Autumnal sweepings

A great big thank you to Val over at Poppy's Place who has given me this award (about a fortnight ago - sorry for being so slow). Pop over and have a look. It's worth going back a couple of months, there's a huge pile of pictures from her recent trip to China.

Spotted these two ducks getting a hand across the road in Kirkcudbright.

Looks like they were of for a small wager on this years annual duck race on the river.

I saved two pounds this year by arriving after the tote had closed.

In Edinburgh the National Museum of Scotland on Chamber Street has opened fully again with some fairly serious rearrangements and improvements, so we went for a wee wander around it. Here's a small and very arbitrary selection of exhibits.

Certainly their leopard is looking a bit more spruced up.

Getting an aeroplane into a confined space like this is a bit of a Chinese puzzle.

A rather delightful vase, engraved by Danish glass maker Per Lutken (I looked him up and nothing else of his on the net looks much like this. There's a chap called Edward Hald has a few things in the case and he looks much nearer to this as far as I can see. Anyone want to have a surf and see what you think). These swallows waiting to fly south are quite appropriate for the time of year.

In the main hall of the museum is an old lighthouse lamp - the lens is cleverly cut for maximum light distribution but I was more impressed by the fact that somewhere in the facets there was always a selection of rainbows.

In the city art centre there was a wonderful exhibition by David Mach (you may remember he appeared in this blog earlier in the year with his match head of Robert Burns - it's about half way down here) Called precious Light it celebrates 400 years of the King James Bible. Downstairs (where photos were allowed) there were three quite brilliant crucifixes made - he made the figures out of coat hangers. I saw a bust made of coat hangers by him in Wolverhampton but the quality of my photo of it is really poor. On the upstairs levels are a large number of excellent collages based on parts of the bible (and a few of his famous match heads). Go here for a better idea. In one hall David and his assistants continue to work on collages - it's good to see how they are produced. Plenty of time to see it yet if you're in Edinburgh - highly recommended- it's on till 16th October.

I'm afraid that the Summer is over in our part of the world already, although Autumn is a season with it's own charms (if we could go straight from Spring to Autumn and back to Spring, I wouldn't complain too much). Still, this being Scotland, the weather can be changeable and Summer made a small return for a few hours while I went for a wander round about Threave Gardens, where I managed to photograph this character. it stopped at my feet for about 30 seconds.

Driving down from Dunoon, I had noticed that the sunset was reflected in mirror like surface of a distant loch. I thought I would stop and try and capture the image at Loch Ken where it's quite easy to get to. When I got there, the surface of the water wasn't as smooth as I had expected........

...........for a reason

Back at work now for a few weeks - time to catch up on a tunes.

Most of you who have heard me sing songs, know my repertoire is mostly of the miserable variety. As you can see, I don't take this approach with the mandolin.