Coping

My mother's boiler seems to have packed it in completely. My brother-in-law has set her up with electric heaters and suchlike. I rang her last night and she was flustered because the immersion heater wasn't working and she was trying to fix it with a screwdriver. I rang round and my brother-in-law suggested it might work better if she tried switching it on. Happy outcome.

Alice rang. She'd seen a news report about lambs buried in snowdrifts in our area. Ailz checked and it was happening in Castleshaw- which is only a few miles away but several hundred feet higher. Here it snowed overnight- and is snowing quite heavily now- but the air is warm and the snow is thawing on the ground.

I saw a report in the Indy this morning that said the unseasonable weather could continue till the end of April.

Bolstering Fragile Egos

There's a convention for photographing politicians. You get them to stare into the middle distance, then get down on one knee and shoot upwards. It makes them look like Moses surveying the Promised Land.

I've seen two pictures in the genre this morning. One was of that weasel David Miliband who is leaving politics for a lucrative position in New York. The other, of the Jabba-the-Hutt-like Eric Pickles, was really quite funny because it made his extra chins look even grosser than they actually are.

No-one else ever gets photographed like this. Only politicians. Oh, and the odd actor. Tom Cruise, for example, at the end of War of the Worlds. With Cruise you'd have to do more than bend a knee, you'd have to lie flat on your back to get the desired angle.