LIFE ON A BORROWED CAMERA

Not that people with perfect vision will be seeing much these days.
A few moments earlier, this was a moderately open view. A few moments later and everything was hidden behind a fast veiling, white curtain.

The default weather here is currently 'mist'. This somewhat reflects my own state of joyfulness - which could be more nearly described as - 'fog'. It will be another two weeks before my camera is returned from the menders; and just when I was thinking after the demise and replacement of my laptop, the demise and not-replacement of my music speaker, the smashing of my mobile phone (I tripped over a low concrete barrier) - there's nothing else to break . . . my glasses frame has suddenly and unaccountably bent and an arm is falling off so it's not just that the world is out of focus when looked at through a broken lens - I'm walking around with crossed eyes, constantly angling my head up and down and sideways to see if there's any way I can make things look better.

On the up-side . .  I've borrowed a camera.

On the down-side . . . although pictures taken with it may theoretically be in focus I have no idea whether they are or are not. (Broken glasses!)

I hope by now, you are completely overcome with sympathy, fighting back tears and playing violins.

Friends don't necessarily help. "I know!" said one. "Come with me for a walk. That'll cheer you up!" After quite a long trek across the grey wastes of an abandoned Park-and-Ride, and after falling up a muddy, brambly bank because everything was so wet, we could see acres of brown reeds sticking up through invisible water-logged ground. I could tart up this picture. I've tried. So I know. With a bit of adjustment I can make it brighter and clearer. But to blog it like that would be to lie. What lay before us was a landscape of stripy murkiness. Which, I hope, is how you see it here.

Fortunately, I was not invited to put on waders to see if we could get through, nor given an axe and a canoe. Instead, my guide diverted us between clumps and bumps of tough grass, along muddy paths and deep puddles so I could experience the pleasure of cold brown water flowing happily into my only presentable pair of shoes.

But even in the murk of a warm, dull spring, there are moments of hope . . . 

Last week I reviewed a book on how to cheer an urban landscape with flowers. . . and brightened the post with an illustration from it of a balcony crammed with plants. I was in Southampton yesterday and as I climbed despondently up the hill from the station into town (wondering how much joy I could summon up from admiring concrete blocks of flats built to resemble ocean liners) I glanced up (never forget to glance up) and saw this. One Cordyline on one balcony. Is this a cheerful reminder that not everything is as bleak as it seems? Or does it emphasise that apart from itself everything is, indeed, bleak?

I've not yet decided.

(I hope you're enjoying this post!)

Here's a bit of light:

Earlier this week, I was going from house to house, posting leaflets through letter boxes suggesting - that plans to close the children's ward and neo-natal unit at our local hospital are not a good idea (that's not the light) when I came across this car. In some ways it could be a sad car. But it wasn't. It wasn't muddy (unlike my shoes) and the paintwork was shiny (unlike my shoes) and growing in the slot where the wipers swish - there was this plant. The photo isn't in focus . .  grey day, broken glasses, unfamiliar camera . . . but it brought - I wish I could say 'leap of joy' into a bleak and un-imaginative heart  (more violins please) . . . but it inspired a little spark of 'oh, look at this!'-ness A man emerged from the house opposite. After all, I was cavorting in his neighbour's drive, taking photographs of his neighbour's car etc. etc. But I couldn't summon enough enthusiasm to call him over to see . . just nodded, put my camera away and went to push the next leaflet through the nest annoying draft-excluding bristles in the letterbox of the next door along. But a bit of my brain (the tiny part spared from moaning about broken glasses) has, since then, been going around almost on its own - singing a little song.

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