Just a Few Steps from Home …

This week, for Monochrome Madness, Leanne asks us to stay in our home patch and show us what we can find within 10 km of our home. Well. I’m sorry Leanne, but frankly, one kilometre is as far as I can stretch today, and I may not even go that far. Let’s see. Have you met our next door neighbours? They’re in the featured photo.

We’re a bit light on neighbours generally. You might find these characters:

They’re from the local ponds – quite honestly the heron and egret come from just a little further up the road- but not much more distant.

Even nearer than the ponds is the River Ure.

Go the other way from the house, and it’s fields and crops…

Winter
Spring
Summer

… and more sheep …

But please don’t think our life lacks drama. On Monday evening we were unexpectedly treated to a starling murmuration at the bottom of the garden. At dusk, starlings in their hundreds – perhaps thousands – swirled above us, eddying back and forth, cacophanously landing as one on the trees, which bowed under their weight, before they took off again to wheel and turn above us. Then some signal, known only to them, indicated that they should disappear and roost in the nearby reed beds. They never seem to come to the same place twice, so they weren’t here on Tuesday, and they won’t come tonight.

This is just as the shot emerged from the camera – a natural monochrome.

So that was our drama for the week. Just an everyday story of country folk.

Feathers McGraw visits Bradford

Team London and I visited Bradford on Friday to spend time in its Science and Media Museum. And here we found Feathers McGraw, anti-hero star of The Wrong Trousers and Murder Most Fowl. Surely he should still be locked up at His Majesty’s Pleasure, instead of gazing out of the windows of the museum?

For Ludwigs’s Monday Window, hosted today by PR.

A Capybara in Cosmo-Caixa

Here he is. The world’s largest rodent. The capybara. He lives in Barcelona’s Cosmo-Caixa Science Museum, in the Bosc Inundat (Flooded Forest) . This, along with other South American species, is part of a huge simulated Amazon rainforest ecosystem, with animals, birds and fish. 

Monday Portrait

Astonishment and Awe

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention

Be astonished

Tell about it

Mary Oliver

For this week’s Lens Artist Challenge, Beth asks us to show shots of what has astonished us, and takes her inspiration from this short poem by Mary Oliver.

For some reason, my mind was drawn back to Lockdown. For us, Daily Exercise was one of the pleasures of that peculiar time. Country dwellers, we could range freely over our home patch without meeting a soul. And here, it happened to be a wonderful spring, where plants, birds and all life could flourish in balmy temperatures and just the right amount of rain.

Walking by myself down deserted paths – M was exploring on his bike – I discovered Wonder and Astonishment anew. Day by day, I could watch leaves unfurl from tightly-bound buds; flowers appear; lambs totter their first hesitant steps.

I had the leisure to enjoy the intricately-designed feathers of a common-or-garden mallard, or the complexity of dandelion petals.

Best of all, creatures we rarely saw close up crossed my path. Who expects to stumble by a toad on a riverside stroll? Or, best of all, come across shy curlews nesting within a foot of a normally well-used road across the moors.

Skies, undefaced by plane trails seemed more multi-faceted and interesting. And back home, day after day, hour after hour, from dawn until darkness, this thrush gave an apparently unending performance with almost no breaks.

Such a time of loneliness, grief and isolation for many remains in my memory a period of joy in the rediscovery of the astonishment offered by the countryside just outside our front door.

A Circular Sort of Trip

No expense has been spared in preparing this post for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, this week hosted by Dawn. Circles are what she’s looking for.

So I travelled to Catalonia, to Barcelona, and went to La Sagrada Familia.

I passed the Arc de Triomf, and took another shot of the Bubble Man at work.

And then I zipped along the coast to Canet de Mar and took a shot inside the house of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

Oh, and finally one of oranges. They’re everywhere.

A flying visit to France next. To Laon to take a shot of one of its many shop signs. I chose the toy shop.

And I caught the ferry back to England.

London next. Greenwich, and looking upwards at the staircase in the Queen’s House.

Then I only had time for a quick visit to the Horniman Gardens in Forest Hill.

I got back home just in time for Masham Steam Fair. I saw plenty of wheels (circular, of course) there, and you can see a few of them in the featured photo.

And that’s me done.

Park-Dwelling Parakeets

The parakeets that live round and about Ciutadella Park in Barcelona are opportunists. They know that all they have to do is hang around tourists, looking winsome, and the next meal will appear. If they’re lucky, maybe specially purchased nuts and seeds from equally opportunist street vendors. Otherwise, croissant crumbs and biscuits. They don’t seem fussy.

For Monday Portrait.

Amboise in Black and White

These last three weeks, when we go to Spain – as we do every January – to catch up with the Catalan family and dodge the English winter, have not gone according to plan. The weather was just as awful in Spain as it apparently was in England, and all those named storms spread themselves liberally about, making sure nobody was spared. So our plan to have a final week driving home in a leisurely fashion, exploring Spanish towns we haven’t so far visited just got junked. We stayed on with the family and cleared out cupboards for them.

You’ve seen what the drive home was like. Here are a few shots from our very last stop-over, in Amboise, a charming historic town on the River Loire with a glorious Royal Château. It managed not to rain, but goodness, it was cold! We’ve promised ourselves we’ll go back, when the weather’s kinder, and when we haven’t got a ferry to catch later in the day. Here’s a taster:

Here are three shots of the Château: well, one’s of a perching pigeon really, and one of the town gates. The featured photo is of the Château too, dominating the riverscape as night fell and the full moon pierced the misty night sky.

In my shallow way though, I’m also going to show you a window display that caught our eye. It’s just the kind of shop you need if you require a suit of armour, a sword or two, or some sexy underwear for a half-sized doll.

For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.