Old Lamp-post

Rust, Wire, Gate, Sky

Rusty gate
warm spring sunshine
lazy vapour trails

and a 'static' image for comparison.

Walking to Morisson's

Old factories,
rusted gates,

blue skies.

weigela and twisted metal, planning application lies

rhododendhron
and fastened gates -
derilict factory sighs.

Cemetery and Dog Field

Sun shine,
though cold,
picks out branches
bare
beneath a sky
of winter-blue.
Long shadows
on grass
deep green
with cold and damp
but yellow
in sunlit cheer

Old sign
paint peeling
once held
a list of do's and don'ts
long gone now
and turned to rust

Home-made swings
in cemetery trees
like nooses
in the city of the dead

Missing Landscapes

Remember this post where I mentioned the old pipe left to rot. Well, now it's gone.

This is the track into the wetlands - you can see Robinson1n's factory on the other side of the lane.

This little fellow was on someone's lawn - part of a ring where a Plane tree had been removed.

I got this on the market yesterday for £10 and it works beautifully. I vacuum sealed a paperback and intend to do a load more. I foresee a garden sculpture made of books coming up.

Finally, a bit of fun.
Jack was fast asleep until Trickster threw the
'Hug Me' on his head. She wanted to play!

Motorway Montage

An early trip to East Midlands Airport and a farewell to Gina, who is by now safely at home in Ireland. We had a great weekend with her.

It was a sunshiny kind of day!

Colours and shapes!

Sometimes the images you get holding a mobile phone out of the window are unpredictable but super!

Fencing along the M1 widening

Signs of autumn:
Harvest lorries










Loved the 70MPH composition of the rusting barn

Rain, wind and speed!

It was sunny very briefly this morning.

Jack knew!

Haiga - Rusted Bike

Another shot (doctored this time) of the bike from Tuesday

Garden and Cemetery

Rusted parrafin lamp
still lights our path
better then dead fairy lights.





Echinacea blooms --
cheerful daisies
among the nasturtiums.

Dark clouds over the meadow
Poplar trees are popular
in cemeteries

Horse chestnuts
swelling in the rain
and the August sun.

Plastic flowers
adorn a Beech
One wonders why.

Butterflies and benches

The nearest I could get to identifying this was a Hespederae; a skipper. Here on a bramble leaf in the field. There were lots this morning.

I took Lina with me this morning as as we got to my favourite cemetery bin I spotted all these plants in it - obviously from a wicker basket that was also in there. This is before and after I'd got them home and potted them up. We have lavender, rosemary, sage, an ornamental grass, a hebe and a couple of cineraria -- also something that was unidentifiable and too far gone to survive (potted anyway) and a little pelargonium.

Off to the medical examiners. Who'd have guessed they worked on Saturdays? I avoived all trace of humanity and got to town via all the back alleys.

Look at the lovely rust on this disused streetlight.

This is the bench tucked away behind the bottom pond. Lovely.

And a Lina haiga.

Rain and Rust

I mentioned rust yesterday. Look how marvellously the rain brings out the colours in this corrugated iron. The cotoneaster creeping across it is spectacular. This was part of an old, unused shed at the back of the local shop, photographed when I went to get some milk this morning. There are two sheds next to each other, both empty but for shards of broken glass. What a waste! I'm almost tempted to ask if I can buy them and re-erect them here. They'd make a super garden office.




Not twenty yards away is an equally glorious piece of fencing. The Elder growing up it is in full flower. I used to make Elderflower wine at this time of year, but last year we had a disaster -- out of the 50 gallons of wine I made (average cost £5 a gallon) we lost 40 to vinegar flies, stopped fermentation and cold. There are so many people coming here that there was nowhere to keep the wine at a stable temperature. I've stopped making it until that changes -- either with a new house of a heated shed.

I'm happy to keep the Elder trees in the hedgerows -- they are prone to infestations of blackfly.

This turned out to be an interesting shot. Jack was looking out of the study window when I returned with the milk. He saw the camera, so has dropped down, trying to escape the lens. Behind him you can see his basket and a 6' bookshelf stuffed full of mostly reference material for my writing. I sit to the immediate right of this bookcase.

Reflected in the glass is me. A better angle would have shown off my cleavage.

Books and... bagels?

Ah! That solves it. I answered a post on the Bluechrome Books blog which was offering a free book to any blogger that was offering to read and review it. I put my name down. This, remember, was at the end of April. Imagine my surprise this morning when a parcel arrives with FOURTEEN books in it -- all fresh off the press. One of them I already have - Your Messages, the result of a highly inventive online collaboration which ran during November 2007, where contributors were given a single day to write a response in exactly 300 words to a message of exactly 300 words created by Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway. I loved this book, though I would say that because its packed full of stories by people I know both in blogland and in real life and, of course, one by me.


Freshly mown fields. There's nothing quite like them. True, this is a piece of council recreation ground rather than a real field cultivated and mown for hay - Ah! what memories of childhood antics that evokes -- but still, pleasant enough.

Is it a sign that I'm an adult, I wonder, that although i want to lie on the grass and look up at the sky, I don't because (a) my clothes would get covered with bits of grass and it's me that does the washing and (b) I have too much to do at home - two stories and a novel to get on with, for a start!

Rust.

A year ago these were two brightly polished Chinese massage balls - the kind that tinkle when you manipulate them with your fingers. They had a couple of spots of rust on them and K was throwing them out. I took them for the garden instead. The gravel they stand on used to be cobalt blue but had faded over time.

I think they look stunning now. I'm very partial to the absolute beauty of rust. If I had a large enough bank account, I'd commission sculptures in raw steel.




And K made lunch so I didn't have a bagel after all.