As Luck Would Have It

I wanted to take a picture to show the effect of the rain in a strong westerly on our limewash walls. Knowing this reflection is possible was a wheeze to make it a blippable picture. A lucky chance: the height of the window (4.5m or so to the apex), the height of the tower (7 storeys), the distances, the angles and the laws of optics conspiring together to let me simply stand in the middle of the lawn and point, the perspective allowing two roofs and a flagpole to fit exactly into the window frame. The brewery tower dates from 1901; the roof, limewash wall and window 115 years later

The colour change in the wall when it is wet delights me. The entire wall is permeable to water vapour: lime render below the limewash, straw below that, lime plaster on the inside and lime paint on the inside wall. Not that rain will soak through that far, but the limewash and surface render absorb some of it, resulting in the change of colour. Sometimes it stays that way for days, until the combination of sun, wind and warmth from within dry it out again. Humidity from inside the house can make its way through the wall on drier days; we have never seen condensation in this room, where we do all our cooking and washing up, marmalade making (soon), pasteurising apple juice, washing honey jars and evaporating off the water, bread baking and clothes washing - quite a test now I come to list it. This behaviour is just as intended and designed; no luck at all

A man in the US has won 1.4 billion dollars on a lottery. Actually, when he comes to read the small print, he has won either 1.4 billion dollars spread across 29 years or 700 million dollars now and no more. The first of many stressful choices he is going to have to make. (Most people take the upfront cash, apparently, whatever their age). Lucky him? Maybe

Elon Musk has lost 180 billion dollars since November 2021. Of course it is money he has never seen and never would or could have seen, so is it a loss at all? His story has all the makings of a Greek tragedy - hubris, nemesis and all that - but we are not yet in the third act. Some people think that his purchase of Twitter - the act that precipitated his Icarus-like fall - has some kind of Mephistophelean logic: taking over the market-place of ideas in order to bend it to his ego-fueled purpose, at whatever cost. Or he's just unlucky. Maybe