Christmas Post

Gosh, another post on Christmas day. That's what you do on Christmas day though isn't it? Try to get away from everyone else, and the ideal thing to do is to go and sit at the computer. When we have traditional family christmasses, you can sneak off to the computer, and find that there are more people at the computer than there are doing whatever christmassy thing was officially going on.

Anyway, having made a pathetic and probably futile attempt to explain why I'm sitting here typing on Christmas day, I'll continue. We went to the beach today - not for any special reason, but because we could. We'd been meaning to go to Malibu beach, because there must be something special about Malibu beach or they wouldn't have named a slightly sickly sweet drink after it. So we went, and it was almost dark.

We hung around at the beach for a while, until it was so dark we couldn't see, and then went home. I'd have imagined that on Christmas day, the authorities would have let you drown, but there was a lifeguard on duty (who was leaving as we arrived - it was obviously OK for us to drown). I'd have imagined that on Christmas day, you wouldn't need to worry about parking, but as we were leaving we were reprimanded for parking beyond the time that the car park closed.

Anyway, as regular readers know, I've got a new camera, so I've put some pictures up. The first is S and A, standing on the beach, the second is Malibu lagoon, with the Pacific Coast Highway and the Santa Monica mountains in the background, and the last one is a stork or a crane or some other bird with a long beak and long legs, on a tree.

Having read my book about taking photos I now know how to cheat and make pictures like this look better than they are - they are all taken at dusk, with long exposures. The second picture was taken only 2 minutes before the first one.