August 2006

If you followed the link I provided last post – the one tracking back to the ‘goat groping’ – you’d likely have seen that directly beneath the original post, someone had responded with this message:

“If you want to have some fun with this self-important twat, post a comment on her blog saying, Aron Palmi should rot in jail!” She will delete your comment, and then hold forth at length about what a poor victim of brutal American justice he is. Repeat as often as desired.”

As if on cue, a comment appeared in my comments box: ‘Aron Palmi should rot in jail. [signed] Aron Palmi.’

After a brief WTF?? moment, the fog lifted. Here we probably had the return of a certain ‘Paul’ who first entered stage left in response to this post, that I penned almost a year ago to this day.

A bit of background: several years ago, an Icelandic kid named Aron Pálmi Ágústsson, who was living in Texas, was caught in some sort of ‘playing doctor’ act with another, younger, kid. The actual details are sketchy, presumably in response to Aron Pálmi’s status as a minor – he was 12 or 13 at the time. However, his minor status did not prevent him from being convicted under the Texas penal system as a sex offender and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, part of which was served in state prisons [as opposed to juvenile homes]. Repeated attempts by Icelandic child protection authorities to talk on his behalf and/or have him returned to Iceland to serve his sentence have failed.

Personally I find the entire matter appalling and an example of a cruel and heartless system. Others – including ‘Paul’ who deposited a comment in response to that post – are clearly not of the same opinion. That’s fine. I respect others’ rights to their views – also those that differ from mine.

However, I will not tolerate when someone launches a vile attack on my views, or on me personally for having those views. Consequently I deleted the comment by ‘Paul’ [who gave no email or website address], and wrote a response of my own by way of justification. I also decided to set up a little bait. I suspected the identity of this person and thus embedded a link in the comment to a certain website that he was in charge of. Sure enough, the bait worked and ‘Paul’ returned – under the guise of ‘Anonymous’ this time. There was another brief exchange … and that was the end of it.

Until two nights ago, that is, when the ‘Aron Pálmi should rot in jail’ comment turned up in my comments box [in the heat of the moment I deleted it – which in hindsight I shouldn’t have done]. Now, the person who is urging this campaign of hate against the Weather Report has the alias ‘jadetree’. If you follow the link underneath that name, you get a profile. And under the ‘homepage’ section of the profile, you get the same website I embedded as bait in my comment all those months ago: grapevine.is.

To my knowledge, the only ‘Paul’ working for Iceland’s alternative newspaper The Grapevine is a certain Paul F. Nikolov. I don’t know if Paul F. Nikolov is the same person urging people to flame The Iceland Weather Report with hateful comments, but I must say he’s very strongly implicated. Certainly Paul F. Nikolov has written about Aron Pálmi at length in The Grapevine and how he thinks he should, as per the comment above, ‘rot in jail’.

I don’t know about you, but I find the tone and content of the above message dark, twisted and vile. Far be it from me to judge, but the word ‘psychopath’ springs to mind. The scary part is that this Paul F. Nikolov character has recently formed some sort of ‘immigrant’s party’ [sic] here in Iceland. This immigrants’ party is supposed to fight for the rights of immigrants here, which if you read the exposés on the subject by Paul F. Nikolov are sorry indeed. So sorry, in fact, that he hopes to run for parliament on behalf of his immigrants’ party in the next national elections. He appeared on the cover of Birta – one of the most widely-read mags in Iceland – a few weeks ago, and while he made an impression that was not exactly grand [I read that interview with a growing feeling of distaste] he certainly came off a hundred times better than the twisted individual who penned the above hate campaign message. And – let there be no mistake – a hate campaign launched for no other reason than ‘this self-important twat’ having opinions different from his own.

I have no qualms about admitting that I am thoroughly creeped out. So at this point, dear Weather Report reader, I would like to ask a big favour. Would you kindly click on this link and then leave me a quick message in the comments box, telling me the name of homepage you see under the name ‘jadetree’? The reason I ask this is that I have a hunch that if mr jadetree knows he’s being watched, he’ll be scrambling to cover his tracks, and will remove the website url. And this way we’ll have witnesses.

If this guy is who I think he is, I think people should see both of his faces. Not just the one he likes to show to the world.

