False widows, butterflies and the annual potato bounty! A few personal highlights from August 2024, captured in tiny wee snapshots.
This is my latest monthly selection of snapshots of things that caught my eye over these past few weeks, comprising the month of August 2024 (but starting with an image from the closing days of July, picking up from the day I published my previous monthly snapshot selection).
Wednesday 31 July 2024: Butterflies…
Butterfly sunning itself in the grass.
Thursday 1 August 2024: …and further butterflies!
Butterfly on buddleia.
Friday 2 August 2024: False widow sighting
False widow takes wing.
Monday 5 August 2024: Canopy of trees
Serving early August arboreal realness.
Tuesday 6 August 2024: Pre-dawn tones
Beautiful, subtle tones of colour in this morning’s pre-dawn sky.
Saturday 10 August 2024: Love against division
“Our commitment to equality, to diversity and inclusion, should and must be endlessly reaffirmed. Now and always.”
From my post Love against divsion.
Thursday 15 August 2024: Judge Death lives
This month saw the 43rd anniversary of Judge Death returning (and this time dragging along his fellow Dark Judges) both to Judge Dredd’s Mega City One and to the pages of 2000AD. The above picture is a print signed by artist Brian Bolland, which I got from London’s lovely Gosh! comic shop some years ago.
Saturday 17 August 2024: Suspended pipes, suspenseful pigeons
An odd sight indeed – but one the oddness of which I am not sure is fully conveyed by this picture. Whilst on an afternoon walk down a forest path, I spied this discarded pipe fitting, somehow suspended in the air by a handy bit of local foliage. How did this even happen?
A local pigeon who is a frequent visitor to our garden – and whom my wife has named Caligula – lets the suspense build as he side-eyes a bowl of water we left out for birds and insects to enjoy. Lest the suspense get to be too much for you, I can confirm that he did eventually take a drink.
On this particular Saturday, I also published a blog post entitled eX-Twitter blues? In this post, I suggest that if you’re making the break, take time to mourn the X/Twitter you knew and loved, then move on. Time for something new, something better.
Sunday 25 August 2024: Solo sunflower
This is the second year in which I have tried my hand at growing sunflowers. I started last year, after my lovely friend Liz Kentish kindly gifted sunflower seeds to me and to all the other people attending a lunch in London to mark the occasion of my turning 50. 2024 has been a tricky year for sunflowers in my garden…The foxes that visit my garden each night destroyed nearly all this year’s sunflowers at an early stage in their growth. But one plucky contender has made it through, and is just these past few days starting to flower.
Wednesday 28 August 2024: Dawnfulness
The day yawns and ponders maybe sometime soon getting around to dawning.
Thursday 29 August 2024: Thursday’s child is full of potatoes?
2024 spud crop harvested!
Not the most bounteous of years, but a pretty OK yield.
Thursday 29 August 2024: Return to Ashdown
The Ashdown Forest, looking rather magnificent today!
Your snapshots
What about you, gentle reader? What has made or is making your month memorable? I would love to know! Post a comment below, or @ me on the social medium of your choice: Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, or Instagram.
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
IMAGES
- All photography by MJCarty (except for the blog post thumbnail images, some of which are from Wikimedia Commons, and are fully credited on the relevant parent post).
MJCarty 