Watching us watching them, on a quiet walk through the deer park at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal
Have you spotted the two albinos?
Postcards of a drystone wall – or two
You can’t live near the Yorkshire Dales and not love a drystone wall, carving up the landscape into pasture-sized segments. But are they better photographed in black and white or colour? They are after all, fairly monochrome themselves, Only you can decide …
Near Grassington, Wharfedale
Near Hebden, Wharfedale
Enough of decisions. Here are a couple in good old-fashioned black and white.
This one’s for Monday Window. It’s not often you see a window above a dry stone wall. And this one’s not quite in the right place. The view could have been better framed. And a bit of double glazing wouldn’t come amiss.
And finally…
The featured photo shows part of Brimham Rocks, Nidderdale
Noticing the notices: a Saturday smile.
Trawling through my photos looking for something I couldn’t find, I came across these.
No driver in India needs to be asked twice to use their horn. At any time of the day or night. 
I didn’t stay here …. 
… or take this advice 
Wensleydale Railway. We shut the gate. 
Sadly, we saw no red squirrels in Dumfries and Galloway 
Cádiz 
So we didn’t. 
I can’t remember where we spotted this pub. Just as well. 
‘Going to the hairdresser is the best natural anti-depressant’: Cádiz.
Especially after Lockdown …
The featured photo comes from RSPB Saltholme.
My neighbours the animals
Lockdown again. Forensic exploration of our own neighbourhood again, as we set off for daily exercise. Yet one way or another, I’ve posted dozens of shots of the area I call home, and I can’t expect others to delight in it as I do. The other day though I noticed, as I hadn’t since the car-free spring lockdown when birds were vying for territory and nesting, distant birdsong.
It made me think about the creatures who share our daily round. Not the elusive ones – the stoats, weasels, foxes, deer who decline to stick around as you get your camera out. The types like Basil and Brenda, as our neighbours call the over-sexed pigeons who stomp across their roof, noisily indulging their passion at 6.00 a.m.
The horse who moved in with the Jacob sheep in the next field at the beginning of lockdown when her stables closed for business. She’s still here. The hens next door, who sometimes deliver eggs for our breakfast.
The large flocks of sheep who are part of every farmer’s daily round in these parts – no cattle for us..
The heron who nicks fish from our landlord’s pond.
The mallards on the village pond, and the crows on the rooftops. The squirrels dashing across our path and up the nearest tree. The pheasants who are even more abundant this year, as lockdown’s put a stop to the shooting parties they were specifically bred for. Rabbits too. So many rabbits. Why haven’t I got any photos of them?
The featured photos shows our much-frequented path through Sleningford Hall at Easter time, with all the new lambs.
Wordless Wednesday
Black and white postcards from not-far-away
It’s lockdown again. Best not travel too far for our day out: we’ll whizz round North Yorkshire, and send a few postcards, old style, in black and white.
Annoyingly, I don’t seem able to label these photos, but there are clues in the tags. But – they’re all in North Yorkshire…
…except for one: here are godwits at Slimbridge:
Grim thoughts, rather flawed
With apologies to Robert Browning and his celebration of an English springtime: ‘Home thoughts from abroad‘
Oh to be in England,
Now that Covid’s here.
And whoever comes to England
Will find people unaware
That masks are meant to hold germs in
Not languish, limp, beneath the chin.
We’ve got to keep the rules somehow – in England, now.
Autumn’s gone, let winter follow:
‘Our Christmas spoilt! How grim the morrow!’.
Ah! Where once our weeks were crammed quite full
Of work and friends and all that kind of biz,
Our new life’s this, it’s really rather dull.
Get used to it, ‘cos that is all there is.
Our freedom’s lost and with it all recapture
Of any carefree sense of rapture.
But though our lives look rough, with pleasures few
All will be fine when once the vaccine’s due.
The hugs and handshakes all will start again
And this past year will all feel quite insane.
MTL: November 2020
The featured image shows a socially distanced Masham Market during the first lockdown.
