pb150031

Here is another moon-shot for Shawn. I think the rest of you have seen it before, but she hasn't - unless she has trawled back through about 4 year's worth of posts.

The most interesting thing about this picture is how and where it was taken. I had just bought a reconditioned Olympus zoom camera (sent all the way from the USA) and was standing outside the pub at the beginning of twilight. I pointed the camera at this moon at full zoom and pressed the shutter. I wasn't even leaning against a lamp post. It does have a primitive stabiliser on it, and this photo is cropped (by about 75% to get rid of the chimney stacks), but it still impressed me as a cheap camera.

I dreamt about you last night, Shawn. I was in a strange, large and seedy bar near the sea somewhere and you arrived (as your young self) to warn me that your family were outside and a couple of them were going to be unfriendly or even hostile to me.

A group of about ten American people marched into the bar, and the ones who you said were going to be hostile were a late middle-aged black couple. They both greeted me like a long-lost friend - him warmly shaking my hand, her embracing me with both arms and both of them smiling affectionately. We got on immediately, but the rest of the people just stood around sullenly near the wall, ignoring me.

We decided that the pub was so nasty and the weather was so good that we should take our drinks outside.

We went out into the warm sun and stood on a large pebble beach with no visible sea nearby, and looked at a glittering city skyline in the far distance - the other side of the Atlantic, I think. It looked like New York.

It was a very good dream.