It’s been a quiet weekend here at Bigland towers as the pair of us have been taking it easy at home – although our definition of easy may not accord with everyone else’s. What neither of us have been doing is travelling far. I spent much of Saturday playing catch-up with picture editing in order to ensure I don’t get overwhelmed as I’ve more time away next week. I’d planned to have a lie-in but I was fully awake by 06:30 so thought “sod it” and retreated into the office with a coffee to spend several hours cataloguing pictures before Dawn woke up. Whilst doing so I was kept amused by perusing the right-wing press who’re clearly having a bit of a melt-down over the Lib-Dems winning the safe Tory seat of Amersham and Chesham. They’ve gone into overdrive to try and blame the result on HS2 passing throught the constituency – anything to divert attention from the real reasons, which is that the citizenry are becoming heartily pissed-off with the kakistocracy of Boris Johnson and his chums. When even staunch Tories are saying ‘enough’s enough’ you know there’s trouble in store for the Government. It will be every interesting to see where this narrative goes if next time a safe Tory seat falls it’s nowhere near HS2!

The weather’s not been that hot and we’ve had some welcome rain, so I’ve not had to spend ages watering the garden which has saved me some time to divert to other things. Even so, neither of managed to find time to get out for a walk so we ended up driving to the Moorcock Inn in order to get some fresh air and have a drink in their beer garden. It was a lovely break, sitting and admiring the view across the valley whilst chatting with Aimee and some of her staff. Leaving all too soon we headed back down to Sowerby Bridge to brave the supermarket in order to pick up a load of shopping. It’s father’s day on Sunday so Dee’s going to be cooking a meal for the four of us over at her folk’s house in Huddersfield and we needed the ingredients for a chicken dinner with home-made (Gluten free) Apple Pie. I wasn’t on cooking duty on Saturday evening, instead Dee rustled up a cracking meal of Plaice fillets with mushy peas and red potato wedges which we scoffed before settling down to watch an escapist bit of nonsense on Amazon Prime. We chose the 2017 film “Wonder Woman” which was a bit of visual fun but hardly intellectually challenging although that’s not always a bad thing, some times you just want to be entertained. Such was our Saturday night in the Shire, not exactly the ‘rock and roll’ lifestyle but enjoyable all the same!

One of the reasons I was so keep to try and get my latest tranche of pictures edited and on display is that scanning old slides has had to take a backseat recently. I’ve several hundred already done that are just waiting to be edited. My latest picture of the day is a sample. I took this shot of fishing boats at sunset at Labuanbajo on the amazing Indonesian Island of Flores on the 5th September 1992. I was here for several days using it as a base to explore the famous Komodo Island – home of the dragons before catching a series of buses across the rugged island on appalling roads to get to the amazing volcanic coloured crater lakes of Kelimutu near Moni. Happy days – and amazing sights!

I’m still determined to get all these old slides scanned this year, although at this rate that could be a bit of a challenge. Time will tell…

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