Tag: Last on the Card

Why did the Greylags cross the road?

We don’t know. In the village, we have ponds on either side of the road, so why bother? I suspect they enjoy having every car, motorbike and lorry grind to a halt, allowing a small and patient queue of traffic to form in both directions. Sadly, I’ve always been just a little too far away to get a photo that properly represents the tailback.

Practising road-crossing skills on a footpath.

Our geese are less than popular here. Because of them, our mallard population’s efforts to breed come to nothing. So far this year, no duckling has survived longer than two days. I’m more hopeful for the moorhens.

A solitary baby moorhen.

The pavements are thick with goose droppings and hard to dodge, especially if you’re a toddler. The geese have spread from their traditional home down the road at Lightwater Valley, where there’s still room for them. On our smaller village ponds, they’ve chased away any of the quite large variety of ducks who used at least to call in for a while.

They’re hissy, protective parents.

Looking around the area – generally, it seems that geese – generally – are out for World Domination. They’re tough enough not to be predated, and are fierce unfriendly neighbours. Does it look that way where you are ?

I’m getting in early for Brian’s Last on the Card. Just to make sure I don’t cheat and take any more photos this month, I’ll leave my phone behind, and not take my camera with me when I go out.

Last on the Card: May 2023

And also I J Khanewala’s Bird of the Week. This is a relatively new challenge- quite a few of you have great shots of birds – why not join in?

Welcome Wild Garlic

It’s spring. It must be. Wild garlic has – almost overnight – started rampaging through the woodlands near our house. A light tang of garlic pervades the air. And I go foraging. This is the season for:

Wild garlic and potato soup

Wild garlic pesto

Shredded fine and tossed at the last moment into scrambled egg.

Shredded and tossed into risotto at the last moment

Have you any favourite recipes?

And have you got a secret piece of ancient woodland where ransoms – the other name for wild garlic – flourish? If so, you’re probably as lucky as me, because wild garlic is often quickly followed by bluebells.

I took my feature photo yesterday, so it qualifies for Brian’s Last on the Card. Accompanying text is rather frowned upon. Tough. This is my post, and I’ll write if I want to.

A Daily Walk’s an Adventure in Serendipity

Lockdown in 2020 taught us to value the tiny slivers of the unexpected in our necessarily limited ‘Daily Exercise’. Here’s yesterday’s unexpected: a cluster of tiny mushrooms in autumn-leaf red, cheerfully growing in the middle of the village cricket pitch. I don’t know what they are. Do you?

They’re multi-tasking mushrooms, because they’re here for Becky’s Walking Squares, as well as for Brian’s Last on the Card for October. Brian insists that we don’t edit our photos, but if I need a square photo, I’ll just have to make a subtle clip, top and bottom. I might get away with it.

Last on the Card: I couldn’t possibly comment …

We all trotted off to Harewood House yesterday. This must-visit stately home between Leeds and Harrogate is a little notorious these days because the enormous wealth and privilege it represents was built as a direct result of the slave trade. Designed by architects John Carr and Robert Adam, it was built, between 1759 and 1771, for Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, a wealthy West Indian plantation and slave-owner.

These days, the family does what it can to move on from these distasteful roots. I’ll probably write more later about a current exhibition there – Radical Acts: Why Craft Matters, which looks at a wide range of social justice and environmental issues. But I found my last photo of the month, taken there, irresistible. It’s perhaps not the sort of poster you’d normally find gracing a stately home?

For Brian (Bushboy)’s Last on the Card: July 2022. A chance to show our last photo of the month, however good, bad or indifferent.

First Theatre Festival: Last on the card

Have I really not taken a photograph since last Sunday? Apparently not. But my last snapshot is a good souvenir. It’s the final event in Ripon’s first Theatre Festival, and here we all are, all 500 of us, at Fountains Abbey, waiting for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream played by the spirited and energetic Illyria to begin.

For Brian’s Last on the Card challenge, I’m only supposed you show my last photo, and without commentary at that, but why shouldn’t I give you a flavour of Saturday in the Market Square, with its bands, its jugglers, its stilt walkers, its slapstick entertainers?

My choir was part of the Fringe too, and sang a cappella at the bandstand in the Spa Gardens bright and early on the Saturday. But I couldn’t take a photo and sing too. You can take multi-tasking too far.

Just listen to that tree!

As you wander down the hill to Fountains Abbey, and arrive at West Green, you’ll spot a tree, a sweet chestnut tree with – how odd! – a girdle of headphones hanging from its branches.

This information board explains all: these headphones enable you to listen in, via highly sensitive microphones, to the hidden sounds of the tree.

Truly – it’s astonishing, mesmerising. Just as our blood courses round our body, day in, day out, so water and air courses constantly through the tree. Through headphones, it sounds something like the tinkling of a mountain stream as it tumbles over pebbles. And behind it, as your ears adjust, there’s a low, more intermittent soft rumbling sound. This is the tree moving. Saturday was a still day, but we could hear that rumbling as we listened closely. On a windy day, I wonder what we’d have heard?

This next photo is the last I took, and the last one of all for April, so one for Brian Bushboy’s Last on the Card

During May, I’m taking a break. I probably won’t even have a chance to read the posts of those of you I follow. When I get the chance though, I’ll try to send a virtual postcard or two.