The Firth Viaduct.

I went down towards the Penicuik/Dalkeith railway path as I knew that there was a large bank covered in primroses nearby. I carried on down the hill looking for the best specimens and realised that the viaduct carrying the path might make a useful later blip and took a few test shots. I found the primroses I thought I wanted and begun to set up the tripod and took off my glasses to check through the electronic viewfinder.

At this point I must say that my distance vision has been excellent since I had surgery for a detached retina. The story goes that with every detachment repair operation you get a free cataract and with cataract surgery you get the opportunity to have your eye-sight corrected - in  the affected eye. I then elected to have the vision in  the other eye corrected with a procedure called "clear lens replacement." It is exactly the same as the cataract treatment but without the cataract. I hope you're keeping up. The effect of this is that you completely lose any ability to focus close up that age hasn't managed to destroy and, therefore can't see to adjust camera settings or find and remove small blades of grass and other detritus that spoils the photograph unless I am wearing my spectacles.

It was at this stage that I started looking for them. I found the bent frame quite quickly, it took considerably longer to find the lenses; straightening the frame and re-uniting the three items wasn't possible without a selection of small engineering tools. The combination of trying to find specimens that had not suffered slug damage, doing the "gardening" and adjusting the camera settings while trying to retain my footing on a steep bank proved to be a problem and none of the flower pictures were satisfactory.

Thus, you have the viaduct - crying out for a dog walker or a cyclist to give a sense of scale and human interest. The primroses will now have to wait until next year unless I can find a pristine patch.