I’m conducting an experiment with this shot.

It’s packaging from one of my birthday pressies – a cute bell from Heligan and I just liked the way it looked – all soft and inviting while being curvy and having definite shape.

To be honest, it’s done to try to force myself for something a bit different because I’ve had a day of toil – lawn cutting, log sawing and one of our never-ending trips to the dump.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is for me to be back at the dump today, yet again, after seemingly thousands of visits. David once remarked to me that we seem to spend an abnormal amount of time there and considering how eco-aware we are and how much stuff we recycle, I can’t believe how much still ends up there. You’d think our house would be completely empty now – but sadly we’ve still got another whole load of MM’s rubbish in our loft and neither of us can face sorting it out at the moment.

Mind you, most of this particular load was, in fairness, not hers and it was recycled once there – cardboard from our new desks – only the 80s black MDF furniture ending up in a skip – it’s full of formaldehyde you see.

Best bit of the day is the pile of sawn logs for the fire – we’ve discovered that buddleia makes fine fuel – we had a bush around 20 feet tall that we chopped over the winter, it’s growing back beautifully and the now bone dry timber that we cut has been running lovely fires this last few days.

Why do we need fires? Well, it’s cold here – it feels like October despite it being sunny – I think our earth has not been warmed at all this summer so at night it’s cold.

I think I could do with wrapping up in some of this stuff really – as always I’ve overdone it and made myself ache from the hard work.

I often say how strange it is that I have an annual cycle to my photos - last year too I was doing experimental shots - though that one was more sexy!