Exaggerated definition

The day started with me trying to identify a replacement Gerebit actuator mechanism for two toilets. Three years in and I’m finally getting around to the important things.

Then there was wood getting and stacking on the balcony once the fire was lit. I finally worked out why the fire races away like a blast furnace when the grate is exposed: the air regulator on the back is stuck open.

Again after three years and endless worry about this I simply looked with a torch and saw the problem. Five minutes later I’d constructed a crude zinc fencing wire spring to hold the regulator closed.

Why didn’t it occur to me that the regulator might have been knackered for three years? I’ve changed all the fire door seals but never gone to the source of the problem. Did I think it was my fault, my failing when in fact it is just a terrible piece of regulator design?

Then to collect chestnuts and inevitably walnuts - where the result, the harvest, comes a long way second to the process.

As I came up the incline I saw the rainbow. I snapped away, got the bigger camera out, told The Boss to come see.

Later still I wandered into the woods. They are so silent, so other worldly, so enclosing that they shift the terms of the game of being human.

Reminds me of the time in NZ when I drove for hours and hours from Auckland north west to see a remnant Kauri forest. I was there alone, a cyclone coming in off the Tasman Sea. I was reduced to a crushed and wondrous smallness, compacted and surrounded into my own insignificance and vulnerability. Huge trees way above me swaying in the growing storm.

The Covid blues are biting hard, the anxiety, the ever changing worseness, the panicky, jittery anticipation of all this again.

No wonder I’m doctoring my photos for contrast and definition, for something definite and solid. For something that is not a treacherous slippery slope.