Category: The Natural World
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When life’s fraught, and there’s a momentary break in the clouds
It’s been a busy couple of days, but mostly filled with increasing anxiety about the immediate future. Will the house sale go through? Will the anticipated surgery actually happen, for our own surgeon daughter, so she can keep working for the NHS? Will we get everything ready for the imminent arrival of family? Will there…
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Soft and frosty morning
Everything outside today, high in these North Pennine fellsides, is still. The frost, the real first we’ve seen this season, is a harbinger of harsher weather ahead, but just now it’s rather exquisite. Even the commonplace looks different in its white morning gauze. I lowered my eyes from the hills and cast them over the…
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Autumn wood
We ventured forth, just after 3pm, to walk in the woods, along from the end of the village, over the manicured golf club lawn and penetrating deep among the moss-covered trunks by the path littered with fallen leaves. The damp colours seemed to shimmer in the last light of the day. There’s a little circuit…
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A quiet retreat . . .
When we were fortunate to acquire the little bolt-hole across the border, we didn’t realise quite what a solace it would be. The weight of responsibility somehow seems more pressing when we’re home, but here across the open-plan living, dining and kitchen space it’s a temporary break from all that. Writing duties carry through, however,…
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Fresh water, the most crucial joy of all . . .
We tend to discount one of the most wonderful benefits of deep rural life, most of the time. Our water system has improved dramatically over the past thirty years, and today it’s really state-of-the-art for a private water supply. Requiring minimal attention, and just pumping away, our water usage is below the national average anyway,…
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Like a murmuration of sunlit clouds . . . ke-e-ep dancing!
The dance of starlings is awe-inspiring, as they gather together to swoop and dive, in a display that ostensibly befuddles predators. I thought that the clouds the other evening, as the sun set behind our sheds, seemed very reminiscent of that floaty swirling activity. Not to mention the lovely dance put on in honour of…
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The spider’s tale
Spiders are perhaps most often associated with perseverance; the story of Robert the Bruce’s eventual victory over the English king at Bannockburn is probably apocryphal, but salutary all the same. If the Scottish laird was indeed holed up in a cave on the Isle of Arran, watching a spider trying, over and over again, to…
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Marshland colour
For a Canadian expatriate, the more brilliant the red leaf is, the more homesickness intrudes. But yesterday afternoon you didn’t have to be a reminiscing Canadian to experience the delight of the blackberry leaves turning crimson, branch by branch. I remember when the new Canadian flag was first mooted. Schoolchildren were urged to create their…
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Joy of an autumn walk
As we ambled along homewards through the lush vegetation, my beloved exclaimed, ‘Oh I do love these woods!’ I felt so guilty that for so many long years we’ve been stuck high on the remote and moor-ish fellside where a deciduous woodland walk has not been feasible unless you get in the car and drive…
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The fruiting body of the Fly Agaric
I stepped out this morning, getting ready for the dash back to Northumberland, and discovered a swarm of fruiting bodies of this poisonous mushroom under the trees across the way to the bottle bank. This one caught my eye, so fresh after the heavy rain yesterday, so vigorously pushed up through the topsoil. These crimson…
Roads to Joy 