By Foggy Foggy Pond

 

In search of sunlight and blooming waterlilies, you lay hands on your hip waders and your canvas helmet with its arty mosquito netting, then don your photographer's vest.

Feeling (just temporarily of course) like a hero in an old African movie, perhaps Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, you potter hopefully off to the beaver pond with a camera around your neck and your pockets full of lenses and filters.

When you arrive, there's no sunshine, just this amazing pearly fog, a web of dreaming trees, gently rustling reeds and quiet waters below. A single heron is standing at the far end of the pond like a statue - you can see it vaguely, but the great bird declines to be recorded on your memory card and floats majestically off into the mist.  There's an occasional quacking of unseen ducks, the slow lap of a beaver swimming nearby, a chorus of frogs among the fringing bull rushes.

The place is thoroughly nebulous and perfect in every way.  Who needs sunlight and waterlilies on such a morning as this?