, tires, brakes, and more powerful engines.

So, which Dodge would this one be?  (Scrolls down through all the pictures on offer.) It would be, unless my eyes deceive me, the 1971 Dodge Charger Super Bee.  A charger and a “super” bee.  So, two kinds of incompatible other creature.  There you go.  What did I just tell you?

Here:

The best comment I can think of is another photo, one of the many that I took in the Churchill Dungeon, this one being an item for sale in the gift shop:

I love words.  I sometimes I fail to think of the right ones, but they never fail me.  It just that I am sometimes not worthy of them.

But I found some good ones this time, I think.

The internet never forgets:

That the Corbynistas are on the side of the crazies in the Middle East is of no direct relevance to British voters.  Who cares what they think about that outdoor lunatic asylum, provided only that they keep us out of it?  That’s probably what most voters think.  But Venezuela is relevant to Britain’s voters, because it is what Corbyn and his followers will start doing to Britain, if they ever get the chance.  Venezuela used to be a reasonably well functioning country.  Now it is: … Venezuela.

I like to take sneaky selfies, with other amusing things.  I have a file full of such selfies with other amusing things, from which I extracted the photo below.  This sneaky selfie has something very amusing in it, besides me.  So much so that I rather suspect I was photoing it (back in March 2010), and that I only got in the picture by accident.

Why I like to take sneaky selfies will have to wait.  My concern now is the other amusing thing, the gymnasium I was photoing, through its big front window.  This was in Warwick Way, where another doomed enterprise, Blockbuster Video, used once to be.

The particularly amusing thing, to me, about this gymnasium was that throughout the few short months of its woebegone existence, I never once, despite going past it every time I ever shopped in either my local Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco, ever, saw anyone in it.  Nobody exercising.  Nobody doing anything.

My theory is that the big front window put people right off the idea of doing what for spectators would have been dance routines.  Besides which, Warwick Way is not really a gymnasium sort of locality.  People in the Warwick Way area get their exercise by doing such things as going to their preferred supermarket and then lugging their numerous carefully chosen purchases, maybe to their cars, but more probably straight to their homes, in big bags.  Special places set aside for taking exercise happen only in places where life itself does not supply enough exercise to all those present, or so goes my theory.

LATER: It now occurs to me, eight years later, that maybe this was not a gymnasium, but rather a place for selling gymnasium equipment.  But whatever, I never saw anyone in their, either exercising, or trying out exercising equipment with a view to purchasing it.

The relationship between, and influence of, photography on artistic painting has always been intimate, and profound.

I can remember when landscape and figurative painting was everywhere.  That would be about fifty years ago and more.  But now?  Do any “important” artists do this any more?  Not many, is my distinct impression.  If there is any “realism” involved, it is usually realism with a twist, and often some kind of violation or distortion.  That guy, who was perfectly capable of terrific realistic painting, was one of the leaders of art out of mere realism.  “Psychological”, instead of literal, truth.

A big part of why this trend out of realism happened is to be found in pictures like this one, of a fire, done recently by 6k.  6k didn’t even have his “camera” with him, when he photoed this.  But, says he, “my phone did ok”.  More than ok, I’d say:

I recall speculating along these lines recently, at a party.  Painters don’t do the “beauty” of the “real world” any more (I said), in fact (I said) they don’t really do “beauty” at all any more, because now everyone can do great pictures, just by going click with their phones, and everyone now has a phone.

My companion illustrated my point for me by immediately taking out his “phone” and showing me some amazing landscape photos on it that he had taken that very day.  They were stunning.  His point, and mine, is that this required no very great skill on his part, just a half decent and half alert eye for something worth photoing.

So it is that “art” has not so much “advanced” into its various alternative realities of abstraction and conceptualisation, but rather has retreated into these things.  Chased out of doing beautiful recreations of reality by technology.

But not this year.

But yes, last year’s Six Nation’s rugby tournament made it possible for one of the nations involved to achieve an even Grander Grand Slam than ever before, not just by the regular Grand Slam method of winning all its five games, but by scoring a maximum number of points in the final table, hereinafter termed “table points”, by scoring at least four tries in every victorious game.

The Wikipedia hive mind is utterly untrustworthy on matters which are politically controversial, but in matters of mere sport, I assume it not to lie very often, and here is what it says on this matter:

Played annually, the format of the Championship is simple: each team plays every other team once (making a total of 15 matches), with home ground advantage alternating from one year to the next. Prior to the 2017 tournament, two points were awarded for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. Unlike many other rugby union competitions the bonus point system has not previously been used.

