Black-headed gulls hanging in the wind at Cramond, Edinburgh, on Christmas Eve. With the black dots behind their eyes, they looked like they were painted by Picasso. It took longer than usual to identify these with Google, because they look so different in summer (guess how), but the RSPB came to the rescue.
Speaking of which, I didn’t mention here that a couple of my limericks (“Ode by a Nightingale” and “The Blackberry”) have ended up in the RSPB Anthology of Wildlife Poetry, edited by fellow OEDILFer Celia Warren. You can read them here, of course, or even listen to one of them here, but in the book you get illustrations and proper paper and hard covers and everything. It’s a wonderful volume; I felt honoured and a little overawed to be keeping company with the likes of Ted Hughes, Tennyson and foreword-writer Andrew Motion.
Of course, my limerick-writing is something else that fizzled out in 2011, with only a few bursts of writing them all year. Maybe this blog project will help revive that, too.
2 January 2012