Crystal Angel

Photograph of a crystal angel which my family was given as a Christmas present last year. We were actually kind of anxious about putting it on our tree this year because it's kind of precious and breakable, but it seems silly to have a beautiful decoration but never display it, so up she went after a suitably stable branch had been selected.

The photo makes the angel look rather massive, but it's actually teeny. And difficult to photograph...

Warped Bauble

Gold Bauble

This is a photograph of me taking a photograph of me taking a photograph of a bauble. There is quite a lot of recursion going on here, and if only I had been holding a big mirror instead of my camera, it could have gone on forever.Nevermind.

Sadly it's very far from the sharpest picture ever, owing to the rubbish quality of light in my house in December. Oh well. Roll around spring and it'll be back to lovely flower photos...

I believe that this is the first photo I've posted which actually has me in it! Obviously I am terrified of stalkers, although if you can identify me from my spotted Christmas fleece I would be fairly impressed as well as scared.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas candle

I have been most remiss at updating recently. This is largely due to Christmas. I apologise greatly. However, to make up for it, here is a lovely picture of a Christmas candle. There's nothing about the candle that makes it inherently christmassy other than the fact that I took the picture on Christmas day. And obviously any candle that is lit on Christmas day is a Christmas candle. It stands to reason.

Merry Christmas!

The thing I like most about this charming and very very orange flower, is it's scrunched up curly-wurly petal. The thing I like least is my photography skills. WHY GOD WHY did I have to cut half the petals out of the shot? It looks very ungainly. Originally this was not going on the blog for that precise reason, but I'm so low on picture stocks right now that I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. Or possibly bouquet.

Oh well. Into each life some rain must fall.

So I've been racking my brains to think of something interesting to discuss in this post but unfortunately I have realised that I'm not very good at it. I have lots of interesting thoughts whilst wandering around the place, but few when sat at the computer. What I need is a dictaphone. Then I can be one of those people who strides around the place grasping a small black box to my face and shouting "NOTE TO SELF: TURN OVEN OFF" and "MUST BUY BINBAGS".

Ooh, binbags!

"What a dull topic!", I hear you cry. "There is nothing exciting about binbags!"

That is where you are wrong. Did you know that the binbag was invented by Herbert A. Resplendency-Potts of Wiltshire in 1894, after a careless servant dropped a lead dustbin on his foot? Of course you don't, because it's a huge lie. In fact, they were invented in the 1950s by three Canadians, who to the best of my knowledge had suffered no garbage-related trauma. But it's not such a good story.

Also exciting are the novelty Christmas pudding binbags which I recently came across in John lewis. I was extremely excited ...until I realised that I don't take out the rubbish. But one day, when I have my own house, my rubbish will out-Christmas everyone else's. Plus, even when it's not Christmas you can get these novelty goldfish binbags. Your neighbours probably won't judge you at all.

Flower... or flour?

Pictures of flowers, pictures of flowers, pictures of flowers, picture of a leaf... It's enough to make you want to scream. Like this fine gentleman, a sculpture at Buckfast Abbey (in fact, I like to imagine the sculpture represents the facial expression which is induced by trying Buckfast tonic wine. It's like alcoholic Calpol).

Being mildly obsessive, I have been monitoring my blog stats and it turns out that by far my most popular post was one in which I talked at length about the strange fact that whales are dinosaurs are always compared to buses. Unsurprisingly, these musings were unrelated to the picture of the day, which was of a flower. I'm sure that all the people wanting to find out how many buses equals a humpback whale were wildly disappointed when they discovered my blog is almost solely comprised of photographs of flowers, but at least this knowledge has somewhat strengthened my resolve to continue writing about random bits and bobs. Because it's interesting to find what people find interesting.

And so. I have been racking my brains. After my recent post about pandas, I was trying to think of something else to discuss. And then it hit me. Flower. Flour. What's going on there?

Flower vs. Flour

As it turns out, there are multiple companies whose names were inspired by these homophones. Predictably, they are bakers (I nearly said "cakists". But obviously that's not actually a word. Although possibly it should be, to distinguish between those who waste their time making bread, and those who concentrate on delicious, delicious cake).

Those who have trouble spelling will no doubt be delighted to learn that originally, the words "flour" and "flower" were spelled the same way. They both apparently derive from the Old French word fleur, which meant both "flower" in its modern sense, and also had a sense of "the finest", as in the finest part of the meal. The meal as in the ground-up grains, not the meal as in lunch dinner breakfast. Etymology is baffling. Apparently Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary did not recognise a difference in spelling between the two words, but by the 1830s there had, presumably, been a few incidents of unwary cooks feeding their families cakes made out of the shrubbery, and the whole mess was gradually straightened out.

