You want water in motion, Sofia, for your Lens-Artist Challenge? You’ve come to the right place. We speak of little else in England this year. Look at this.
A dismal moment sheltering by the River Skell in Ripon.
Or this, taken through the windows of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool.
A (typical?) view of Liverpool.
But without this rain, we wouldn’t have those glorious tumbling riverside views: these are both from Yorkshire: I’m focussing on England for this post – it seems appropriate.
The River Wharfe at Grassington
The River Ure at Redmire Force.
Water’s playful too: especially in the hands of a sculptor. Here’s Atlas with his sea gods at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. A fuller image is shown as the featured photo.
Atlas , Castle Howard
And a child in Granary Square, London is certainly having fun.
Fountain, Granary Square, Kings Cross London.
But we’ll conclude with a more typical London view, overlooking the River Thames.
Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day. Rain, rain, go to Spain, Never show your face again! Traditional
A shot taken not in England, but in Bavaria, Germany
It’s not just children who’d willingly sing this these days. In the UK it’s rained pretty much constantly all this year. But in Spain, they’d cheerfully take some of our surplus. In Catalonia, in mid-winter, the reservoirs are a mere 16% full, and water-use restrictions are in place.
When the wind is in the east 'tis neither good for man nor beast. When the wind is in the north, the skilful fisher goes not forth. When the wind is in the south, it blows the bait in the fishes' mouth. When the wind is in the west, then 'tis at the very best. Traditional
A particularly windy May morning near home.
The fog comes on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbour and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Carl Sandburg
I can’t claim that Carl Sandburg’s is a children’s rhyme. I couldn’t think of one. Can you?
Fog slowly lifting near Burnsall, Wharfedale
The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow, and what will the robin do then, poor thing? He'll sit in a barn, and keep himself warm, and hide his head under his wing, poor thing! Traditional.
The field-just-down-the-road one January.
This hardly-there snow is pretty typical of wintry conditions in England. And I know that a robin lives pretty close by: this field almost qualifies as my back yard.
The robin -just-down-the-road, not in January
Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue: I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too. Arthur Hamilton
All three of my children used to sing this one – often – at assembly in primary school. I wonder if it’s still going strong?
Lofthouse in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire.
So that’s it. Oh, hang on, I’ve forgotten something. Sunshine. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? It’s February in England, and famously sunless. Let’s show British sunlight, rather than the full-on sun of the holiday of our dreams.
It’s September. The schools have gone back, so here is a sunny beach, gloriously (almost) empty in Filey, North Yorkshire
And most children can sing the less-than-traditional The Sun Has Got His Hat On by Noel Gay. So let’s leave you with this cheery version.
I glanced up from checking my emails twenty minutes ago, and this is what I saw.
You have to seize the moment. In half an hour it’ll be raining- a proper deluge with fat splashy drops tumbling relentlessly down for the rest of the day (just like yesterday). So I went for a mini-walk.
Just in time. Now it’s like this – and becoming more sombre by the minute.
November was for the most part mild (and rainy. And windy. And unpleasant). Until the very last week. This shot from the bedroom window yesterday pointed out fairly forcibly that winter has arrived.
Five random words. Paula, over at Lost in Translation posts five different words every month, and invites bloggers to choose five different photos to illustrate them. Well, I decided I’d join in. But I thought I’d have even more fun if I wrangled those five words into a piece of doggerel to accompany my images. Here we go…
A retired Major General from Hove
with the moniker Algernon Gove
said ‘Before life unravels
I must finish my travels.’
And forthwith he made plans to rove.
He selected some places to stay:
His first port of call was Norway.
He thought he'd get bored
with a trip round a fjord.
But he found it quite splendid, if grey.
.
Thereafter, he thought the romance
Of a yacht sailing slowly to France
Would just do the trick.
But the poor chap was sick.
What nautical mis-happenstance!
Dry land seemed a safer idea.
Get his plans and his thoughts into gear.
