Pun based title, when I think of one

This seemed such a slight tale, barely over 100 pages; but it worked its way into my imagination and finally left me with a renewed appreciation of Joseph Conrad as a writer. There's a curious side to my reading this. I read a bunch of Conrad's novels when I was a student; I was especially taken with Victory , and then hugely impressed by Nostromo ; and the clincher was the ever so sombre and downbeat The Secret Agent . I ended up electing to do a 'special paper' on Conrad for my literature degree. It won a decent grade, though if I'm honest I didn't have anything new or particular to say about the author. I think I simply wanted to indulge myself, writing about him. The odd thing is that Conrad was always generally known as a writer of tales about the sea , yet none of those books, or the others I read at that time, fell into that category. So, after all this time, I read The Shadow-Line , which most definitely is a story about life at sea. To sum up, whil

We've had another less common visitor to the pond up the hill. Three of them. Not that they're rare or anything, but I can't recall seeing them here before. I have to admit I didn't identify them straightaway, to the extent of thinking they were 'light phase' versions of the resident mallards. I really wasn't paying proper attention, because they're goosanders , members of a small family we know as mergansers, which have differences from 'normal' ducks I should have noticed. Below is the first picture I took, yesterday ie. 13.2.2019, when I went up there with my new smartphone . I haven't had a smartphone before, and this was an exercise in taking a picture and straightaway mailing it to a bird-watching friend, to see if she could confirm they were what I thought they were. Yes, she had the common sense to realise I wasn't referring to the coots in the foreground. I went into the nearby Starbucks (I know, I know) to have a coffee