Malfunction

Today has been rather like the photograph of this lily- with great potential but not too well focused.

It started well enough and with resolve: Christmas cards sorted into piles for different destinations and family presents wrapped for their collection this weekend. So far so good.

Then I noticed my watch had stopped and I had to make a foray into the outside world to get a new battery before coming home and spending too much time taking rather bad blips of my lilies with my 105 mm zoom lens.

A friend arrived too shortly afterwards to see the Dower House, and then I realised that the central heating wasn't working, and we were doomed to sit getting colder and colder all the while trying to work out why the heating hadn't come on.

His Lordship's arrival back from a hard day's leisure on the hills only to find that it was warmer there than inside the Dower House and also that I hadn't noticed there was a bulb needing replaced in a wall light seemed to send him over the edge.

So out came the ladder and the screwdriver while my friend whom I haven't seen for about two years and I tried to carry on a conversation to a background of workshop noises three feet from where we sat. It would have been funny if I could have seen the joke.

The upshot of this is, I give you my not too well focussed lily taken with my 18-55mm lens in a certain amount of desperate haste, while the site plumber tells me that a small radiator leak has caused the pressure in the central heating system to drop, and has fixed it.
Hallelujah, I can take off my padded jacket now, both literally and metaphorically speaking.