Category: Ageing
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The things you miss . . .
Our walks over the past two days have been intriguing more for the things we didn’t immediately see than for those we clocked with only a casual glance. Within the beautiful cluster of aquilegias, growing wild beside the storm drain, a bumble bee was busy, searching for nectar inside the wrinkled blossoms. I wouldn’t have…
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Sharing broodiness
I feel sorry for the hens when I rustle underneath them to feel for their next eggs. Not quite so sorry when they each peck my hand! But they’re not fierce — they just don’t want to be disturbed in their hormonal delirium. The Barnies are the best layers we’ve had; their eggs are large…
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The feeling of being needed
I often feel that I’m not needed, and that can be hard to bear, after insinuating myself into a variety of positions where it seemed only I could facilitate. We set up a robust swing for the grands, a decade ago, but found that a garden bench swing was also needed for ourselves. We did…
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Petal confetti, horse-tail alley and a flight of swans
We must be getting fitter; we traversed the circular route around the marsh dyke to the River Ken, and back through the fields to home, in just about an hour of ambling, looking and listening. Along the way we invented descriptive words for the natural sights: a tapestry of stichwort; a serried rank of Jacob’s…
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Rewards of a hillside amble
I was beginning to think that it was nearly impossible to capture, succinctly, something of the intense purplish-blue of the bluebell woods in full bloom. But then the sun, dappling out between huge puffy white clouds, created a sensational spotlight, leaving the bank of bluebells before us in immediate shade. So it was worth the…
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Succession joys and worries
But what about generational succession? Google is full of references to the HBO television series Succession, which is certainly rife with intrigue. I’m musing this morning on generational succession because of a particularly proud moment for my brother’s family in Philadelphia, as our niece graduates with top honours from her journalism/political science degree course. As…
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Well hello there!
We’re just casual observers of things, as we amble along. I’m not sophisticated enough in the natural history side of things to even begin to attempt a Guardian Country Diary piece. As we walked beside the River Ken in the direction of the Ken Bridge, and the Ken Bridge Hotel where we started our reconnoitring…
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A walk in the sunshine
We finally made a circuit of the dyke walk that extends through marshland in the Upper Ken, on the border of the Galloway Forest. There we watched a crow/jackdaw/raven dive-bombing a red kite, over and over again. Eventually, it seemed that the red kite agreed to divert its soaring flight away from the black bird’s…
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But tasks make a joyful punctuation . . .
I have delved deep into the first of the four novels I mean to read over the next few days and weeks. I have begun. It’s lovely, and I’m away with the faeries into another land and another time, but the present also makes a welcome intrusion. Today we’re expecting a delivery of two big…
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The joy of reading
Too often, in the grand scale of things, I’m obsessed with doing, creating, achieving, finishing. So much so that when otherwise idle, as I’ve felt over the past day or so, and when challenged to ‘read a book,’ I find myself explaining, ‘but that’s not really doing anything!” Err, apparently, wrong! There are four books,…
Roads to Joy 