Stirling

Why would you want to be anywhere else?

Actually I would, but if you didn't have 15,000 words to write about poetry from 1790-1901, you really wouldn't choose anywhere else.

The snow came down here several days later than it did in Suffolk, but at last, it has come. First on the mountains, but now in the streets. With it, it brings birds: Fieldfares patrolling the streets of housing estates, Redwings in the trees at university, a Nuthatch tapping the bark of the campus Yew. Up Dumyat a pair of Stonechats stoically weathered the frost and snow and the bitter bitter north-easterly wind. 400 metres up, the only thing the wind passes before it passes through you are the snow-covered peaks of the highland mountains.

And still the snow keeps on falling but not accumulating for much longer than an afternoon. Without the time to do much walking or birding, photography and its challenges take over. Every non-Australian seems to have snow at the moment, so how do you make a photo stand out?

Streetlights and fiddling with shutter-speeds is a start. It's a funner form of photography not knowing exactly what will come out when you press the shutter and wait.

When the snow goes I'll have even less of an excuse to spend my time with binoculars and cameras as I attempt to crack on with my dissertation. My favourite form of blogging, of long words and longer paragraphs* will be retired in favour of photos, short paragraphs, and possibly old bits of writing from elsewhere.

 

Airthrey Loch, above. The Wallace monument from the road to Cambuskenneth, below.

See you in April! (If I survive.)

*The undergraduate curse.