RSV - vaccine and scripture

A sunny start to the day, warmer after a cool night. After breakfast two men arrived and spent the morning fitting replacement radiators in the downstairs shower and upstairs bathroom. This obliged me to clear a space in my study to permit access to the radiator under the window so that it could be drained. I took the manuscript of my novel to Diana for her to read, and we chatted for half an hour about the inspiration we both got from growing up in the South Wales Valleys. Then I returned for lunch, just as the radiator men were leaving.

I took my prescription renewal form to the chemist's before going to walk. The pharmacist told me that the RSV vaccination is, as I thought, something new. Winter 'flu vaccinations start in October. The acronym RSV in my recollection stands for Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which appeared in 1952 as a development of the Tudor era Authorised Version using contemporary scholarship to give more accurate translations of Hebrew and Greek words, but in a traditional form of language. It was widely used for bible study until contemporary language translations appeared from the sixties onwards: New English Bible, Jerusalem Bible, Today's English Version, New International Version, and so on. I still have one but rarely read from it, relying on reading from on-line texts these days, in whatever versions of scripture they present. RSV texts are still those I have most memorised over a lifetime, however.

Walking in a street on my way to the park I spotted a grasshopper jump off a garden wall on to the pavement near me. It wasn't easy to see where it landed at first, but when I did, the resulting photo I took was surprisingly good. Later at Blackweir Bridge I spotted a cormorant taking off and got a clear shot of it flying up river under the bridge. I saw a heron and an egret in different spots on the east bank downriver then spotted an odd shape in the trees above the riverbank, resembling a kids kite crashed and hanging from a branch. I took a photo using the Olympus OMD E-M10's digital zoom option, and realised it bore a resemblance to a large heron stretched out. Dead or alive? 

When I got home I uploaded the picture to examine magnified to check the detail. A heron, but not a dead one. Its neck was fully elongated and its feet firmly grasping a lower branch. Its wings half extended, and hanging down if not drooping.    I searched through a wide range of heron pictures on Google images and came across just one in a similar posture to the one in my photo, entitled heron sunbathing. And yes, it was facing westward in full warm afternoon sunshine. Not part of a mating display ritual but a relaxed pose by a creature that knows it's safe from predators high in the tree canopy. Fascinating and rare.

After supper this week's episode of 'Hostage' on More 4 then another of 'Presumed Guilty' which I found a few days ago and have intermittently. It's a French cold case murder mystery, set in a Breton coastal town. Complex with lots of flashbacks, with the same actress playing daughter and her murdered mother (with a different hairstyle), and a lot being made of the look-alike factor.