Winter flowers

On Monday 16th January – officially the most depressing day of the year according to a rather incomprehensible formula – Audlem Online published a series of local ideas to beat the winter blues.

Here's another – seeing flowers blooming. Our thanks to Frank Morris for the top photo taken on Tuesday in a particularly sunny spot on Bagley Lane. The out-of-focus in the rear ground is intentional, we are told. Photo types call it Bokeh, the Japanese word for out of focus.

The second photo of the rose was shot a couple of weeks ago on a plant that's never bloomed in winter before.

Roses seem to be everywhere this month – for example, there's yellow ones in good numbers down by the canal on the Lock Keeper's cottage just past the Shroppie Fly. And snowdrops, as you would expect in late-January, are springing up everywhere.

Many readers may have been surprised by the many snowy pictures on Audlem Online's Homepage over the past month or so, particularly during a relatively mild spell this winter.

For reasons unknown, the part of the program that selects the Homepage pics from our extensive library, has gone out of control. It's been picking the daily photo shown exactly a year ago – when Audlem was experiencing snow and ice for weeks on end.

The technical team have been investigating this phenomenon, and are so far baffled – there is a theory that it is due to 2012 being a Leap Year (a concept which computers find it notoriously difficult to cope with), while other authorities refer darkly to the amount of space being taken up unnecessarily on the Internet by Diamond Jubilees and Olympics, leaving no room for our new homepage pictures.

In any case, they say that it will take too much valuable time to fix this strange fault, particularly as all their spare time is being devoted to a major upgrade of Audlem Online.

The webteam tries to introduce new ideas, and provide a new look for Audlem Online, every couple of years. We hope to introduce this upgrade in the Spring. One result, we hope, will see our Homepage photos back under control! 

More on this upgrade as our ideas are finalised.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.