This is what is known in the trade as a Battered Badger.

Muffin nearly killed me last night. I was on my way to bed and Muffin decided to race me down the stairs – by going between my feet.

The result was that I went head first down the flight of stairs and did a fair amount of damage. Muffin beat me to the bottom – but only just – and my arrival was much less dignified,

I hope you have noticed that I have Blogged on the last two Sundays so that you poor sods who apparently look at my Blog first thing every day do not suffer from blog deprivation on the first working day of the week.

The fact that someone would look at my blog first thing each day is a bit scary but hell – whatever turns you on. Me – I just need a cup of Caruso to get me going.

I think that the photo on yesterday’s Blog was quite the best photo that has ever been taken on my camera.

Unfortunately I didn’t take it – it was taken by the incomparable Mehmet.

The light and shadow is good – and he got birds as well (and possibly an aeroplane in the top left hand corner). An astonishing performance really and much better than I could do.

I did get a reasonable shot of a Bee in the garden at Topkapi and will let you see this in due course.

Cate of course got testy with me ‘It’s a Bee – why are you photographing a Bee?’

Indeed – and why do I photograph railings and carpets?

It is because I am looking for the shot that will be on the front cover of National Geographic. (Although I admit that Bees are a long shot – particularly as I don’t work for National Geographic).

Cate has now become an avid photographer. Apparently taking 10,000 pictures of the same elephants in Zambia has whetted her appetite and I now have to fight her for the camera everywhere we go.

Fair enough I suppose. She wants to do palaces and castles and I want to do Bees and railings so she is certainly going to have a wider audience.

However, in eons to come there will be 10 billion pictures of Topkapi in existence and very few (possibly only one) of the Bees in the Topkapi garden. By then I will be famous and in publications they will say things like.

‘This photograph (‘Bee in motion in Topkapi’) was at the beginning of Badger’s Bee period when he was just beginning to understand the essential essence and post-modern connection of Bees with the fundamental nature of mother earth. His later picture of Bees are more melancholy and reflect the decline of Beedom as we now understand it in the context of the new macho-deconstruct renaissance and the de-Beeing of most of the Earth – which of course is why we are now all dead’.

I note that in the middle of my Bee period Merisi is very much into cups of coffee and I ask you – which is more exciting and evocative – a living Bee or a static cup of coffee.

(We will leave aside the issue that Merisi is a duck eating photographer of some skill and I am not – well yes alright I ate one duck – but I am not a serial duck muncher).

Yes – I thought so – the Bees lose.

I actually think that for the first time ever some of my photos in Istanbul are bearable. I am reading the ‘Complete Book of Digital Photography’ and have learned a few things and will keep practicing assiduously.

Cate now wants ‘a proper camera’ which she somehow thinks is a big camera. Well actually most ‘proper’ cameras are about the same size but apparently one of the troops in Zambia had a colossal telephoto lens and Cate has become fixated on this.

Well – we do need another camera now because Cate rarely lets me have the one we have got so I will get another and make sure it has a lens through which you can see the craters on the moon.

Cate can have this one – and all I need is one with a Bee lens.

But seriously – I am really worried about the Bees – and the Molluscs – no one can tell me about Bees and Molluscs and why they are dying.