UPDATE:
Joseph was kind enough to leave a comment in which the identity of Mr Jadetree is fully revealed. He googled jadetree and Grapevine and got this link, under which there is a commenter by the name of jadetree. If you click on that, you get this profile, where ‘jadetree’ is identified as Paul Fontaine-Nikolov. Bingo.

Yeah, so remember a couple of days ago, my post about the ram-groping contest? Evidently the word has spread around the world like wildfire and suddenly everybody and their dog wants to know more about groping rams. Especially everybody and their dog in the interational media.

But… just how would all those pundits know about the ram groping contest? I suspect YT is to blame. For the last while I’ve been writing little news blurbs for this website in the mornings. A few mornings ago, I wrote this item. A day later, I re-hashed it into part of this blog post. This morning, when I went to scour the online media for news, what should turn up but an item in one of the main Icelandic media, that went something like, “the international media is showing a great interest in the ram-groping contest and have tried to contact the organizers in order to get full coverage…” etc. etc.

The only way they would have known about it is through my little news blurb on the Iceland Review site because to my knowledge there has been nothing else written about it in English. And suddenly, hits to the Weather Report skyrocket as punters from throughout the world start searching for ‘ram groping Iceland’ or some variation thereof. So YT, completely mystified, follows one of the links. And what should I find, but the Times Online quoting my blurb almost word for word, without giving any credit anywhere, neither to the IR website nor the Weather Report. The Times frigging Online! Who one would have thought would have a little more integrity. Bah! [no pun intended]

AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH…
suddenly there are hits coming in on a conveyor belt from this link. So of course I follow it, and what does it say?? “It’s Goat-Groping Season in Iceland.” Oh, give me a fucking break! Goat-groping?? You could spend five years in Iceland and not even see a frigging goat, never mind grope one! But it’s the sub-heading that really, er, gets my goat: “Unfortunately it’s not as exciting as it sounds, but there is a picture of a hot chick groping a goat.”

[…]

All right. Let’s set the record straight here. That’s not a hot chick. That’s my kid. [no pun intended] And in the blog post, if you bother to actually read it, there’s not a single mention of a goat, anywhere, Meanwhile, there are abundant mentions of rams, including this at the bottom: NB. Photo is unrelated to post content. Anyway that’s a sheep, not a ram.

Okay? Do we understand each other? Good. Now scram. [no not you. the guy with the link.]

THE WEATHER IS UN-SENSATIONAL
And remained overcast and sort of drizzly today. By evening, though, it was beautiful, even if it wasn’t sunny - very calm and the sea shimmered with gold. Right now 12°C and the sun came up at 05.48 and went down at 21.09.

* I think Magni should come home. I don’t like the company he’s keeping.
* In the last episode, the show’s producers sent in vipers in the form of ‘journalists’ whose main purpose is clearly to poison all the contestants against each other, so we the voyeuristic public can see some scandalous footage. Then they act all appalled when people start stabbing each other in the back. Hypocrites.
* Somebody should send in a gigolo so that miserable Storm Last [oops – I meant to write Large… Freudian slip!]… so that miserable Storm Large can get laid.
If that miserable Storm Large gets laid maybe she’ll stop jumping Magni by the poolside, straddling him, and thrusting her tits into his face.
* … Or hanging around him every spare minute. Or running after him, panting.
* I feel seriously sorry for Magni’s girlfriend. Seriously seriously. In fact, I am deeply concerned. I mean, if the only communication I had with my man was through watching him on television, and every time I watched him on television I saw that miserable Storm Large running after him and thrusting her tits into his face, I think I would seriously lose it. Only I couldn’t lose it to his face because he would be caught up in some weird psychotic television reality show and could very well be screwing that miserable Storm Large every night for all I knew and might well have changed irrevocably so I wouldn’t even know him when he came home. What a wretched situation.
* I think he keeps landing in the bottom three now [two weeks in a row] because the show has been moved back an hour so that means it finishes at 3am here in Niceland and people just can’t stay up that late to vote. [But boy did he kick ass with that Jimi Hendrix’s Fire!]
* I think the most apt description I’ve heard of anybody in a long time was when a reviewer in Morgunblaðið called Ryan Star ‘það smeðjulega illfygli’ which loosely translated means ‘that pandering villain’ – only slimier. I couldn’t watch the show last night without thinking of that and laughing every time I saw him. That said, he delivered a pretty good performance of his own song. I just can’t stand how he fawns and panders to those who hold his fate in their hands. And that iniquitous look in his eyes. Nauseating.
* What marketing genius created the ads for Kentucky Fried Chicken here in Iceland? KFC has been sponsoring Supernovarockstar, and amidst tantalizing footage of deep-fried breaded chicken pieces or ‘pork burgers’ [gross] being tossed around, the jingle ‘Nothing but a heartache every day!’ plays unrelentingly in the background. I mean – Hello!!

