Missed Photo Opportunities

Travelling home from work today, on three occasions I saw things that would have made good photos. 

As the train was pulling into Ascot Station I saw a deer.  This was one of the deer that frequent the woodland on the inside of the curve of the Guildford line just outside the station.  It was a larger one, presumably an adult. Last Friday I saw two small ones together.

Then, while we were stopped a Bracknell station, two teenage boys, carrier bags in hand as if they had just been shopping, climbed over the wall and got onto the train.  It was obvious by the way they kept looking along the platform, and by the fact they went straight to the first class compartment at the front of the train (a dead give-away), that they were avoiding paying their fares.  And then, immediately after that, two different teenage boys with mountain bikes got off the train and proceeded to climb over the same part of the wall with their bikes.  Obviously fare-dodging is a big thing in Bracknell.

Later, back in Reading, I was walking past the London Road car park of the Royal Berks Hospital when two young women suddenly started jumping around, punching the air and whooping.  Between them,  they had just managed to jump-start a car.  The celebrations seemed to be part relief and part triumph that they had managed to do it without the help of any men!.  Their obvious happiness quite made my day.

Maybe I should carry my camera rather than my laptop with me when I go to and from work? 

Evolutionary Symbols on Bibles!

When I was in Waterstone's bookshop this morning I happened to notice the rather attractive covers of these Bibles.  I wonder if the publishers realise that they have decorated them with potent symbols of evolution?  Darwin himself studied humming birds, indeed the current ten pound notes issued by the Bank of England show him with a humming bird (I suppose barnacles weren't considered photogenic enough - is there a term 'vertebratist'?).

 

The image on the right-hand bible appears to be a nautilus shell, and nautiluses are cephalopods, and cephalopods, as everyone should know, mean .... PZ Myers.

A New Camera

I got myself a new camera at the weekend, an Olympus SP-500 UZ. I took it out on Sunday morning and this is one of the pictures I took with it. It is a distinct advance on my father's old Olympus C-1400 XL that I was using before.

Sir Patrick Moore Cloned?

From the Guardian Unlimited Science page:

Podcast:  Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly the Sheep, as well as the legendary Sir Patrick Moore.

If I had written this I wouldn't have relied so heavily on a comma to decide between the two possible readings of this sentence!

More Deer

A few days ago I noticed what looked like the body of a deer-sized animal just outside Ascot station, beside the line to Guildford and I feared that the deer I had occasionally seen over the past few months had been killed.  Well, I needn't have worried for, this morning, the doe was in its usual place but this time two large, healthy looking fawns.  Come to think of it, what I thought might have been a body has too much white fur, and anyhow it looked too old and well-decayed to have been killed just a week or so ago.

Update on Tue 2006-07-25 by Tristram Brelstaff

Today I got a better look at the white animal body by the railway track at Ascot.   It has feathers; it is a dead swan; come to think of it I seem to remember seeing a swan near there (on the other side of the track) a few weeks ago.  It was probably either hit by a train or else electrocuted by the live rail (the trains on that line are supplied electricity through a third rail rather than overhead lines).