On 30 November 2016, the 6 Nations Committee announced that the bonus point system will be trialled for the 2017 Championship. The system will be similar to the one used in most rugby championships (0 points for a loss, 2 for a draw, 4 for a win, 1 for scoring four or more tries in match, and 1 for losing by 7 points or fewer), with the only difference being that a Grand Slam winner will be given 3 extra points to ensure they finish top of the table.

So, you can now win all your games and score four tries or more in each of them, and get a maximum total of 5 times 5 equals 25 table points plus 3 table points equals 28 table points for the entire tournament.

As Round Two of the tournament drew to a close with the Scotland France game, just two teams can still win a Grand Slam of the old fashioned sort, with five wins by whatever margins.  But although England and Ireland both ran in a ridiculous number of tries in their games against Italy, neither managed to score four tries in their other game, against Wales and France respectively.  So, both England and Ireland are at the top of the table with just 9 table points each, and can only end with a maximum of 27 table points.  So no Even Grander Slam for anyone this year.

In my previous Six Nations posting, I wrote off Italy.  But they are at least, for this year anyway, proving to be entertaining losers rather than just loser losers.  Traditionally, Italy have defended well but offered nothing much in attack, beyond a few fluke tries of the sort you’ll always get against tiring or weaker teams.  But now, they seem to be prioritising attack.  This means that instead of getting beaten 20 points to 10 points (hereinafter termed “game points"), they now get beaten something more like 50-20 game points, which is a hell of a lot more amusing to watch.  Instead of trying to bring other teams down to their dreary level, they are trying to raise their game to the level of their opponents.  In table points parlance, Italy have switched from trying to win, or failing that lose by less than seven points, to trying to win, or failing that to lose while scoring four tries or more.  Personally I find this a considerable improvement.

Take yesterday.  In the Italy Ireland game, Ireland had their four tries bonus point in the bag by half time, with Italy having scored a big fat zero of game points.  But in the second half, Italy kept on trying for tries, and the try count was: Ireland four (more), Italy three.  So, although Italy were never going to get a table point from only losing by a bit, they were, by the end, just one slightly cleverer pass away from getting a fourth try, right at the death.  Shame.

In the other game yesterday, England scored two early tries and looked odds on to get at least four, but actually managed no more game points at all.  England were then very lucky, with the video referee refusing to award Wales what the commentators all said was a good try.  If that Wales not-try had been given they could well have won.  But then again, there was an amazing tackle by an England player when Wales looked odds on to score another try, by which I mean a different not-try, so maybe England deserved it.  It was very tense.  I had to be somewhere else, and ended up being late because I could neither watch it nor not watch it.  I ended up watching it and not watching it to the not bitter end.

France Italy, in two weeks time, looks like it could be a lot of fun.  Italy will be well up for it, and France might, if they get off to a bad start, become very edgy.  Whoever loses that is a likely Wooden Spoon winner.  Apparently there is no actual wooden spoon awarded to the losingest team.  Maybe there should be.  And then, holding it, the losingest team should have to do a Lap of Dishonour.  But no.  This year it will probably be Italy, again, and that wouldn’t be fair.

There now follows the dreaded Fortnight Wait, between Round 2 and Round 3, and after that there will be another Fortnight Wait, until Round 4.  In such circumstances people often say: “I can’t wait.” But they can and they do, because they have to.

You Had One Job (a current Twitter favourite of mine) calls this “Brilliant”:

Agreed.

At a site called Idiot Toys they also do lots of gadgets with faces.  Or, they did, because (I just looked) things seem to have slowed down there lately.  But I can’t recall anything nearly as dramatic as the above image.

LATER: this.

Those little chinese cats, the ones that slowly wave their paws in the air, are often to be seen in gift shops.  But I never thought I’d see one of these pretend cats being copied by a real cat.

Dogs will copy, including copying their humans, like in this bit of video at the same Twitter feed, but I never knew that any cats were also this way inclined.  I didn’t know that there were actual copycats.

I guess my surprise comes from me not having known any cats who were growing up in the company of other cats, and hence still at the stage of learning how to be a cat, by copying those other cats.