And a bunch of other things that I’m too tired to articulate right now. The weather was ok I think. I spent most of it cooped up, working. Managed a run before noon, though, at which time there was drizzle. But it cleared up. I think. Right now we have 11°C and sunrise happened at 05.45, sunset at 21.13. Forecast for light winds and some cloud and blahblah.

AAH and friends
Originally uploaded by Alda Kalda.

You’ll be happy to know that the annual ram groping contest will be held on Strandir [northeast Iceland] this coming weekend. Ram groping, apparently, is a recognized sport up there. The contest is divided into two categories, one for experienced and another for inexperienced gropers. It is conducted as follows: a group of experienced judges choose five different rams and secretly rate them in order of excellence. The aim of the competition is for contestants to come as close as possible to that order.

Think I’m kidding? I assure you I’m not. The contest kicks off at 2 pm. Icelandic meat soup will be served, along with a cake buffet.

MEANWHILE, THE POLICE PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS
And has launched an effort to get Icelandic drivers to use their indicators. And not a moment too soon I tell you! I suspect when God was handing out the ability to use indicator lights, the Icelanders were off groping rams. A large portion of drivers here consider it, oh, optional at best. I mean, why would people care that the reason you’re suddenly stopping in the middle of the street is because you’re about to make a turn? Still others use them as an afterthought, as if to say: “Oh yeah, I just turned that corner back there.” If there’s a pet peeve I have here in Iceland, it’s when people don’t use their indicators. And, well, the traffic culture in general, which is appalling [don’t get me started - please - don’t!]. So don’t use yer indicator, sucker, and get slapped with an ISK 5,000 fine - that person guffawing on the sidelines will be YT. Mwhahahahahahaha!

ENOUGH RANTING, GIVE US WEATHER
Has been kind of nasty today. Adequately warm, but too much of that pesky wind that has the power to make life miserable up here on the ice cube. Mind you, we’ve chosen to live in the biggest rokrassgat [literally: wind assho… er, rectum] in Reykjavík, also known as the funky West End [yeah right, who are we kidding!] so I guess we don’t have a right to complain. Why can’t we just be suitably suburban and live somewhere sheltered? To summarize: a windy day with some rain. Temps currently 12°C. Sunrise was at 05.39, sunset at 21.20.

NB. Photo is unrelated to post content. Anyway that’s a sheep, not a ram.

Grótta lighthouse
Originally uploaded by Alda Kalda.

What an excellent day yesterday: Reykjavík Culture Night. In the past few years these have surpassed our National Day [17 June] as the biggest party of the summer – and yesterday was no exception.

When this started, a few years ago, the party was just in the evening as the name suggests. But with each successive year, Culture Night has grown in scope and popularity and now officially kicks off in the a.m. with the Reykjavík Marathon. From then on, it’s just a huge celebration all over the downtown area and beyond. There is so much to see! Everywhere you look there are people doing things. Wild things. Crazy things. Gorgeous things. Amazing things. Everyone is in a happy mood, and museums and galleries and shops and hell, even banks, throw open their doors. Out on the sidewalk, street artists do their thing, bands are playing everywhere, foods of every description are being peddled or given away, and tucked away in the corner of some small gallery you may find a couple of guys making music, lost in their own little world. You run into lots of people you know, wander in and out of places you’ve always meant to check out, and sometimes you do a double take [or two]. Basically, Reykjavík Culture Night is culture in the broadest sense of the word. Mannlífið. Human existence. People celebrating and doing their thing, just for the sake of it.

EPI and I hopped on our bikes and cycled downtown around 2pm. We began by checking out the [open house] exhibition in the cellar of the Hotel Centrum Reykjavík. Here’s the story: when they started building that hotel a few years ago they discovered a Viking longhouse just lying there around 2 metres below the surface. Yowsa! So construction was halted while excavation took place and to allow the city council to argue about what to do with all the stuff they were digging up. Finally a decision was made to just leave it there and set up an exhibition in the cellar of the hotel. Long story short, they’ve made a stellar exhibition, ingeniously incorporating modern techniques to enhance the experience. For example, around the entire periphery of the exhibition, along the outside wall, there is long and narrow screen depicting exactly how the view would have been from that house over 1,100 years ago, and in various parts of the screen figures appear and move around, doing stuff that they would have been doing back then. Hard to describe, but very clever.

