To coin a phrase

If our spouse's siblings and our siblings' spouses are brothers- and sisters-in-law, should our cousins' spouses not be called cousins-in-law? I had never come across the phrase and had decided that is what I shall be calling my cousin's husband from now on. Then I Googled it - and find that it is in common use! Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Today's nature shot

Perhaps that should be today's almost nature shot.



This is a picture of a red deer hind. She had run across the field, jumped the fence and stood there looking at me. But she was camera-shy and by the time I had pressed the button she had taken off into the woods.

I have calculated that over the past 40 years I must have walked some 8,000 miles, or it could be nearer 10,000, through the fields and woods around Stanmer, but this is only the second time I have seen a deer.

This one was a little less camera-shy. OK, he's a stag, not a hind, and he was on the farm.

Still researching...

I came across this delightful picture of an entry in the 1971 carnival procession. I wonder if it would be possible to trace the girls?

And it's raining again, so the pears won't be picked today either.

Rain at last

We have had little rain of late, but it has arrived today. The South Downs can't be seen from our bedroom window as they are hidden in cloud.



I had hoped to pick the last of the pears today but i somehow doubt I'll bother to go down the garden.

The world has gone mad (continued)

OK, I know this is a few days late, but here goes.

Two women police officers each had a child, the children being of much the same age. It happened that the women were not only work colleagues, but friends outside their work as well. They worked shifts, and as one was a single mother, the other married to yet another police officer, they had problems leaving their young children. The solution was to ensure that they always worked different shifts, then one could look after both children while the other mother was at work. Seems simple enough, and a common-sense solution to the problem.

But someone told the nanny state - and the nanny state knew better.

One of the women received a visit from an employee of Ofsted, the quango charged with looking after education and, by extension, young children. He told our sensible young mother that she was breaking the law, which naturally caused her some concern as her job is to uphold the law. The transgression? Child-minding for benefit without having obtained the necessary qualifications.

Benefit, she asked? What benefit? I'm not paid for baby-sitting. Oh yes you are, she was told. You have a reciprocal arrangement and that is a benefit.

She was told she needed to attend a course to learn how to change a nappy (she's a mother, for goodness sake), obtain clearance from the Criminal Records Bureau (she's a police officer!) - and might well have been warned to expect a visit from the Inland Revenue as she had failed to declare this "benefit" on her tax return.

We are told that the regulations are being re-examined to see if they can be made more workable.

Meanwhile, a nursery attendant who had been on all the courses and had been cleared by the CRB to work with children has been found guilty of the most horrific sex attacks on children aged between 6 and 18 months.

Through the Looking Glass has nothing on life in Britain today.

Books I haven't read

A fellow dog walker was delighted when she found a copy of Schindler's List at the Lions' book fair last month. She had recently visited Krakow and seen the factory and had also seen the film, so she wanted to read the book. But this morning she told me she was finding it hard going and I suggested that as she was, I assumed, reading it for pleasure, she might as well give up on it. I always do that with books that I find I am not enjoying. I don't belong to a book club (or group or whatever it is they are called) so I have no need to read a book from cover to cover just so that I can take part in dissecting it at the next meeting. I read solely for my own pleasure so I feel no compunction in putting aside a book I am not liking after reading the first fifty pages or couple of chapters or so. Two authors who have suffered this ignominious fate recently are Peter May and David Baldacci. Both were recommended to me by friends who have an idea of my reading tastes, although I was warned that Peter May is a bit like Patricia Cornwell, who is another author I don't read. In fact, it was the over-abundance of Chinese characters (and therefore names) that put me off the May book. As for Baldacci, I found it all just a bit too far-fetched and James-Bond-like. On the other hand, I read a couple of Dorothy Simpson books while in France and quite enjoyed them, and at the library I found a McCall Smith title in the 1st Ladies' Detective Agency series that I had not read so I have been able to enjoy some reading.

So that's how it's done!

Way back in the mists of pre-history, when Methusalah was but a stripling, I was the proud owner of a camera, a box Brownie. It must have been about six years before I graduated to a new, improved version but, under the influence of the man who was later to become my father-in-law, I went mad and bought a 35mm single-lens reflex camera from a colleague at work. Although I could change the lens and alter the aperture, exposure time and focus, I still needed a light meter to get the exposure accurate. I eventually changed to a better model which had a built-in light meter, but I was still learning just how to use the aperture size and exposure time to the best advantage. It took me quite a long time to get the basics and I never did make much progress beyond that, although I learned how to make the background out of focus so as to concentrate the viewers eye on the main subject, and how to stop movement or allow blurring to indicate movement and speed.

Then along came the digital revolution. I seem to recall that I received a digital camera as a free gift with something I bought; as a give-away, that camera must have been pretty basic and I never did use the thing anyway. But when I retired, my company asked me what I would like as a gift and I opted for a new digital camera. It cost quite a lot - rather more than I remember ever spending on my fairly up-market SLR - but was still a somewhat basic point-and-shoot model. I became disenchanted with it because it was so basic, although I did use it whenever I thought to take it with me. This is an example of a picture taken with that camera. It is a temple at Nara, Japan, which I visited when at the Lions' international convention in Osaka.


It's OK as a holiday snap, but that's about all that can be said for it.

Digital cameras were becoming both smaller and cheaper and I was particularly taken with one owned by a friend of my son which was small enough to put in one's pocket yet featured a zoom lens and better picture quality. What's more, it was the same make as the one I was already using and the memory cards were interchangeable. I bought one. That's the one that now produces dark spots in the sky, and, as I wrote yesterday, I eventually upgraded again. What I should have bought is a digital SLR so that I can see what I am photographing through the lens using a small eye-viewer or display window rather than relying on the LCD screen, which I find difficult to make out when the sun is shining too brightly, but I didn't. All the same, the camera I bought allows manual control of the aperture and exposure time so I can be a little creative.

It didn't take me very long to work out how to under- or over-expose pictures, but the manual that came with the camera seemed to be for a slightly different, probably a newer version and I couldn't work out how to adjust the aperture size. I've had the camera, what? Eighteen months, maybe two years? It must be two years as I certainly had it when we visited California back in 2007. And yet it was only yesterday that I realised the manual was for a completely different model of camera. I went to the manufacturer's web site, downloaded the correct manual, and bingo! I now know how to alter the aperture! Admittedly, there are only two f stops so any alteration is very limited, but I can choose which to use.