Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as
to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery?

Beth and I just returned from our summer holiday – a week in West Cornwall. Even for someone born in St Austell, we were a long way west. The Penwith Heritage Coast was the heart of Cornwall’s hard rock mining industry which extracted tin, copper and arsenic in particular. With other employments including fishing, farming, smuggling and wrecking, Cornwall was a tough place in the nineteenth century, when tin mining there peaked and declined.

The sunsets over the sea were particularly beautiful:

Further photos here.

Blogging will be infrequent until the new year at my wife’s special request. I’ll be finishing my constituency work today and then taking Christmas off. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this shot of St Lawrence Church West Wycombe at night.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

Some of my (hopefully!) more interesting photos from Northumberland may be found here.

This emotive shot is most likely to be used again:

(Click image for all sizes - Creative Commons licensed)

I was pleased with this falcon(?) too:

It was hunting on the updraft around Dunstanburgh castle, with a swift(?) bouncing in playfully:

Vassiliki Bay Panorama, originally uploaded by stevenjbaker.

Too little wind this morning and a storm this afternoon, so we took a stroll, discovering this magnificent grasshopper (cricket?).

Grasshopper, originally uploaded by stevenjbaker.