So having been suitably wowed by that, we decided to wander a bit. Saw some heavy-duty bikers who were offering free rides to the public, stopped to talk to family and friends, wandered up to Skólavörðustígur and ate incredible seafood soup that they were selling out on the sidewalk, drifted into 12 Tónar where everything was half price just because, ran into a seasonally-challenged Santa Claus, checked out a daredevil flying show overhead, wandered into galleries and took photos that EPI [the fine arts graduate] sternly instructed me not to post online, ducked into the Culture House where I discovered this stunningly beautiful sculpture of a benign Jesus in a blue room, and more, and more… and eventually were so cultured-out that we decided it was time to head home.

There we had a brief interlude in which we enjoyed our regular Saturday night dinner of foie gras, caviar, Veuve Clicquot and lobster tails [just kidding!] [about it being our normal Saturday dinner!] In other words, we had a kitchen party and… can you believe that EPI has only just informed me that he owns a CD of the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense?? Which is only the most superexcellent kitchen party soundtrack ever? I mean, how can he have kept this information to himself this entire time?

Anyway… we had planned to catch the fireworks that were being fired off a ship anchored off the shore of Sæbraut with all the other 90,000 Nicelanders who made it into town last night for that purpose… but we were just too damn busy having fun.

BUT WE WERE NOT TOO BUSY
… to get on our bikes just before midnight and cycle out to the Grótta lighthouse, which you can see lit up in all its glory on the picture accompanying this post. The lighthouse, which if you’ve been reading for a while you will have seen on previous photos on this site because it’s near my house and, well, we go out there a lot, is actually located on a little island named Grótta, which is only accessible when the tide is out, so twice a day for a couple of hours. And the lighthouse itself has never before, to my knowledge, been open to the public. And then a few weeks ago a handful of artists had the brilliant idea of setting up an exhibition out there and opening a cafe where they served coffee and waffles and played old Icelandic standards from the ‘50s. And of course I’d been meaning to go, and just never quite found the time, and last night was the last night, and it was due to close at 1am. So of course we had to go.

We cycled out there in absolute darkness and found that the little route out to the island had been lit up with candles [which didn’t do much good, unfortunately, because we kept tripping over rocks anyway – still, it was a nice gesture]. When we got out there, we found a bonfire on the shore with – inexplicably – a bunch of English speakers hanging around it. A good friend of ours, Paul Lydon, had been performing out there but had just finished his set when we arrived, which was a shame because we were hoping to catch him. However, we still had the lighthouse to see and it was completely magical – the Northern Lights even danced around it – and it is highly unusual for the Northern Lights to be visible in August. It looked so very imposing all lit up like that – and let me tell you, what an exciting experience to go inside! There’s something so enchanting about a lighthouse – maybe it’s their solitary stance by the sea, maybe it’s their role as beacons of light, I don’t know. [I’m sure the Freudians would have a field day with this one, though.] In any case, going inside – after having walked around the periphery of it so many times in the past – was incredible. Who would have believed the place had so much soul?

The craziest part was entering this room, not seeing anything, but hearing a [recorded] child’s voice eerily coming out of pitch darkness … a child, hesitantly reading from the records that have been kept there for decades and which are gathering dust on the shelves. Very very freaky!

Anyway, it was a perfect day. And now this post has gone on far too long and my better judgement tells me to wrap it up before collective snoring starts wafting out from cyberland. The weather was excellent today, highs of 17 I believe, and scattered clouds. Sunrise/sunset unavailable on account of the calendar being in the other room and YT being all cosied up with the laptop and too lazy to go get it. My guess: around the same time as yesterday.

… a.k.a. Reykjavík Culture Night, is upon us once again. Huzzah!

I shall return with news from the front lines.

IN THE MEANTIME:
Scattered clouds, winds from the southeast 5-10 metres per second, temps 10-17°C. Sunrise 05.30, sunset 21.34.

