Silver birches

The early morning rain soon gave way to a brighter day with some blue skies, but it was rather cold today. Gavin and I had a brisk walk with Xena to warm up and it was lovely to be out in that cold fresh air.

Today the little elves delivered our Christmas tree - the local scout group who we ordered our tree from promised that it would be delivered by the 'little elves' and as we were out when it came we cannot attest to that! It is a beautiful tree, so we spent the afternoon putting it up and decorating it - and of course sweeping up all the pine needles that fall off when you do the decorating.

It's beginning to look like Christmas now with the outside lights up, the tree and decorations up and the house starting to fill up. Meriel arrived today, she is part of Luke's bubble and had a Covid test before she came so we are fine with this arrangement. We have chosen to be careful and the children respect that. I think if everyone is sensible over these Christmas holidays things should go well, although you only have to look at restaurants and see the tables of six adults of a similar age eating indoors all pretending to be from the same household to know that most people are not bothered about being careful. We probably will have another lockdown in January but with the vaccine inoculations starting this week it should help, although of course it will be many months before the majority of the population will get it. Of course the anti-vaxxers will hinder the process of trying to get herd immunity through the vaccine program, such a pity there are so many ignorant people out there who think they know more than the scientists.

We finished watching The Queen's Gambit last night, we both enjoyed it very much - Netflix have a big budget for their own productions and they are usually so well filmed with wonderful sets and costumes. There were some amazing hotels seen in this series. 

I liked the colours of the sky seen through the birch trees and so tried an ICM on the scene to show the colours.