Autumn in Glorious Black and White
Suddenly, autumn is almost over. Those rich burnished leaf tones of copper, gold, brass, bronze and rust are all but gone, released onto the woodland paths beneath the trees. It’s that final burst of colour that we love to celebrate: so how odd of me to choose trees as my subject for Jude’s Photo Challenge this week, where she invites us to look at shadow and texture in black and white. I thought it might be fun to allow craggy, nubbled trunks and bark centre stage, and to contrast them with the leaves, glossy this autumn from the rain that’s so often beaten them to the ground beneath the trees where they’ve been since spring time. And at the end, just a couple of trees reflected in different ways, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
The High Ride at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal
Two from the High Ride at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. The last image was taken a Kiplin Hall
One Misty Moisty Morning …
… yesterday in fact, I woke up to this.
It’s the same window I showed you last Monday, but now November mist has descended. I went downstairs. This.
It wasn’t raining. It wasn’t particularly cold. What’s one of the Commandments of Lockdown? ‘Thou shalt exercise daily’. So I did. I took my camera, and explored the local lanes: familiar sights blotted out, as others loomed out from the general obscurity. At just 11 o’clock, I stopped, just for a while: it was Remembrance Day. I heard what a rarely notice as I walk – the constant undertow of birds murmuring and chittering on more distant shrubs and trees. It reminded me of John Lewis-Stempel’s book – Where Poppies Blow. This wonderful account examines the restorative role of nature to those soldiers confined to the trenches in the First World War. For just a fleeting instant, this was a moment I could share with them. Except I came home to a glowing wood-burning stove and a hot cup of coffee.
Six Degrees of Separation in November.
Last month, I ended my chain of books for Six Degrees of Separation with Mudlarking, Lara Maiklem’s engaging account of uncovering London’s history through those artefacts she discovers lurking under the silt of the Thames. This month, I thought I’d go dredging too, and try to remember books I’d enjoyed several years ago. What had stuck in my mind?
Maiklem has her own personal museum collection, I’m sure. Twelve year old Clover Quinn is making a museum, in Carys Bray’s The Museum of You. She’s a sweet child, but a bit isolated from her peers. She likes her dad’s allotment, and museums. In fact she secretly decides to make her own museum in memory of her mum, who died when Clover was six weeks old. Gradually her story unfolds. Her dad Darren’s story unfolds, and her mum Becky’s story unfolds. A skilfully constructed tale.
This gull on the Thames in London probably does a spot of mudlarking too.
Peas on an allotment. Darren’s allotment?
Mary Lennox is a solitary child too. Surely, as children, most of us read about this orphaned girl who’s moved from India to England, and about the children she learns to think of as friends? We read about how their lives become fundamentally changed in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, set somewhere in deepest Yorkshire.
Another Secret Garden.
My next choice involves another isolated individual, and in Yorkshire too. Sanctuary. Robert Edric re-imagines the tragic and self-destructive life of Branwell, brother of the more famous and successful Brontë sisters in a book I haven’t forgotten since I read it maybe five years ago. Branwell is the ‘author’ of this book, and paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death.
The parsonage and church than Branwell knew so well.
Another life cut short: Simon Lambeau dies in a surfing accident, and his parents have to decide whether to allow his heart to give someone else the chance of life. The journey of Simon’s transplant organ explores the metaphysical zone between life and death, and remains one of the most breathtakingly engaging and unusual books I have ever read. Mend the Living, by Meylis de Karangal. Just … read it.
This is North Yorkshire, not France. A surfer’s sea?
None of these is a light read. Let’s stay with a sea-related theme: The Penguin Lessons, by Tom Mitchell. I didn’t expect to like this book. The story of how Mitchell keeps a penguin during his days as a school teacher in Argentina promised to be a fey, sentimental read, I thought. But it wasn’t. Though light in tone and amusing, it highlighted the real challenges faced, and life-lessons learnt from caring for a wild beast in a thoroughly domestic setting. A somewhat thought- provoking and satisfying holiday read.
As I didn’t have a suitable photo, this guillemot on the Farne Islands will have to stand in for a penguin in Argentina.
From a penguin in captivity to a fish in captivity: Fishbowl, by Bradley Somer. A goldfish falls from his usual home on the 27th floor of an apartment block (where he’s sort of looked after by over-sexed Connor) downwards to the pavement beneath. On his way he passes apartments in which small dramas are being acted out, lives becoming changed. A quirky read.
I’ve a feeling this is a carp, not a goldfish. And it’s a carp in pond in South Korea, rather than a goldfish in a bowl.
We seem to have travelled a long way from the Thames in London: to Yorkshire, to France, to Argentina and America. And I’ve rediscovered the pleasure I had from some books I first read quite some time ago.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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