Woeful failure to take photos

The Shard, from Citizen M Bankside

 Not much photo-taking going on.  I'm still on the tram lines of get up-go to work-come home-slump.  I will blog more about this in my next post.  We had a long weekend in London recently - things have been too busy for us to plan a summer holiday, so this was as close as we're going to get this year.  Since this is a blog about Scotland I shouldn't really be compensating by filling it with London.  In fact I hardly reached for my camera all weekend.  I just felt like enjoying the time rather than documenting it.  However I did take a few extremely random photos.  Above, a glimpse of the Shard from our hotel, Citizen M Bankside.  First time I've ever found staying in a hotel fun - I didn't realise the concept existed. 

Below, a place I really love - the Royal Festival Hall.  We got to know it very well when our children played in a national Suzuki  concert there.  This time we were at closing concert of the Philharmonia's season - Bartok, Mozart and Beethoven.  It was absolutely sublime.

Royal Festival Hall

 After the concert we walked back to the hotel along the river, taking photos of that major London landmark - clouds.

Clouds playing pat-a-cake over London skyline

The only other photo to emerge from the weekend is this totally unsatisfactory one taken in the Chelsea Physic Garden.  The garden was lovely and interesting and educational, but fiendishly difficult for photos, because it just looked like a large kitchen garden with some information panels.  I don't really mean 'just', and perhaps much of its charm is to be a garden that looks achievable rather than ferocious.
 

Chelsea Physic Garden

 The main reason for our visit was to see the exhibition of watercolours by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery.  I absolutely love the work of Ravilious.  After we'd queued to get in and then gone round the exhibition, my long-suffering husband said 'I suppose you want to go round again?'. And of course I did.

Back in Edinburgh I was lucky enough to see something that's been tantalizing me on weather and cloud sites, but I began to doubt would ever be a feature of Edinburgh's skis.  Mammatus clouds!  They're associated with thunder clouds, which aren't very frequent here.  However, we've had a couple of thunderstorms this week, one of which I slept through, and in the morning on looking out of the window (which had been open wide all night) thought, 'oh, there's been a bit of a shower of rain in the night'.  

Mammatus clouds!