Last night I began reading ‘Her Brilliant Career – Ten Extraordinay Women of the Fifties’ by Rachel Cooke.
Early this morning I received an e-mail from Alex Schneideman attaching rebalanced copies of my two historic photos from yesterday. They were so pleasing that I substituted them for my own versions in that day’s post. The experience made me determined to crack a problem with my Epson V750 PRO scanner, which should have restored the colour balance, a facility which had mysteriously disappeared. After much trial and error I discovered that the auto exposure function, without which certain others would not come into play, had been disengaged. I can now sort out the colour again, but haven’t yet managed to resuscitate the dust removal feature. I have also found ‘levels’ to which Alex alerted me, in the iPhoto edit function.
Not that I particularly needed it, light rain refreshed me on my walk down to Football Green, up through the grounds of Minstead Lodge, and back home via Seamans Lane and Running Hill.
In and around the village and forest, no doubt as a response to the increase in animal deaths on the road, there have appeared a number of small laminated posters warning drivers not to kill ponies and horses carrying people. These, affixed to gateposts and wayside trees, are all no larger than A4 and cannot be read from moving vehicles. I don’t know how practical it would be, but it seems to me that we need something about the size, and in the simple, spare, language, of the yellow Animal Deaths warnings on such as Roger Penny Way.
A field beyond the village shop contains the only oak currently completely devoid of foliage. 
This one has been naked as long as we have lived here. Probably because it is dead. Further along, a shower of orange leaves from a live specimen descended like a shimmering macrame screen behind the deep green back of a double decker bus. The stout branch immediately above the cascade imitated the action of a seesaw. It had been clouted by the vehicle. Maybe the driver had lost his way.
A gaggle of geese could be discerned through a gap in a beach hedge bordering the track up to Minstead Lodge.
After lunch I changed the colour balance of those ‘posterity’ pictures I have already posted. We then produced a Christmas card which it would not be sensible to reproduce here, because I don’t expect the prospective recipients would really appreciate a preview.
This evening Jackie produced a succulent sausage casserole, with mashed potato and swede, and crisp, colourful vegetables of which my Uncle Ben would definitely disapprove. In 1983, when I first ran the Bolton Marathon, Matthew and I went up to stay with my uncle and Auntie Ellen. Ben bemoaned the catering firm that had just taken over his works canteen. He complained that, because they had been trained in nutrition the staff didn’t cook the veg. Now aged 92, my uncle is of the generation that believed vegetables were not palatable unless they had had the life, the colour, and the nutrients, boiled out of them and into the water which would then be thrown away..
Our cauliflower was white; our brussels green; and our carrots orange; not grey, brown, and yellow. With them Jackie drank a Palastri spritzer and I some Roc des Chevaliers bordeaux superieur 2011.
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