A miscellany

My regular reader will be only too well aware of my propensity to wander off the subject.  It may be that I start by writing about the price of cheese and go on to discuss the merits and otherwise of various makes of estate car.  That, you understand, is jusr by way of example.  But today will be different.  Today I will not merely drift along: today I shall post several short, pithy paragraphs, in each of which I shall stick rigidly to the point.

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I have never really understood the difference between "will" and "shall".  Somewhere or other I read that "shall" is an emphatic version of "will" but somewhere else I read that "shall" should be used when the subject of the verb is in the first person, "will" when the subject is third person.  Me, I just use whichever comes to my fingertips first.

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We seem to have a much greater variety of birds in the garden now compared with only a few years back.  Jays have become daily visitors, as has a charm of goldfinches, and yesterday I caught sight of another new one - a marsh tit.

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My heart sank when the Old Bat said she wanted to go shopping for a pair of shoes and would I go with her?  I still remember the day, not all that long after we were married, when we went to London for her to look for a pair of shoes.  We started at Marble Arch and walked along Oxford Street to Oxford Circus and then back to Marble Arch on the other side of the street, going into every shoe shop on the way.  There seemed to be dozens of them!  That took all day - and she didn't find a pair of shoes she liked.  Yesterday afternoon we went to Lewes, a small town a few miles away, knowing that we could park within a couple of hundred yards of the two shoe shops in town.  The first was holding a closing down sale and had nothing of use.  The second had just what she wanted, but not in her width fitting.  However, the young lady who was serving us (to me, all shop assistants are young these days) offered to order pairs of two styles in different sizes.  She will phone when they are in - and there is no obligation to buy any of them.  That's what I call service, and that's what will take us back to the shop another time.

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I think I will trawl the photographic archives for a day or three, the weather not really being conducive to photographic activity these last few days.  Perhaps a trip up the River Loire?  This picture is of a tributary, the River Havre, close to its confluence with the Loire at Oudon.