cemetary hunting ripeness

 Now for more holiday snaps. They will appear here in the next few days as I continue to go through them. Here is another dove this time resting on a tomb in the cemetery at Sitges.

From the balcony I set about reviving the series of photographs of shadows which occurred almost by chance last year when I reversed shots I had taken of people walking on the beach or  sea front so that the shadow assumed more significance than the substance. Pedestrians and dogs there are in plenty passing below, but I am looking for a cyclist and his shadow. I hang on in the same way I suppose that  a wild life photographer hopes for a particular animal to come to a watering hole where he lies in wait.

At the Farmers' Market this morning I buy some apples from a stall, where I young man offers me apples. I ask for the crispest. "Cox's," he says. " I tell him that local farms in the old days would not think of picking Cox's until until October and preferably until there had been a frost. "When I was a child," I say, " they used to shake Cox's to see if they rattled and only then, would they be regarded as ripe." "Funny," he says, "there was a man here the other day who said that when they rattled they weren't eating." It occurs to me that the young man at the stall and his previous interlocutor will almost certainly never have bitten into a Cox's apple that has ripened on the tree, and tasted as the juice spurts out, its magical blend of musty sweetness and acidity.