Birds of a Feather

Having arrived in London at 8 a.m. today to do the sound for Start the Week live on Radio 4, I was home quite early this afternoon. With the sun streaming brightly through the windows on the train home, I thought it would be easy to get a photo to blip. How wrong I was! As soon as I stepped onto the platform, the clouds filled in and the Chiltern Hills precipitated rainfall. I did try taking a few shots of some poor bedraggled birds, but wasn't happy with any of them.

Now stuck indoors, I remembered a bird of a different kind in my jewellery box, a brooch which I've been meaning to photograph for ages. It was a gift many years ago from my late sister Kaye, who died in December 1997 at the age of 44, and I treasure it. It's solid silver, with marcasite set into the wing and a green peridot eye. When the Duchess of Windsor's jewellery was auctioned in late 2010, the collection included a beautiful 1940 Cartier flamingo brooch, which made £1,721,250 in the sale and hit the news headlines. I realised then what had inspired the jeweller who created my own brooch from Kaye, which is very similar in style and shape.

It may not be worth £1.7 m, but to me it is priceless.