Morning madness

I've not really been out again today, apart from the trot down to the supermarket for some essentials; the cold that's plagued me is still making me feel rather feeble. But when I was just out of my bed this morning, the sun came into the bedroom all the way to the back wall, and I felt so cheered by this proof that the Spring was coming that I took this. (I'll remind you that in midwinter the sun rises too far downriver to shine into my house at the front).

So this photo? Well, there's a bit of the sunlight showing on the left. Reflected in the glass is my bedroom window, and through it you can see the east bay promenade and beyond it the Firth of Clyde. You can also see my hand, the pinkie elegantly elevated as though I were a lady taking tea. And the picture itself is of the Matterhorn, a photo I took from outside the Hörnli Hut probably 20 years ago. I've been obsessed by this mountain since my teens; there is a photo taken by my father on his pre-war honeymoon which he gave me when we married and which has been on my wall ever since. But because I've been there, I know that the iconic shape is foreshortened when you start climbing, and I am aware of how much blacker the mountain was in the 1990s than it had been in the 1930s, or even in 1965, when I'd been there before. I used to draw the outline of it from memory - my school text books were full of little doodles of the Matterhorn.

Enough reminiscing. But that's why this bizarrely bad photo made it into my Blip for today ...