An occasional collection of snippets of momentary contentment. Not all worthy of their own posts, but collected together for my personal enjoyment. If this page brings you a measure of happiness, so much the better.
Category: words
A delightful conjunction of astronomical events yesterday and this morning. A 95% solar eclipse at teatime, and the Perseid meteor shower in the wee small hours of today. I didn’t join the huge queues of people trying to buy eclipse glasses in Bridport or begging on Facebook, as…
We have had the unusual pleasure of sharing our house with a little shrew for the last few days. We often have shell-shocked voles lurking in the corner of the kitchen (thanks to our cats), which are duly given time to recover then released in the garden. But…
This post is prompted by a year-long course I’m doing, emphasizing the importance of both presence and being ‘in the moment’. An evening walk down the lane from my house – just a few hundred steps in the cool evening breeze just before sunset. Long shadows, golden light…
This post is an account of a walk I took this sunny morning to see my favourite tree. It’s an absolutely magnificent English Oak, growing at the edge of a sunken lane at the bottom of a valley with high slopes either side. This has created a sheltered…
I’ve been making the most of the wet indoor weather by taking a number of workshops with the RPS Digital Imaging Group. Two of the presenters – Brad Carr and Paul Sanders – both emphasised the importance of feelings and presence as part of the process. So I’ve…
This is my first venture into book publishing other than on a one-off basis. Field Studies is my tribute to our farmers and their influence on the landscape. Taking photos of arable and grassland fields was a project I started more than 20 years ago, and which still…
Today’s word of interest is “Dunkelflaute“, formed by combining “Dunkelheit” (darkness) and “Windflaute” (little wind) to describe heavy overcast skies and light wind conditions. As you may have noticed, UK weather has been in this condition for a number of days now – in meteorological parlance, an anticyclonic…
This year, our Egremont Russet apple tree was laden with apples despite the hot dry summer. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been eating windfalls, but recent winds and the inevitable abscission process have meant that they are dropping in significant numbers, so today I hauled out…