breakfast

Another image of the completely everyday, though again, full of the knowledge of its transience. I was up very early - still on east coast time, and not much point in trying to settle down into PCT when I have to fly back tomorrow - so made some coffee and took it, and some toast and almond butter, out to the front step to watch Emmett whilst he took his morning prowl up and down the terrace, inspecting where the skunk had skunked on the geraniums.   I've always particularly liked picking up the paper in the morning (and wondering where the paper deliverer might have hurled it - it was with the trash cans this morning, though they seem to have given up, happily, on making it land on the spikes of the cacti).   There are all kinds of very early morning fresh smells (besides skunk), many of them coming off the orange tree, or dew on the pots of herbs by the top of the steps.   It's also - then and in the early evening - when 962 is at its most European, and this picture manages, partly because of its color, to look as though it's pretending to be Umbria or the Dordogne (it would make more sense to opt for the former, given the Deruta mug, and given the fact that I've never been to the Dordogne, and hence am relying on the visual cliches of tourism ads and travel articles, which usually feature geraniums).

But this also manages to be a picture about what we won't miss.   I was very glad, when leaving 16 James Street, in Oxford, to have gone around taking a number of images of spreading damp and mould and of widening cracks, most of these unattractive features carefully concealed at the back of closets.   This has acted as a wonderful visual corrective when I find myself missing that particular house - the use of photography to remind one about what one's relieved to be dealing with no longer.   One of 962's most scary facets is very visible here - the tendency of this house, too, to develop cracks.   There's quite a gap between wall and middle step, and that greyish powder is the cement dust from where, once again, it's being patched up.   And there are worse areas than this...