Late yesterday afternoon, we tried to print some lovely photographs Flo has taken of Ellie. This proved impossible, because the colours were very wrong. This is not a problem I have encountered before. I tried cleaning various settings and even changing inks, to no avail. All this takes a long time when you don’t know what you are doing.
A skip was delivered just after Martin arrived this morning, for four hours of which he raised a considerable sweat on this, the coldest day of the month so far – indeed prompting me to don socks for the first time since May. He works steadily and without a break, except to take the drinks we ply him with.
He prised, bashed, and dug out the solid lumps and loose hard core material;
loaded them into a barrow which he wheeled repeatedly along the Kitchen Path, up the Brick Path, to the skip placed half way along the Back Drive.
The filling of the skip was not the easiest of the stages.
By the end of the morning much of the levelling had been completed.
When I had begun to photograph the work I realised that I had probably left my 35 mm. lens in the car. I discovered it in its saturated case under the passenger seat of the Modus, clearly not waterproofed from the recent storms. I could barely see anything in the viewfinder and the pictures produced were decidedly murky. Very soon everything was fogged up, and I left it alone for the day in the hope that the condensation would evaporate. These pictures were all produced with a 55 mm. lens. By the end of the day all seemed fine.
We then visited Wessex Photographic in Lymington where we sought Luke’s advice on the murky photographs. He made some suggestions and offered to have a look at my set-up if we were unsuccessful.
We dined this evening on another of Jackie’s wholesome chicken stewp meals with which she drank Hoegaarden and I drank Gran Selone Premium, Italian red wine.
Now I am going to watch the Football World Cup match between England and Wales.