Signs and Wonders

Red kite (thanks, Chris) flying over our Land, as they often do, but fiendishly difficult to get in a photo - as I zoom in and focus, they move, of course, and then, zoomed, can't find it again. Anyway, this is what they look like, they fly so high. Saw this one emit a stream of light-coloured liquid, glad I wasn't underneath.

Reading H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald. For some reason, never appealed to me, but ran out of books, so started reading it, and wow. Her Dad (who she is grieving) was a Fleet Street photographer. She tells about one winter night when he came home disheartened; he'd pointed out the sky to a small boy playing in the park, "a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun's light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire." He'd said, "Look up, look at that. Remember you saw that. You'll never see it again." But the boy wasn't interested and that baffled him. And now that her Dad is gone, Helen begins to see "How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again." But her father captured them in photographs.

And isn't that what we try to do as Blippers?

Otherwise, most of the day setting up for a General Assembly I was to translate for, and trying to get the mic to work on a fancy new headset I bought, to no avail, I thought. Then, when I logged on, lo and behold, it worked.

Gratefuls:
- that the bloomin' mic worked in the end, still don't know what I did to make it happen
- that the meeting went well, and was only about an hour instead of the two they'd predicted; simultaneous translation in less than ideal circumstances is exhausting
- that Mike has made progress in finding another agent after our insurers suddenly told us they can't insure our UK house after Brexit because we live in the EU!

And please could you remember Julia, accompanying three women in labour seriously unwell with Covid? It's definitely getting worse...