The view from on top of my block of flats is jot quite high enough to be really great, like, say, the view from the top of the Tate Modern Extension.  Plus, there is the great lump that is Hide Tower, right outside my front window, which blocks off a huge chunk of London.

But if the light is playing games, things can get entertaining.  While grubbing back in the archives looking for a shot, from my roof, of the now deceased New Scotland Yard building just off Victoria Street, I came across this shot, taken just under two years ago, looking from my roof along Chapter Street, towards Battersea Power Station:

Cranes, roof clutter, vapour trails.  Lovely.

I find that I can best photo a sunset, not by photoing the sunset itself, but by photoing it with and behind buildings, and showing what it can do to buildings.  In the right light, the most commonplace of buildings can be transformed into something far less commonplace.

I have spent my day fighting against infrastructure overload and now I am tired.

Here, instead of nothing, is a selfie that I took, on a train, exactly one year ago:

That reminds me: I could now use a haircut.

But I wasn’t really photoing myself there.  What interested me was yet another of those London logos, in this case in aid of all this, with a random selection of Big Things, this one featuring the Gherkin, the Wheel, and St Paul’s.  The Shard, oddly, didn’t make the cut.

After a hard afternoon yesterday, exploring Churchill and his wartime government’s subterranean lair, I was, in the evening, in no mood to do much else.  But Christian Michel had one of his 6/20 evenings (yes I know, on the 5th (there was a reason but I have forgotten it)), and I forced myself to attend, knowing that I would not regret this.  And I didn’t.

The highlight of my evening was undoubtedly getting to talk with an artist and art teacher by the name of Elina Cerla.  We spoke about how we were both fascinated by the difference between how two eyed people see things, and how one eyed cameras, or camera-like gadgets used by artists, see things.  Summary: very differently.  Also about how she is more concerned to help people solve the artistic problems they consider important, rather than to shape them all into her preferred sort of artist.

She gave me her card before we went our separate ways, so I’m guessing she will have no problem with me linking you to that website.

You could become one of Elina Cerla’s pupils by doing what this says:

Having already wandered about in the website, I was particularly struck by that naked figure when I came across it elsewhere on the website, so I was intrigued later to find that she chose it to illustrate her teaching advert.  I think you will agree that this image inspires confidence that the time of pupils will not be wasted.  This is someone with definite skills to impart.

I am presently listening to this YouTube interview.  Refreshing absence of art-speak bullshit and political infantilism, of the sort commonly emitted by those who practice (or who are attempting) shock-art.

Today me and GD2’s Dad, who will return to Brittany tomorrow, visited the Churchill War Rooms and the attached Churchill Museum, underneath Whitehall.  Very good, and a lot bigger and more elaborate than we were expecting.  A lot of time, trouble and expense has been passed, taken and spent on this show, with its tiny and insignificant looking entrance in King Charles Street, just off the right hand side of St James’s Park.

I took a ton of photos, most of which came out pretty well.

I was also out this evening, so I’ve time to present only one photo now:

I was fascinated by the war, of course, but also by the numerous items of peaceful technology that were also also needed to fight that war, like telephones, fire extinguishers, standard lamps, electric fans, chairs, and the three pin power sockets they used then.  And the cooker, above.

A lot of these devices looked very familiar to me, me having been born in 1947, and the Cabinet War Rooms having the sort of kit that regular people often only got a bit later.

I just heard ITV News describe South African politician Jacob Zuma as being “mired in a whirlwind” of something or other.  Controversy, or some such thing.  Yes, this.

Next thing you know, he’ll be blown away by a swamp.

Yes, I don’t think I’ll ever get totally tired to taking photos of photoers, like the ones below, all taken during a recent walk with my friend Tony (who is GodDaughter2’s Dad) along Victoria Street, past Westminster Abbey and Parliament, and then on over the River and past the Wheel.

Lots of woolly hats and gloves and furry clothes, and hair.  I especially like how the hair of the lady in 2.2 is lit up green, and also a bit of red.

Click and enjoy:

Seven smartphones.  Two old school cameras, like my one.  Smartphones have totally swallowed the dedicated-but-little camera market, although you do still see them around.

Indeed:

At the top of the Shard, Aug 2017.

A terrific photo-op for someone with a really powerful zoom lens.  (The sort that looks like a giant ... never mind.)

Once more I find myself at tomorrow morning, without a posting here.  However, as luck would have it, I was photoing Pavlova today, my two favourites being this … :

… , and this:

The sign.

The clock.