Twilight Egret

A late afternoon wander along the wetlands by the Severn had not produced anything exciting. Just as the light faded and I was in the process of giving up, this white egret slipped out of the twilight reed beds. 

I don't normally go for the darker shots, but I quite like this. It was this or seagulls... Do go Large.

...

I had fun this morning sorting out a problem with an elderly family member, who had received an email confirming receipt of a large pre-payment for a fourteen person hotel booking in her name. I contacted the hotel and confirmed the booking and the payment were real - they were. But no booking had been made by her.

Obviously the first thing was to alert their bank, who were tardy answering the phone. In the meantime I looked at the email, which was sent to firstnamesecondname(@)googlemail.com. My relatives email is firstname.secondname(@)gmail.com. It may be that this was a mis-routed email to another person of the same name.

But it turns out that Google ignores the dots in email addresses, and also gmail and googlemail are the same thing. Who knew? By this time the bank had responded and confirmed no transaction had been made, and I also obtained the last four digits of the card which were different to my relative's..

Chances are someone has inadvertently mis-spelled their name and produced my relative's in error. The email address is the only contact the hotel has. I'm left wondering if they've now cancelled what might be quite an important reservation and someone will be most put out.

This has been a public service announce-blip.