It all started with this...
The Kayaker had been to an exhibition at Greenwich and came round bearing this gift from the Royal Observatory, a Stargazers' Almanac, a monthly guide to the stars and planets, this in an ongoing effort to unravel some of our night-sky confusion.
We still say 'Oh look, there's Orion/the Plough,'...we might remember Betelgeuse and Rigel north and south of Orion's belt, but we are no further on in our quest to confidently point out Draco, or Cassiopeia or Perseus, and after twenty years of living in our stargazing paradise we really should be doing better.
The Kayaker took this picture last July and 'caught' us a shooting star..
Now I'm humming ...
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Save it for a rainy day...
One of the very first songs I can remember singing with my mum and Perry Como when it played on the radio, that and Que Sera...wasn't that Doris Day...
Anyway, I digress. Each month we will have a detailed diagram of what to look for where...and with all the stars joined up to make the figures (apologies, not very clear pictures)
Who invented all these joined up dot-to-dot shapes we have yet to fathom (great deal of astronomical licence involved we feel) but our Stargazers' Almanac might help us.
The problem was it needed to hang somewhere.
Now I don't know about you but we are at 100% capacity for used wall space, and once I start shifting things around it can get hilarious, this goes there...that goes here...that has a rest...this goes there...that goes somewhere else, and so it goes on and can range all over the house as I find new wall-homes. In fact I quite enjoy it for the way it can change the entire feel of our home and bring different things into our daily focus.
It helps to have the lanky Kayaker around and so we made a start with this photograph and swiftly moved from stargazing to owl watching...
And then discovered this forgotten-about label on the back...
and a very clear signature on the front...
Bookhound had bought this for £20 at an auction some years ago. There were a large number of framed pictures by George Yeates which were pulled from the sale about three lots later when it became clear that they weren't going to achieve good prices, so we feel very lucky to have this one, and have loved it from the minute it flew in the door. Looking closely at the owl suddenly I see its shape mirrored in the bark of the tree..it's much cleverer than I had realised...
What patient watching that must have involved in 1940...in the midst of the war.
It didn't take us long to find out more about George Yeates, an amateur photographer who was eventually ranked amongst the professionals, and then to find a picture of him...
Or to order a copy of one his books because thanks to You Know Where we found this...
and when we looked inside, there it was, Plate 12, ours...
In the end we found a wall-home for the Tawny Owl, and for the Stargazers' Almanac, but along the way joined up far more dots than we would have thought possible.
Do you have moments like this...
And I'll bet some of you know the words to that song too...
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