Mrs M wanted to do some Christmas shopping and announced that Birmingham was where it was at. Birmingham would not have been my place of choice, but then shopping would not be my activity of choice either. Nonetheless, the city centre struck me as somewhere I might weild a camera alongside thousands of people inching their way through the bottlenecks induced by the numerous stalls of the German Christmas Market that comes along this time of year. And I was not wrong. With my litle pocket camera at hip or chest height I moved among the crowds, clicking away the instant the lens might see a way through.

This shot, with many others, was taken as we squeezed along to the the new library. I had never been to the new library before and I thoroughly enjoyed the large open interior and the escalators that travel high into the roof space.

I was still glad to see the back of Birmingham and felt thoroughly exhausted by the experience.

In the afternoon I took the car in the direction of Wootton Wawen, and parked up at the lay-by north of the village where the Monarch's Way joins the roadside. From here I took a path of mud churned over by bikes and horses, soon crossing the Stratford upon Avon canal, and continued over rising ground to the edge of Austy Wood. It was during this early stage of my walk that the light was at its most brilliant. Sunshine streaked in from the south west bathing everything in warm gold, and along here a serious contender for today's blip was a collection of oak leaves atop a broad mass of bracket funghi astride a block of wood.

From the top of the wood the path dropped down to Cutler's Farm and then bent north for Kington Grange. On reaching Kington the sun had already dropped below the horizon and the light faded swiftly. Leaving Kington I heard long before I saw, a man with a whistle amid doggie training.

The course from Kington was in the direction of the canal. I had imagined with the path delineated at the canalside, that the path would be a towpath. It was not. The path hung within the boundary of Preston Hall Farm for another mile. By when I reached the farmhouse drive all around was dark. My only illumination was from the sky reflected in the canal or from the mists gathering in hollows. I took the canal path, now on the western bank. A slippery muddy affair, so close to the canal's water, my chief concern was to avoid sliding into the watercourse. By when I reached the Monarch's Way my guide for the course of the path was the black emptiness fringed by lit sedge tops on either side.