Christmas Food...

This Christmas, the kitchen abounded with all sorts of interesting food. The fridge bulged for the first time in months; the drinks cabinet creaked under the weight of its exotic cargo (Welsh whisky - I kid you not), like the sea-soaked timbers of a pirate ship. And, in the finest tradition, we drank, ate, and made merry.

The cats liked it too: they enjoyed very much their scraps of duck and roast beef, as well as their own little can of celebratory tuna, which came, this week, with no hidden foul-tasting pills, the way it normally comes.

And they seemed perfectly, perfectly content. But, last night, I noticed that Fran had an air of conspiracy about her:



Yes, she alone had made a precise inventory of the Christmas supermarket shop. And she alone had noticed that something very large had been stowed away in the deep freeze, left uncooked and uneaten...

Not just for Christmas...

I'd officially like to take this opportunity to welcome young Seraphina to the household. She's a very, very little guide-dog, and she has her own lead and everything. Her favourite hobbies are drawing with Swiss crayons, revelling in Alice Meynell's poetry, and nattering away to Winnie Bear in the early hours of the morning. Barrabas likes her very much, as do I, as does Sandy Dog.

Happy Feet

For the last few days, I've not been taking any photographs at all. Rather, I've been restoring and digitizing slides from the early 1960s, taken by a member of the British Antartic Survey.

The slides were found in an attic. They had mould and condensation damage which cleaned up very nicely with some strangely addictive PEC-12 Film Emulsion Cleaner and, once they were remounted in archive quality slide mounts by Gepe, scanned in with a trusty Microtek scanner borrowed off a friend, and post-processed for those particularly stubborn bits of dust, they looked rather nice. Or, they should look rather nice by the time I finish. So far, the project's taken £70 and 30 hours. I've still got 110 pictures to zip under the all-seeing magnifying glass of Photoshop but cleaning snow is fun and, somehow, appropriate for this time of the year.

Something tells me, though, that I wouldn't have even thought of being so thorough had I not seen Happy Feet last week - and then picked up this slide...