First: apropos the last post, in which I vowed to let you know of the ‘remarkable’ event that was s’posed to happen on Supernovarockstar last night [which had been hinted at on this website, among others]… well I watched and watched and watched real carefully… and nothing happened. The only vaguely remarkable thing was that old Magni wore a white suit and said he’d never been dressed up that much in his life [although methinks he doth lie – surely a nice Icelandic boy like him was made to put on a confirmation suit and get confirmed when he was 13?] Other than that – nada.

Sadly, Magni’s performance was also unremarkable – he did an okay job singing Starman [David Bowie] but it was certainly nothing to, er, write home about. Which is probably why he landed in the lowest three… although his track record and ‘bounce-back’ performance [broadcast tonight up here on the ice cube*] ensured that he wasn’t sent packing and is still in the running.

BUT ENOUGH: I HAVE EVEN MORE EXCITING NEWS!
Namely that EPI and I are proud to announce that we have become grandparents. Yes it’s true:

Try to ignore the fact that our grand… er, egg, looks like a ball that is about to hit old Eiður Smári Guðjohnsen in the head. Or that the photo is a little blurry, because I had to get the camera out quick before Polly took my hand off at the wrist in a single bite. Look instead at the delicate perfection that yesterday was ejected from the Polly metabolism and which she is currently prepared to kill for:

Looks pretty mean, doesn’t she? The saddest thing, of course, is that Polly still harbours the illusion that if she guards her egg fiercely enough and gives it lots of love and warm attention, it will eventually produce a little baby Polly. Which we, the all-knowing humans, know it will not, on account of the rather unfortunate absence of a male cockatiel.

It’s now almost three years since Polly outed herself as a girl by producing her first clutch of eggs. Since then there have been times when preventing another round of egg laying has been a full-time job – that’s how obsessed and determined our Polly has been to propagate the species. [I know, sadsadsad…]. Three days ago, when Polly looked decidedly under the weather and spent almost the entire day snoozing, I knew something was imminent [there had been other signs, as well]. That night, AAH was walking past Polly’s covered cage ‘late in the evening’ [read: in the middle of the night] holding her duvet, and accidentally bumped it. There was the predictable fluttering of wings, and the next morning I found a barely-formed egg lying on the cage floor, probably ejected when our Polly was so badly startled. This is thus the second egg of the clutch and I have to say that I hope it is her last [not likely] because producing eggs in this manner takes a severe toll on the little cockatiel metabolism and the last time she barely survived. So you can believe that I shall be risking my life by keeping a close watch on her.

AS FOR THE ICELAND WEATHER REPORT
It’s a gorgeous day. Went out for a bike ride earlier along the seashore in brilliant sunshine, but not before biking into town on an errand. I haven’t been to the city centre on a regular weekday in ages and I was startled to see all the tourists… it’s almost got to the point where you’re more likely to hear a foreign language than Icelandic being spoken. [Which is all very good news for our coffers.] Right now it’s 10°C and sunrise this morning was at 05.24 and sundown will be at 21.37. Day getting shorter by the day.

* Did I ever mention that Icelanders refer to Iceland as klakinn, or ‘the ice cube’?

So the Icelandic nation is holding its collective breath, now that our man Magni is among the top eight finalists in Rock Star Supernova. Because as you may know, the victory of one Icelander is a victory for the entire nation [or something]. Never mind that the show is about as manufactured, commercialized and prone to emotional pornography as any ‘reality’ TV show can get, despite the raunchy bad-boy image of the Supernova rockers [the Icelanders have a name for them, gúmmítöffarar, or ‘rubber tough guys’, which I think is totally apt]. In fact, most people that now sit glued to their TV sets twice a week would probably never give the show a second glance if it weren’t for Magni’s stellar turns. Who knew we had such talent in our midst?

For those that don’t know, Rock Star Supernova revolves around a band [Supernova] that is looking for a frontman- or woman. [Evidently there was an earlier version of this, where INXS looked for a frontman – but of course nobody over here watched it because there was no Icelander competing.] The show is like a combination Idol-Big Brother, meaning that the contestants live in this [lavish] mansion somewhere in LA and are not allowed to leave the house. While there they are given tasks like writing songs etc. and are constantly under surveillance, the footage of which is edited and broadcast during the show. Once a week, they take to the stage to perform covers of various songs chosen by the band. There are two broadcasts a week on successive evenings [Tuesdays and Wednesdays local time in America – it’s shown live here in the middle of the night, and repeated later that evening]. During the first one there’s the usual footage of comments by the contestants about, er… mostly each other, and then there are the performances, followed by the judges’ commentary. After the show the polls are open for four hours [unfortunately for Iceland, because most people are asleep at that time] and – hear this – you can vote for your favourite contestant online.

