Favourite cushion

Today was wet until mid-afternoon, so I found myself looking around the house for pink details to see if I could follow up yesterday's flower collage. That will take a bit longer, but here in pink and pale blue is a detail from my favourite cushion cover, an impulse buy from Ikea many years ago.

Little of note has happened here today. I did some household jobs, helped J to think about next steps in her current animation project, which will form part of a group film, and this afternoon joined a small Camera Club group on Zoom for photographic chat and sharing. Later, as the sky lightened, I did a bit of much needed clearing in the fruit bed, trying to remove enough tall nettles to gain access to the ripening raspberries. There's so much to do - it's in a desperate mess.

I've just been scanning the numbers from the French exit poll. There's clearly a huge collective sigh of relief that the left alliance and the centre have both, thanks to massive tactical voting and electoral pacts to avoid splitting the centre-left vote, managed to amass more votes than Marine Le Pen's far right. Rallye Nationale will still be strongly represented and, with no group having overall control, it's likely to prove difficult to form a government, but for the moment a populist far right government has been averted. I've been remembering the 2002 French presidential election, when Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie, leading the Front National, unexpectedly came second in the first round, leading to a second round in which he confronted the Republican candidate Jacques Chirac. The socialist party, whose candidate Jospin was his main political rival, and many smaller parties, all called on their members to vote for Chirac, enabling him to win with 82% of the vote. I'm relieved at today's result, but no less concerned about the growing strength of the far right across Europe.