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| life or death |
Another little experiment today...
As I'd arrived home from work some 40 minutes earlier, I'd noticed that the stand of daffodils that bloom every Spring on the verge outside our garden are really opening up now.
We live at the edge of the foothill that runs along the North of Red Horse Vale, with Edge hill running parallel, a couple of miles to the South...I suppose if we lived those couple of miles south, we'd live at the foot of the Edgehill!
(aythengyew, I'm here all week...all year, in fact!)
Fun fact...the opening battle of the English Civil War was fought across the plain we live on the northern slopes of, in 1642. The centre of the battle was a couple of miles away over the fields, but by all accounts it was a bit of a disorganised brawl, with 1,000 soldiers killed and 3,000 more injured - there must have been a few of those up this way!
Bonus fun fact...up on the ridge above us was the old RAF Gaydon, whose airstrip, which runs for 2-3 miles from Gaydon to Kineton, was used at one time as a base for some of Britain's nuclear capable V-Bomber planes in the 50's and 60's...it's now a test-track used by Jaguar/Landrover and Aston Martin.
Anyway, the point is that the cold air seems to fall down the hill from up near the test track, and sits on the two little cottages in the corner of the arable field where we live...it's always a degree or two colder here.
This is borne out by the temperature gauges in our cars, which often show the temperature start to tick up by 0.5C within 100m or so of our little lane, in either direction, and as much as 2C by the time you get to Gaydon.
It's also borne out by the late flowering of our daffodils, which are spread liberally around our garden, and up and down the verge outside our garden too. I've seen daffodils flowering all over the place for a couple of weeks or more, around the rest of Warwickshire, but it's only in the last few days that they've really started to bloom here.
Of course, having noticed them and thought what a nice photo op they'd make, I promptly forgot all about it until getting home from walking Jazz, by which time it was nearly 7pm, and fully dark.
So I thought I'd see how the flowers responded to flash photography, and whether it might make an interesting and unusual shot. This is only about 15-20% of the daffodils that make up this stand, but it is the section that's flowering the most densely.
I like the effect of the colourful flowers against the dark night...I think it looks bright and lively.
Anna, on the other hand, thinks it looks like a cemetery!
This might seem somewhat bleak, on first glance...but this seems entirely a propos, today of all days...
An hour before this photo was taken, I was on the phone to my lil' bro' Jools. Our Big Sister Debs died in 2004, after battling the Big C for a couple of years. Today was her birthday, and she would have been 52.
Jools told me he was just picking up some flowers from both of us, and taking a trip to Debs' grave, in a natural meadow cemetery near Coventry.
So it was very much with Debs and cemetery in mind that I took the photo!
And Anna reads me so eerily well that she managed to glean cemetery from the resulting image, despite the fact that I'd uttered not a single word about any of that to her...spooky!
Still love you and miss you, Debs...
:*-(
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