Lots of small-time organisms growing on a wall.
Admin1 is reading Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson, the fifth book in his highly impressive and eerily prophetic Fractured Europe series. This is from the first volume, published in 2014:
The early years of the twenty-first century brought a symphony of slamming doors. Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers — and, of course, GWOT, the the ongoing Global War On Terror — had brought back passport and immigration checks of varying stringency, depending on whose frontiers you were crossing. Then the Xian Flu had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the disease; it had killed […] between twenty and forty million people in Europe alone. It had also effectively killed Schengen and kicked the already somewhat rickety floor out from under the EU.
Europe in Autumn, p27
This was written pre-Brexit, pre-COVID. There’s an interesting (if somewhat academic) analysis of the series in relation to Brexit here.
Admin2 is reading Babel by RF Kuang, but gave up halfway through because it was so stupendously bossy; with the author and all her characters lecturing the reader and each other on linguistics, racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism etc. To be fair, it was set in a university (an alternative Oxford in Victorian times) so some characters were lecturers, but still. Show, not tell.
We ate roast chicken and squidgy chocolate pear pudding again and scored 11.5 on the GSQ. Bob was quizmaster and did pretty well.
Admin1 is reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley, a thoroughly enjoyable story of a Victorian telegraph clerk who gets mixed up in Irish bombings, Japanese imperial politics and the search for the 
Nature’s graffiti.
The road is long and now the sun is setting. What lovely pictures they are. Here is the last one.
Admin1 is reading A Memory for Murder by Anne Holt. Admin2 is reading Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, in a damp wrinkly copy that got caught in the rain yesterday. 
Those waving fields of elephant grass in the hot sunshine is a contrast to the cold wet miserable weather in these parts.
Happy Winter Solstice everybody.
Admin1 is rereading The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett. Admin2 is rereading The New Confessions by William Boyd.
‘Tis the season for nuts (see UK politics) and this year the council is asking citizens to 
The leaves are turning, and this one has a spangle of glittering dewdrops. Winter is coming but the sun is shining and our solar panels have made more money this year than in any year before.
Nature’s little helicopter, floating silently before this excessively complicated construction of petals, frilly skirt, dome, pillar, sphere, hammers, nails and curly springs.
Spring is well under way with little suns everywhere evolving into ghostly moons.
Somebody spent ages going over these blooms with a highlighter and felt-tip pen — or maybe they just grew that way.
Spring blossoms in a tasteful design, suitable for curtains and similar household textiles.
Municipal plantings coming up.
Actuall not a pollock but a very distorted shubunkin.
Droplets on wavy glass, saturated to the max.
Autumn’s bounty of inedible chestnuts.
A virus-shaped chestnut pod collected by Admin1 on the way to an unscheduled spot of work.
P
Moss feeling the joys of spring.
