Nine o'clock. Arthur has already left for school. It's a grey and misty morning. It is also dawn; that's 59ºN for you. William and I are enjoying a second cup of coffee in the kitchen and talking politics as usual. Today Turkmenistan is the subject – for no good reason except fun. Now that's a dictatorship! The Russian political blogger Ilya Varlamov says the only comparison is with Sasha Baron Cohen's film Dictator.
I glance out of the window. The water of the bay in front of the house is an absurdly delightful shade of blue. Can it be caught on camera? It will be gone in a moment as the still invisible sun ineluctably rises.
A quick dash for my new camera. Recall long-unused photography basics to select aperture and focus manually and far more deliberately that some Japanese or German algorithm.
Click. Remove card from camera. Sit at computer and feed file into Capture One Pro to adjust crop and develop the picture.
And this is exactly what we saw for a few brief minutes as the day was taking shape.
