Comic Cuts - 8 January 2016

Welcome to the new year. After only a week, last year seems so long ago, probably because Christmas and New Year seem to exist outside the course of normal time. Regular tasks, like my weekly trip into town to go food shopping, get thrown into disarray and it will take me a couple of weeks to settle into 2016.

I had hoped to have my Harry "Iron Mask" Bensley book finished over the Christmas break. It didn't happen but not for laziness reasons... OK, partly for laziness reasons. But also, while I was proofing the text, I found a thread that I needed to tease, namely the background of  Bensley's first wife, Kate. When I did my first round of work, I'd picked up marriage and one or two other certificates relating to Bensley's second wife, but not his first wife.

But now that I come to read the text, it seems a little odd that I'm speculating about her parentage when it will only cost me a tenner to know for sure; her dad's name will be on the marriage certificate, so I've ordered a copy. I've also speculated about her death, which was possibly registered under a different name, so I've ordered that certificate, just to make sure. Hopefully, with those two certificates in hand, I might be able to find her birth certificate.

Unfortunately, all this takes time (certificates can take a week to arrive), so I'm likely to be caught up in the final stages of another issue of Hotel Business when the information arrives. But I might be able to get the book out – or booklet, as it's not that long – in February. And once that's out of the way, I'll hopefully get back to some of the other projects that I want to put some time into.

The photo at the top of the column was taken on the morning of Christmas Eve: sunrise seen through the Colne Barrier. One of the first pictures I took with my new camera, which I bought as a present for myself. It's smaller and faster than the previous camera and it hasn't got a weird, proprietary memory card that couldn't be read by our card reader.

I need to experiment with it, but I think it's an improvement. Jumping up to 20 megapixels hasn't made the difference I imagined it would—the resulting pictures are bigger in size (7mb rather than 4mb) but that's down to pixel density. The canvas size is also slightly bigger, but everything else is down to the quality of the lens, so I can still only zoom in so far and no more. A picture of the moon, for instance, still only results in a white blob with no discernible features.

The pic above, incidentally, is of the town's famous adopted family. Two swans have adopted a goose, and the odd trio can often be seen swimming together. There's a mural of the three of them painted on a wall which I'll have to take a photo of as it's hilarious. The three were recently the subject for a local art exhibition. I haven't been able to find out much about them, but they've been together for a number of years—since 2011, I believe—and while they take the occasional break from each other, the goose shows no sign of flying south for the winter, even when other geese turn up.

Our little picture gallery this week is even more random than usual. Here are a handful of books I've picked up over the past couple of weeks.

More Ace O'Hara next week... I hope you're enjoying this classic yarn!