Derek and Chris made one of their photography trips to the reservoir yesterday.

I went with them.

Chris has an old Finepix S304. Derek has a new Canon EOS 1000D.

Coots were nesting in the reeds and Chris got a great shot of a nest with eggs.

Derek got a good one too – a chick, very black but gingery round the neck, looking up at him, a scraggly thing with black claws as wide as its body.

No parent around. Perhaps it had been rejected. (I know that coots reject the weaker young.)

I have seen coots running, waving their weak, stubby wings.

I once read that they get blown off course in their migrations and some ended up on Pacific islands where they evolved into a new species, losing those wings because they didn’t need them any more – until we came and wiped them out.

Chris is really Krzysztof. That’s seven consonants in a row. Or is “y”a vowel?

He is always correcting us over his surname. “It is spelt with a “w” but pronounced JANKOFFSKI”, he tells us, coming down hard on the second syllable.

Chris is a lab technician and he is about 35. He rents the old post office.

An English nurse called Janet has moved in with him.

“Janet is not happy”, he said. “It is her birthday.”

“Did you get her something?” said Derek.

“Yes, sure. I got her loungewear called a cardigown. It looks really comfortable, from a company called Hush. It came in a perfumed box”.

Chris is always very particular about details, like someone taking pains to get the grammar right when speaking a foreign language.

Derek had brought a veal and ham pie in his camera sack. He sliced it with his Mauser knife, which comes from the same people as the Swiss Army knives.

We sat on the grass and ate it.

Nice.