Photo Prompts week 2

Photo prompts week two, taken from Clare on her blog HERE

I sort of sneaked a Rust for last Sunday in with my garden bench in front of the greenhouse in Farmleigh.
Monday was guilty pleasure...this was a hard one. I like most things in moderation and don't see the need to feel guilty about them.
Best I could come up with was feeding the gulls. I know that on many peoples' radar, gulls range from a mild nuisance to a major pest. I grew up near a local landfill site AND by the sea; they were certainly a nuisance with some of the rubbish they dropped in the garden. And I would rather feed my bread scraps to ducks - sometimes on the way to work there are indeed mallards and an occasional moorhen, and swans. But every day, come rain or shine, you can count on the gulls. And I'd certainly rather feed my stale bread to them than toss it in landfill; there are only so many breadcrumbs I can use.

Tuesday - Black and White. The obvious thought was a monochrome photo, and the next one was the Black & White whiskey ads - but finding a Westie would be possible, finding a Scottie much more improbable. Then I thought of magpies, and black-headed gulls - but they are still in winter plumage and don't have a lot of black. In the end, I was renewing my work ID and went with the black and white colours of Guinness. As per the information board (inside the gate, where no tourists will see it), it only started being painted in black and white in the sixties.

Wednesday: keepsake. Lots of possibilities here, I ended up with one of my little thimble displays. After filling up three, I more or less stopped collecting thimbles, though if I see an outstanding one I will probably still get it. Some of these come from friends, including the Chester one and the Welsh harpist (but in fact, Chester is where we bought C's wedding ring), some come from the markets in London when I worked there ...and the one in front is my regular sewing thimble, a gift on my 18th, and I still have the stacked origami waterlilies which my sister presented it in, too.

Thursday: books. Where to start...I still remember my total incomprehension when I was once asked, by a removal man who had come to give us a quote, what we did with all our books. And at that stage he had only seen my recipe books and our "coffee table" collection, not all the paperbacks and "reading" books. Well, most of them I read and re-read, and even in this Internet age, I still refer to a lot of our reference books.
For the prompt, I thought I'd go with generations of books! I'm not sure that I have anything belonging to my (Irish) grandfather, certainly nothing from my maternal one who was Scottish and lived most of his adult life in Canada.  But this picture shows some old Babar  books which were my father's when he was a child, and two of the Little Grey Rabbit books which I collected as a child. I can still remember going into the bookshop and picking new ones when I had Christmas or birthday money to spend. One of them is as re-bound by my father, who drew the little hedgehogs on the cover. And the other books came from my great-grandfather; the leather-bound one is a book of Dante's poetry, and I really just keep it for the beautiful binding. The hardback one was a prize presentation to him when he was in college in 1881, and it's "Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré by George Sand, published in Paris in 1874. I've taken a photo from the side, so you can see how even the edges of the paper (as well as the fly-papers) have a beautiful marbled finish. And yes - I never finished it but I did read a lot of this one.  While on the French connection, we have quite a large collection of French children's books accumulated on our various trips - and here is a beautiful pop-up scene from a book called A Night in the Forest. Most of it I can translate easily but I usually end up having to look up a couple of the birds and animals.

Friday: out and about. Sadly the tide wasn't out, I was hoping for some low-tide photos with birds. Instead, I just snapped these on my way home from work. A sign on the bus, a veterinary surgery sign and some carpets. Also sadly, it wasn't one of the day the carpets were facing right-side out, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm so curious to know who lives in that house or apartment  - do they have a huge dust allergy or what? The carpets are regularly hung over the wall, and this is the first time I've made the time to stop and take a photograph.

Saturday: on screen. For us, that's a varying degree of small screens, we don't have television. And while we went to the cinema twice over Christmas, that's probably the first time in about 5 years.
So, we have a screenshot of the current weather, and then I admit to taking the one that's based on Star Wars in advance, when I was walking into town after renewing my work ID the other day.

And the current wallpaper on my PC is one of the photos from Le Teich.