Flight practice

This morning H and S set off back to the Frozen North (H still a bit under the weather with what now looks pretty clearly like a virus), and suddenly the house was huge and empty. So R and I reached for our usual solution, and went to Stratford.

While R went off for a brisk riverbank walk I started out at Holy Trinity, but the churchyard birds were being uncooperative again this afternoon, and I didn't want to spend a lot of time there and keep R waiting about for me in town, so I gave up on them pretty quickly and headed off to the Bancroft Gardens. Sadly the sun was still too high to produce the kind of golden water I photographed yesterday, but the light was pretty good, so I spent a few minutes on the Bancroft wharf practising my flight photography skills on the Black-headed Gulls. Against a contrasting background like this they're relatively easy for the camera to pick up (certainly easier than an owl against rough grassland), but they're pretty fast and change direction quite erratically, so they provide more than enough of a challenge.

This evening we began watching the fourth series of Slow Horses on AppleTV, which is the last one yet available - although the fifth season has allegedly finished filming, I don't know when it will be released. I didn't like Series Two, but One and Three were excellent, and Four is shaping up very well too. Most of the cast are very good, especially Jack Lowden, and overall I'd say it's a highly creditable effort. I'll never get used to Gary Oldman, but I have now solved the internet's Jackson Lamb Conundrum ("If not Gary Oldman, then who??"). So: who could play a sleazy fat old guy with horrible habits, but make you believe that he survived as a spy behind the Wall during the Cold War, and is still too dangerous to be safely messed with even now? (And could deliver an abusive epithet in a sardonic growl, by the way, rather than a peevish squeak?) Tom Hardy, that's who. Once you think about it, it's obvious. The trick from now on will be not spending so much time and thought mentally re-shooting every Jackson Lamb scene with Hardy in the role that I lose track of what's happening on the screen.