Morning walk

-
Which actually happened yesterday, but which I haven't had chance to load until today.



It's a very deceptive photograph this - I did it just to show the mist, and it looks a rural idyll on first sight. However, if you look closely, modern life is certainly present. You can clearly see the two railway lines, and also the mobile phone mast to the left. What you can't see is the A45 thundering away behind the tree line. At least the railway is intermittent. Just up from the picture is the village's old station, now thundered through. Nothing's stopped since Dr Beeching.

If the station were still working, my children would have walked past this view every day on their way to the school. As it is, we do a lift share with another family, and have a 10 mile round trip to take the children to our nearest station.



The rabbits have made full use of the railway embankment, and there is a huge warren. It has an eerily empty feel about it at the moment. I'm not sure if I'm just imagining it, but there's certainly not many droppings about, so I wonder what's happened to the rabbits.



There's masses of wild clematis about at the moment, and it's particularly beautiful with the little droplets on it. I'm glad I managed to photograph it as I'm not good at taking the camera out with me as a matter of course, and by the time I do remember, the things I wanted to photograph have changed. Generally it's as much as I can do to get self and dog out in the morning, with me being correctly shod. Have got this wrong a couple of times recently as I completely underestimated the amount of dew on the ground.


It's been a good year for fruit. Despite the hedges being flailed, there's still plenty of sloes. As I still have the ones I picked last year in the freezer, I don't think I'll indulge this year. Must try and think of something sensible to do with them that is not sloe gin, as we still have the unopened bottle a friend gave us last year.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with the hawthorn here, but it doesn't look like normal autumn colouration to me.




It's amazing how flowers keep going. The scabious and the white campion (though not the red - I wonder why?) keep popping flowers out.



I wonder if my son will miss any of this as he heads off to his city university this Saturday. He was born in London, and spent his first 7 years there, so I wonder if the bustle of city life will seem in any way familiar. It's going to be very odd for us without him (though odd is not the word his sister would use).

Comments

Val said…
Really Lovely photos...many thanks

It's frosty here, with a squirrel pelting the ground with cones he/she is harvesting from the spruce in the back yard.

My Father used to travel from his village to the nearby Market Town to Grammar school, but Mr Beeching put a stop to that track too I'm afraid.
23 September 2010 at 19:12
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more