Lloyd about life

Perhaps I should start a new blog giving photos of picturesque Spanish castles at night. We recently spent a week in Peñiscola, a couple of hours up the coast from Valencia. It was a great week, and has a beautful old castle, which looks great lit up at night. Here’s the photo!

I love variety. I did think of giving my blog a name with ‘variety’ in it, however the domains I searched for were all taken. Variety in work can help to keep it interesting and exciting. It also means there’s often something new to enjoy and learn about. And I’m not the only one who enjoys variety. My daughter does too, for example at tea time she likes the variety of drinking out of every cup that’s on the table! There’s another reason I like variety, but I’ll leave that for a later post.

My final college essays are now all written and handed in - hooray! This meant that we could all go out for a day trip on Saturday to the nearby town of Newent. There is a nice, small lake in the town. Just going round it, I was struck by the variety in the beauty of nature that we could see there. Nothing particular unusual or outstanding, but beautiful and tremendously varied all the same. The photos below are just a taste of what we could enjoy.

Our little daughter loves ducks at the moment, and there were many of them around of all sizes.

There were plenty of squirrels around too, but photographing them is more difficult. This one was up a tree, and needed a flash to make it light enough. This meant some bad animal eye glare which I’ve had to try and artificially touch up. Hope it looks OK all the same.

It’s impossible to capture all the beauty of moving water - I could watch it for ages. The portion of one photo below just illustrates an element of it, produced by a fountain in the middle of the lake.

Here’s another photo from our time in Spain. This is another of my favourites, but for different reasons. It was taken outside a cafe in the square by the cathedral in Valencia.

English spelling is difficult, and not only do I admire the bar’s owners for providing a full English breakfast, but they almost get the spelling entirely right.

Well I’m back from my six weeks college placement in Onda, Spain. We had a great time and I’ve got lots to say. But for now I’ll just post a portion of one of my favourite photos of Onda. Onda is a thriving and growing industrial town, but it has plenty of history and a lovely old castle up the hill overlooking Onda. This is lit up at night, and is well worth seeing - below. It’s a bit hard to get a view without street lights, other buildings etc in the way, but this is the best I could manage. It also goes to show that if you don’t have a tripod, a baby pushchair can serve the job, if not quite as well, at least satisfactorily!

Autumn is my favourite season. There are a number of reasons for this, but a lot has to do with its beauty - I just love the colours of the falling leaves, and the clear blues skies with bright fresh days (when we get them). Here are some photos taken around college a few days ago, to illustrate just why I like it.

Our college has this beautiful big horse chestnut tree which looks magnificent any time of year - it’s even better in autumn as you can see

One of my great childhood memories is of being asked to rake up the leaves that fell from our trees into the garden. I loved it then and still enjoy just walking through fallen leaves now.

Another childhood memory was of playing ‘conkers’ at school. I relived childhood last year and had several conker battles against fellow students. I’d forgotten how painful a game it can be! Is this a particularly British past-time? If you have experienced this game anywhere else then let me know. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then please say, and I can make it the subject of another blog. Some conker photos below …