Over the last few days, I have been crawling out of bed in the morning like a groom after his stag night. Not that I’ve been drinking the night before. Far from it. It has simply been the knowledge that Friday was the final day of term and my internal engine of energy had started to shut down prematurely. The freezing temperatures outside did nothing to boost my enthusiasm and on Friday morning I was even hoping that the school might shut down for the day due to the snow. It didn’t and so I set off for work at the very late (for me) time of 7.15am. I was however rewarded with a stunningly beautiful morning on the Berkshire-Oxfordshire borders. Blue sky, orange sun and bright white countryside all around. It was a photo-opportunity in the making… So I paused and took some pictures. One can be seen in an earlier post and the one here – a close up of Reggie silhouetted in the sunlight of dawn – has now gone viral. Kind of.

When I arrived at work I uploaded the picture in the earlier post and posted the picture above to Twitter. For good measure, I also sent it to the local BBC television news programme, South Today. I suspected I was in with a chance of it appearing on the show as it was a cracking shot but when Sally Taylor, the presenter of the programme said that they had been inundated with pictures, my heart sank a little: Reggie’s moment of fame had probably passed… But no! Not only had my photo made it onto the programme but it got top billing with my name on the screen (no mention of Reggie by name alas) and a suitably positive comment from the weather reporter. I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture of Reggie’s few seconds of regional television fame and here he is, slightly cropped from the original, basking in the sunlight of a cold morning in Oxfordshire and in the limelight afforded him by the local weather forecast. The picture has even found itself on South Today’s Facebook page along with other snowy snaps from the south of England. What next for little old Reggie Ridgeback I wonder? Hollywood?