MOONRISE

Last Sunday evening, whilst t'Beloved (and, it seemed, the rest of the universe) were watching the World Cup Final, we happened to glance out of the window of the place we were staying in for our holidays and saw the extraordinary sight of a moonrise over the headland across the bay.

Now, because this was a rather full moon, and given that the so-called "super moon" had happened 24 hours earlier, this all seemed rather more impressive than the deathly dull nil-nil draw which seemed to be playing out on television, and so we gaped and gawped at this rather beautiful view for several moments before deciding that we'd like to capture it in a photograph, even if it was going to have to be taken through the window because I didn't feel quite like dashing outside with a load of old clobber at that time of night.

Now, for some bizarre reason, it turned out that I had four photographic devices with me on that particular holiday. In fact, if you count the Kindle, I actually had five, but let's not, eh, because I didn't even try with that one.

First of all I snapped a quick shot with the teffalone before it was suggested that I ought too try using a "proper" camera, and so I rummaged about in the backpack, produced the tripod, and set up the SLR.

Sadly, my knowledge of night settings for such pictures is sadly lacking, and so I spent a few minutes producing shiny blobs on dark backgrounds before remembering that the pocket camera had some special "night sky" settings and grabbed that out of the bag.

Rather miserably, I couldn't work out where those settings were on the menus, and more blobs were produced as the clouds began to gather and the moment was escaping us.

In the meanwhile, of course, the Beloved snapped off a couple of rather smashing shots on her own camera that I'm now very jealous of.

All of this frantic scrabbling about was not helping me to appreciate this rather serene moment, but I grabbed the much underused "bridge" camera, the batteries of which - rather happily - I'd charged only that afternoon after finding them to be completely and utterly flat.

Once again, the moon proved to be far too bright for the "night sky" setting, but by spinning the dial I managed to find a setting that worked reasonably well, and got a snapshot that I'm relatively happy with, even if it's never going to impress any "proper" photographers.

But the fact that it was born out of chaos and much frantic leaping about will always make the story behind that beautiful moment very memorable to me.

Oh, and apparently Germany won the football in "extra time" (whatever that is) which I'm told means that whoever's best at football has finally been resolved forever and there'll never be any more football.

So that's nice.