Out of its element

Happy New Year, blippers!

By rights, this should be a bit of black-and-white photo journalism, recording the annual Bray Seafront New Year's Day Swim, but the organisers decided this year to postpone it until tomorrow for safety reasons, because of the recent high tides and strong winds. So friend Dave got a reprieve and didn't have to take his hangover into the freezing water, and we got a reprieve and didn't stand shivering watching him do that.

It really would have been a difficult undertaking today. Last night's snow was still covering the roads and the surroundings hills, making driving quite tricky. After bidding farewell to our Bray friends, it wasn't too bad on the way to Carl's place (indeed, I thought some drivers were being unnecessarily cautious along the way). It was a different story when we got onto the side roads near Carl's house, though, and there was a bit of a skating moment as we took the second-last corner. I grabbed a quick espresso to fortify me for the cross-city trip and set off cautiously. Things were very, very bad until Booterstown. There wasn't any sign that the dangerously icy roads had been gritted, and it was very much a question of tip-toeing along very slowly and using the brakes as little as possible.

Things got bad again on the side streets closer to my place, and I was glad indeed to close the door behind me and sit down in the nice cosy atmosphere of the warm indoors ... until I realised that I should have stopped off on the way for some grocery essentials. I left the car outside the house and braved the pavements, which is when I spotted this confused heron, far from you'd normally expect to encounter it. The trip to the shop would usually took a great deal longer than usual, and I was very, very cold when Ig to back despite all the extra layers of clothing.

I was delighted that Carl had loaned me his DVD set of the complete Series One of the wonderful Life on Mars, which kept me nicely entertained as I watched the first two episodes.

p.s. I've back-blipped something for yesterday.