Stygian

When you go out in the middle of the day and your automatic headlights come on, I think you're entitled to say that it's gloomy. "A real Tupperware day," said R, referencing Guy Garvey's statement that living in Manchester often feels like being inside a Tupperware box with the lid on. 

I went up to Hillers in the hope of a bird, but the situation in the woodland clearing there seems to be getting steadily worse, and I didn't take a single photo of the small number of birds there were. Instead I walked around the show garden, which is still well in flower, and snapped a few things that caught my eye. A birding lens maybe wasn't the ideal tool in this Stygian light, but a friend of mine refers to the Canon EF 100-500 as "the lazy man's macro", and actually in the circumstances it did pretty well.

The hoverfly in the middle of this Japanese anemone is a female Platycheirus - probably P. albimanus.

R: C6, D9.