Celebratory

I've had the insurance claim form for a cancelled trip on my desk for nearly a month now, and every day I've managed to find reasons for avoiding tackling it. Today it finally hit the top of my to-do list, and took me approximately a tenth of the time to complete as I've spent over the past four weeks fretting about the imagined difficulty of filling it in. I was about six, I think, when I first experienced the revelation that the things you get the most worked up about in advance generally turn out to be less of an issue than the unforeseen disasters that suddenly arrive out of nowhere and smack you round the back of the head. I'm eleven times that old now, but despite all the intervening decades of practice it seems that I still haven't mastered the lesson.

And - breathe...

Anyway. After triumphantly flinging an envelope of documents onto the hall table, ready to be taken to the Post Office tomorrow, I decided that some celebratory macro photography was in order - only to discover that during my time in insurance claim form purdah the morning's lovely weather had gorn orf, and it was now raining. Sigh. 

As soon as the sky cleared I threw my gear in the car and zoomed off to Cleeve Prior in search of the elusive hawkers, but today they failed to show so much as a whisker. I'm beginning to suspect that they're taunting me. There were quite a few damsels around though, and the most pleasing was this female White-legged Damselfly, which is the first I've recorded at Cleeve. You always try to get your damsels to pose on pretty flowers against a well-diffused background, but they very rarely cooperate, so I'm happy to have captured this moment.

R: C1 D12.