Melksham (Friday 10th February 2023)

After today's shopping trip I rummaged up to the boat house in search of swans. The light was already going (1642 hr) and the first ten shots, which were more general shots of the river, had to be deleted. I saw first the swan that is displaying, and then the other swan glided in from a tributary. I assumed they were a pair but looking at the pictures now I think they are both male swans, perhaps of pre-breeding age.
As I was only carrying one camera I brought out the big guns: my Pentax full-frame K1 with the 1.4 converter.

L.
Friday 10.2.2023 (2024 hr)

Blip #3807 (#3557 + 250 archived blips taken 27.8.1960-18.3.2010)
Consecutive Blip #000
Blips/Extras In 2023 #017/265 + #005/100 Extras
Day #4703 (1155 gaps from 26.3.2010)
LOTD #2948 (#2788 + 160 in archived blips)

Taken with Pentax K-1 Mark II and Pentax HD P-D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6ED DC WR lens and HD Pentax-DA AF Rear Converter 1.4x AW

Melksham series
Swans series
River Avon (Bristol) series

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Radiohead - Climbing Up The Walls (Remastered 2017)(recorded September 1996-March 1997, St Catherine's Court, Bath)
C’s musician son Dan was playing this in his studio while I was there on Wednesday. It is from OK Computer. 
Climbing Up the Walls – described by Melody Maker as "monumental chaos" – is layered with a string section, ambient noise and repetitive, metallic percussion. The string section, composed by Jonny Greenwood and written for 16 instruments, was inspired by modern classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Greenwood said, "I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like Eleanor Rigby, which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past 30 years." Select described Yorke's distraught vocals and the atonal strings as "Thom's voice dissolving into a fearful, blood-clotted scream as Jonny whips the sound of a million dying elephants into a crescendo". For the lyrics, Yorke drew from his time as an orderly in a mental hospital during the Care in the Community policy of deinstitutionalising mental health patients, and a New York Times article about serial killers. He said:
    This is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing. I used to work in a mental hospital around the time that Care in the Community started, and we all just knew what was going to happen. And it's one of the scariest things to happen in this country, because a lot of them weren't just harmless ... It was hailing violently when we recorded this. It seemed to add to the mood. - Wikipedia