I've not seen anything to support/prove this in any of the etymologies I've found, but based on my research (coughgooglingcough) I wondered whether the eventual clarification of the two words had something to do with the city of Rochester, New York; in the 1820s the town developed a famous and booming flour mill industry and then in the 1830s it also gained a renowned and thriving seed-selling business. Perhaps the residents of Rochester found it especially important to differentiate between flour and flowers; certainly the town's nickname is given initially as the Flour City and, later, the Flower City. Given how neatly the dates line up, I'm surprised I haven't been able to find anything linking the town to wider acceptance of the two spellings. Rochester, you're missing a trick.

5 Reasons Giant Pandas Are a Boost to the Economy



Stained Glass at Buckfast Abbey

 Another picture of the impressive and rather modern stained glass at Buckfast Abbey. I do like the way the light shines through it. But that's not what I want to talk about today.

There has been a surprising amount of vitriol directed at the Edinburgh Zoo's newest arrivals; two giant pandas on loan from China until 2021, Tian Tian and Yang Guan. This is largely because it is supposedly costing the zoo $1,000,000 per year to host them, which some people see as a waste of money. However, I love pandas, and so I disagree. I have thought about this complex issue in great depth, and present my conclusions below:

5 Reasons Giant Pandas Are a Boost to the Economy

1. Pandas are black and white. Therefore, as monochrome creatures, their arrival will be saving newspapers everywhere a small fortune on printing costs. Everyone knows that coloured ink is more expensive.

2. Pandas eat nothing but bamboo. As every gardener knows, bamboo grows like the blazes and is tricky to get rid of. Horticulturalists across the nation can send their unwanted bamboo to Edinburgh Zoo, and the pandas will eat for free every night.

3. Pandas are reluctant breeders, at best. Fewer panda babies means fewer claims for child support.

4. Pandas take shelter in trees or caves, but they do not build permanent homes. This means that the chance of giant pandas precipitating another subprime mortgage crisis is virtually nil.

5. Pandas, unlike many members of our great nation, are actually supposed to be fat and lazy. This means that, unlike humans of similar size and girth, they will not demand costly gastric banding procedures on the NHS.

Yawn

This charming seal, who lives at the National Seal Sanctuary in Gweek, adequately expresses how I felt after my exams were over. And indeed, even though it has been very nearly a week since my last exam, I still wish that I were a chubby seal, lounging on a ledge in the sunshine and being fed copious amounts of fish in return for, well, just being a seal.

Of course, my photo supplies are running low and soon this blog will be plunged into wintry darkness as I take endless photos of glasses of sherry. Not because they're an ideal subject for keen photographers everywhere, but because I like sherry, and once I've poured it out for a photo opportunity, it would be a waste not to drink it. Recently, whilst travelling the London tubular system, I came across an article suggesting that the redoubtable Downton Abbey is responsible for a sudden resurgence in sales of sherry, but I disagree. I'm pretty sure the reason sherry is becoming fashionable again is all down to my efforts to force everyone I know to drink it wherever possible.

Alas!

I am feeling very guilty about my lack of posting recently. I can only plead a) exams, b) a nasty cold and c) the first amendment. Oh, and d) slightly running out of photos. More will follow shortly, along with illuminating commentary on flowers whose names I don't know, different types of insect and the etymologies of random words.

Hurrah!

Pastel Perfect

I was surprised to see that I hadn't already blogged this picture, because I am quite fond of it! I love the colours of the hydrangea and the contrast with the little marmalade hoverfly (which looks like it's balancing on one leg in that picture).

Whilst I don't know the name of this kind of hydrangea (I would guess it's hydrangea macrophylla?), it's apparently a lacecap as opposed to a mophead - meaning that it has large, showy but sterile flowers around the outer edge of a number of much smaller fertile ones -you can see the two types in the picture. Mophead hydrangeas are the ones you immediately think of when someone leaps out from behind a wall and shouts "hydrangea!" - i.e., the ones with big round fluffy-looking flowerheads. The colour of your hydrangeas will be affected by the pH of the soil, which is rather interesting.

Foxglove

This is a foxglove. I believe it is the Common Foxglove, digitalis purpurea (which sounds like some kind of hideous rash you might get on your hands.. but no matter). It's an interesting name and one apparently widely open to debate, but according to some 19th Century book of botany quoted on Wikipedia: "In south of Scotland it is called 'bloody fingers', more northward, 'deadman's bells'", which seem like unnecessarily gruesome names for what is quite a pretty plant. Probably this comes from the fact that it's extremely poisonous, as the leaves, flowers and seeds all contain digitoxin. Digitoxin has been used as a treatment for heart failure, as pioneered by William Withering (fabulous name for a botanist).

Withering also recommended it for the treatment of dropsy, a hilarious-sounding old fashioned disease which, I've just discovered, was an archaic name for oedema (Edema, if you're American. Or just can't spell). I always feel faintly guilty when I find the names for medical conditions funny. Like botulism. I don't know why, but the name just amuses me, whereas I suspect the actual condition itself would very definitely not...