In the neighbourhood

The man on the bench was not there this morning (I wrote about him yesterday). Strangely, my passing the bench happened at the same time as I was listening to the audiobook of Willa Cather's Song of the Lark. In this, the author tells the tale of life in the small town of Moonstone, Colorado, not long after the pioneers arrived. In a particularly chiiling incident, a tramp arrives in town by boxcar, is rebuffed by the town's inhabitants, and then vanishes overnight. Shortly afterwards, an outbreak of cholera kills several townspeople, and it is eventually traced back to the town's water supply, where it turns out the tramp had ended his days, in a calculated act of revenge on the town that spurned him. Thea, the story's fifteen year-old heroine, remains haunted by this occurrence. Is it any wonder?

I have not drunk any water today.

(Should I call this journal My life in Books? I have not read the Orwell yet, as my course is not happening this week.)

This morning, I took some pictures out on the back step, standing on a chair. The mist was swirling, and the rhus tree was particularly flame-coloured. But I realised that the back door shots always look the same, and I have blipped a couple already. In addition, CleanSteve took some with his borrowed wide-angle lens, and posted one up while I was at work! So we might have ended up with the same subject, had I not had this shot from the front, which I took because the sky was oddly dark. The telegraph poles were a pain, so I ended up posterizing it and giving it a stamp frame. The others in the the series are here:
Back step view with mist:
Back step view posterized
Bomble the neighbourhood cat stamp

Camberwick Green springs to mind: 1930s houses; a bit ordinary; not much happening. BUT, the milkman and the bus service don't come here anymore, and the local shops and post offices have closed, though the pub has recently opened a little shop and cafe. And the Police do come here quite often; they were talking with some yoofs in the street when we returned from Skyfall this afternoon.

Freespiral has expressed most of what I want to say about Skyfall, so do check out her blip if you want to know. Daniel Crag Craig is wonderful in the role of 007, and I do appreciate the sneaky references to older Bond movies. Plenty, too, is made of the undeniable truth of ageing: can ageing operatives still cut it in a post-9/11 world, where we don't even know who the enemies are any more?

Finally, thanks so much for all the comments on my Apples blip of 28th, which briefly hit the spotlight last night. I was sandwiched between TussockTales and Giacomo, with EmyJane as a near-neighbour, so to say I was over the moon was no exaggeration! EmyJane later made no. 1 in the spotlight with her beautiful mole blip.

...oh, and the sports car in the above shot is our neighbour's! We have the Skoda, in honour of my year of living in the Czech Republic, and just because...

PS I should say that my love of stamps might come from living in the Czech Republic, where stamp illustration is of a high quality, and also because we have a wonderful illustrator of stamps and other artforms in our neighbourhood. Tony is sometimes on the no.28 bus with me.