One perfect rose

I know it's only two days since I was celebrating the fact that the solitary bees could be emerging just a couple of months from now, but I do find it worrying that my Iceberg rose is still flowering in the last week of December. The name has started to look uncomfortably ironic.

This image would have been sharper if I'd bothered to squelch back to the house for a macro lens, but it was raining steadily (for about the fourth day straight) and I felt that I was quite wet enough by this point, so I went with what was already on the camera, which was the 24-70. I'd been using that to take some winter tree images down in the wild garden, but a combination of the rain and the fact that I wasn't prepared to lie on sodden ground to look up into the canopy made it hard to get the perspective I'd wanted. I do quite like the shot I've posted to the extras, which is a view up into the branches of our ancient cider apple tree. These were pruned and thinned about a month ago by the tree surgeon, because the tree - whose trunk is now hollow - is inclined to collapse under the weight of its fruit if we let it grow unchecked.

Speaking of things growing unchecked, R and I are now living on an unholy diet of Christmas leftovers, because neither of us can abide good food being wasted. Embarrassment prevents me from listing all the things I've troughed through today, but the highlight was a rather civilised lunch of cheese and biscuits with Chablis. Civilised, but not a good habit to be getting into, especially as I don't usually eat lunch at all. Tomorrow I will mostly be avoiding the bathroom scales.