The subsequent evening is the elimination round. The show starts by the judges asking one of the performers from the previous evening to do an encore of a performance they thought was outstanding. [Magni has been selected twice – I’m not sure if anyone else has been.] It is then revealed which of the contestants were in the bottom three of the voting. Those three then perform again and when that’s over, one of them is sent home. Last time, surprisingly, two contestants were sent home.

But back to our man Magni. He’s just acing it. I mean, there are some talented performers on that show and I’m not going to say he’s head and shoulders above the rest – that would be pushing it – but I’m pretty confident he’s going to be in the top three, and he may very well win. The judges seem to like him pretty well; comments like ‘you continue to raise the bar for this competition’ and ‘talent through and through’ certainly make the little Icelandic heart swell with nationalistic pride. His performance on the last show, for instance, an acoustic version of Dolphin’s Cry, was awesome – he was asked to repeat it the following night, with a band.

In my opinion, the thing that makes Magni unique among the contestants is that he never gets ahead of himself. While other contestants turn proverbial somersaults in order to impress, he simply gets up there and delivers, with intensity and grace. He’s a natural talent, has a lot of experience [fronts a band here in Iceland called Á móti sól] and it all seems to come to him without any effort. Whether he’d be the right frontman for this particular band – or whether he would even want to be – is another question… Magni seems to have no illusions about anything taking place over there, as witnessed by a recent interview in which he shoots from the hip [I will not repeat what he said because I’d be afraid it would jeopardize his chances – suffice it to say that the man has a good head on his shoulders and both eyes wide open]. However, I think this is a great showcase for his talent and I know I’m not alone in believing that he deserves every ounce of success he can get out of this.

Incidentally, news is filtering down here in Iceland that tonight’s show is going to be remarkable for some particular reason [it’s already been filmed]. Don’t know any more than that, but I’ll be sure to let you know – that is, if you don’t watch it yourself [and if you do, be sure to vote!].

AND TODAY’S SUPERNOVA WEATHER IS…
Clear skies, gorgeous sunshine but alas – winds from the north. Always a killer for our YT, on account of the whiplash injury that gets severely exacerbated in this kind of weather. Boo. Current temps are 15°C and sunrise was at 05.18, sunset due for 21.44.

Was feeling a bit poorly yesterday [tired, under the weather] so EPI and I decided to head to Þingvellir to visit his brother and sister-in-law, who bought a cottage there a few months back. Þingvellir, incidentally, is where the Eurasian and American tectonic plates are pulling apart at a rate of around 1 cm per year [as in, the continents are moving apart and it’s visible at Þingvellir], and also where the world’s first democratic parliament was established. To Icelanders, it’s a sacred place.

Somehow Þingvellir is a natural pick-me-up. There is so much energy there [on account of the perpetually-ongoing geological activity, perhaps] that after some tea, homemade pönnukökur [Icelandic crepes rolled up with sugar or jam/whipped cream] and excellent company, not to mention a refreshing walk around the area, I felt a million times better.

I had my camera on hand:

The grassy shore of Lake Þingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest lake, which is purported to be extremely cold. Wouldn’t want to find out the hard way [brrr].

Dinghy…

The water is absolutely crystal-clear.

Angelica growing on the shore, a ubiquitous sight in Iceland.

Can you spot the ptarmigan in this photo? They’re masters of camouflage, turning white in winter. Still, that doesn’t stop them from being hunted almost to the point of extinction.

Icelandic moss, soft as a mattress. It takes hundreds of years to grow and is all over the countryside.

Meadow buttercups, one of the more common wildflowers in Iceland. Set among moss and lichen-encrusted rocks.

A small model church that someone has made in their garden. There was a light inside, which is presumably turned on when it’s dark.

TODAY’S MONDAY WEATHER…
Haven’t been out yet, but I suspect it’s a bit chilly. There’s a wind, and a nip of cold coming through the window. Temps are 12°C according to the mbl.is website so that’s quite tolerable; will find out soon enough as am heading out for a noon-time run. Patches of blue in the sky amongst cumulous clouds. Sun came up at 05.15 and will go down at 21.48.