New Year's Eve

At The Courtyard Hotel at Stanwick was a fun, if cold, evening in a marquee...good company around the table, but WHY do organisers think that a disco playing a decibel level similar to a jumbo jet adds to the atmosphere???? I would so much like to have talked to some of the other people there without having to shout in their ear! Still, the fireworks at midnight were good...but an interesting thing was also going on in the sky that night. I noticed a steady stream of dullish orange lights crossing above the horizon in a dead straight trajectory, separated by a few minutes...miles away by the look of it, but there they were one after one, passing over. The interesting thing was that when we got home, my mother in law had been looking from her bedroom window and said that she had seen as many as 50 of these lights passing and gathering together in a hauge formation.... so what was all that about then???
Today I am sitting in the gallery in the hope that a few people have got some money left to spend on lovely photographs and artwork for their walls!

Christmas Eve...

... and a job in Newark for the Sunday Telegraph means that JR and I are looking for the subject (who must remain nameless), as no one at the paper checked he was actually at home today! In the event he wasn't, so we spent a jolly hour gathering "interesting" shots for our libraries at Alamy and elsewhere on the net. Newark is a nice place with very friendly people who all seemed happy to chat and spend a few minutes with two bearded blokes wielding cameras....here (above) is JR enjoying the delights of Newark's traditional market!

All of this was in stark contrast to the job yesterday, which was taking photographs of the Northants Police diving team looking for a missing body in the frozen lakes near Ringstead. A very grim job in freezing temperatures, and sadly so far no body was recovered. My sympathies go to the families of the two men that drowned whilst out wildfowling

Out and about today...

in the snow of East Northamptonshire, and I was able to capture some really beautiful and evocative winter photographs.

I spent a little time wandering around Upper Dean, on the Northants/Bedfordshire border and came across the wonderful gravestone pictured here... if the inscription is not too clear it reads "Walter James Green... ...who was called away (suddenly).... I love the use of the parentheses ....! Sadly, it appears that whatever he was called away for, the old boy never returned! Perhaps this was mid-Victorian humour?

I am hoping for a few more crisp sunny blue sky days, to accompany our Alpine scenery, so that I can get out and about in the glorious county of Northamptonshire some more