Acts of Beauty

First snow,

first attempts at pastry:

later that night, first snowball:

Ah, sky through a train window, fast becoming my favourite thing to photograph:

My mother doesn’t like these kinds of pictures because they look so fake and unreal, but this really did happen!  I saw it with mine digital eyes!  This is also more evidence for my theory that it was the sky that made early peoples invent god stories – “there it is, the abstract hand of God, making light patterns on the Giant Canvas Above”.

Here are the trees I saw:

All blurry and spidery and golden.

The train from Cardiff to Tenby is fantastic.  You are travelling beside the water for miles. Living in Wales, I have an appreciation for the beauty of greyness:

I particularly like it when a grey sea and sky come together at the horizon and you can’t see where one ends and the other begins. While in Tenby I made an effort to find a great café to sit in, and happily stumbled upon a small Greek establishment overlooking the sea.  It was a bit higgledy-piggledy, had it been in London it would have been hipper, but I liked it half-baked. My glass of lemon water was wonderful (lots of floating bits), but the best thing was this swan biscuit which came with my tea: I thought it was so pretty, and amazingly it tasted as good, if not better, than it looked.  It was almondy, buttery and crisp, and on the back were flaked almonds.  I want to track them down one day. The amazing thing about Tenby was the atmosphere, it felt liked arriving in a different country, gentle and sea-wildish, different to the sea where I live.  Stranger still, most of the shops were closed in the middle of the day, it being winter in a tourist town, so that lent it an air of… hmmm, not sure what without turning it into a cliche.  But it is a lovely place.  With great biscuits.