Asparagus

Many thanks to everyone who wished me well for last night's performance of Messiah  - you're lovely people. I thoroughly enjoyed myself: a few things went wrong, as they usually do, but the orchestra and soloists were great, and on the whole I don't think the choir did too badly. Most importantly the audience seemed to enjoy it, and even the conductor smiled a few times! It was also really nice that Technophobe and LooseCanon, who are both singers, came to hear the performance, and took the trouble to fight their way through the scrum at the end to say hello.

Today I've been feeling tired and anticlimactic, and with the weather outside positively biblical I wasn't really very inspired to pick up the camera. I did think about trying to get some droplet shots, but having read up on the technique I wasn't sure I had everything I needed - I certainly don't own one of these kits, and at that price I'm not going to be getting one any time soon...

Luckily when I was deciding which vegetables to serve with lunch I noticed how interesting asparagus is, and was suddenly inspired to put the meal on hold and fetch the extension tubes - CH can confirm that it doesn't take much to put me off cooking! This was shot with the 21mm tube on a 50mm lens.

In case anyone is lifting an eyebrow at my fancy ways I should probably point out that we live in the Vale of Evesham, where it's almost compulsory to serve asparagus with every meal. The locals call it "sparrowgrass" - pronounced "spahrergrarse" - and the local paper (I kid you not) thinks that stories like this belong on the front page. Child One once described the Evesham Journal as being entirely asparagus-centric, but that really is an overstatement - in the middle of summer they do a lot of items on plums as well.

Having caught up on everyone's journals in the middle of the week, a few days of rushing hither and yon has put me behind again - but I plan to spend tomorrow slonked in front of the computer, finding out what you've all been up to. Right now though, I'm off to play Poldark  bingo!