The familiar? Go home?
Or a day-trip to Rome?
Or ditch the whole plan till next year?
He mused - and looked up at the sky
Which was sulky and grey - though now dry.
And saw the attraction
Of a rainbow’s refraction
It was time to bid drifting ‘goodbye’.
So what did the old fellow do then?
It needs planning, the where and the when.
But I’ve got a hunch
That after his lunch
He’ll announce an adventure. Amen.
Maps are a good place to make destination-selections from. This is the Catalan Atlas, created in 1375 by Abraham Cresques, and may not be the map book that Major General Gove made use of.
This isn’t a fjord. It isn’t even in Norway. I’ve never been there. It’s Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia. But I think it’s rather splendid – if grey.
These yachts look a little small for a nautical voyage. No wonder the Major General was sea-sick.
A familiar scene to the Major General as he gazed out of his bedroom window in Cheshire.
A rainbow. A double rainbow in fact. Plenty of refraction here.
Before he retired, the Major General was commanding chaps like the fellows shown in the featured photo.
We’ve had a lot of misty-moisty mornings lately, and I turned this photo up when looking for soft-focus shots for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. This isn’t for that challenge: I just thought this hardy creature deserved her five minutes of fame as a Monday Portrait.
Eight years ago, none of us knew that five years later, our local tracks – the only ones permitted to us during our Lockdown Daily Exercise – would become almost as familiar to us as our own garden path. This is a post I wrote about a nearby walk on January 27th 2015, when I thought that I’d seen all there was to be seen locally. I was wrong as it happened, and later realised how very much more there was to discover when Lockdown provided the incentive. For Fandango’s Flashback Friday.
Only Sky
The days are short
The sun a spark
Hung thin between
The dark and dark.
John Updike, 'January', A Child’s Calendar
A bright winter’s afternoon. Just time, before the evening cold sets in, to get out for a couple of hours of brisk walking: 5 miles or so along familiar paths. So familiar that this time, I focus on the sky: changeable, unpredictable.
Sometimes it’s moody, sometimes cheerful, sometimes simply rather grey and colourless: at other times dramatic, particularly towards sunset. Come and walk with me to watch the clouds.
Yesterday was foggy. All day. Yesterday, when I took a photo – the header photo – at Fountains Abbey, it was so murky I thought it could pass for a sepia image. I’m going to chance calling it monochrome anyway. And since we could barely see ahead of us, we focussed on the ground below. And were rewarded. This is rather a fine tree trunk, I think.
And these Giant Funnel Fungi are rather fine too. Regular readers know that I am keen on foraged food, but I’m glad I didn’t bring these home. Here’s what the website Wild Food says: ‘A large chunky mushroom which can be found in fairly large numbers and is edible to most but can cause gastric upsets in some. This doesn’t really matter as the mushrooms are usually infested with maggots, even when young, making them more maggot than flesh. Not so appetising then … but look how huge they are! That’s a bit of my boot at the bottom of the frame.
This is the last day of November, a month in which Becky has been encouraging us to get out walking, whatever the weather. I’m glad I’ve joined her, and everyone who’s participated in Walking Squares. Thank you!
And I’m going to see if my header photo squeezes in as a Mid-Week Monochrome.
For her Walking Squares challenge, Becky is encouraging us to walk whatever the weather. On Thursday, I had no choice: I was on duty at Fountains Abbey. The rain was so vertical, so clamorously unrelenting that getting out camera or phone would have been foolish. Once I’d faced the fact that that I’d drawn the shortest of short straws, I quite enjoyed the ceaseless drumming of the water, dodging the puddles as they became rivers, and watching the water birds demonstrating by their surly inactivity that even they thought it was all A Bit Much.
Unexpectedly, a quarter of an hour before it was time to go, the rain stopped. The sky lightened, the puddles offered up reflections, and – thank goodness – I turned round, in time to see this rainbow. Probably just past its best, but at least I saw it.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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