Natural highs and lows

Posts

Supermarket sweep

It's January, so as is the way of things these days, I remember that I am not immune to a little competitive birding. After all, when you're the worst birder in the house, you have to take your chances when you see (or hear) them. Essentially, if I wake early on New Year's Day, I can be ahead of the game for about two hours, or until Megan surfaces from her slumbers. For the remainder of the 364 days and 22 hours, I'm fighting a losing battle as, short of a miracle, I'm not going to see (or hear) as many species as she is. Now, for the first few months, most of my list seems to come from birds seen whilst driving about for work, or the weekly food shop. But the other night, I did have one moment of complete chance which, if I'd kept quiet, would've been quite the domestic coup. In the wee small hours, I couldn't sleep, worrying about some of those little things which beyond all reason keep folk awake. Outside in the pitch black and freezing cold, I heard...

Wintry ramblings

As I write this, snowflakes are gently falling out of a sombre sky, carpeting the ground in fluffy mounds and making the garden look like it is having a duvet day. Eponymously, there are highs and lows to this state of affairs: vertically-falling snowflakes are much preferable to the horizontal hailstones we've been having for days now; whilst main roads are passable with care, side roads and tracks are treacherous; I am working from home today, so don't have to drive anywhere; because my car refused to start and is awaiting recovery to a local garage; for once, our garden looks as pretty as everyone else's. Instead, there's been some serious work admin-ing going on: invoices issued; bills paid; website updated; email folder looking slimmer than it has for ages (unlike me, after the feasting of the festive season); and, the navigation of an RAC online procedure that isn't really geared up for reporting a breakdown on a small Scottish island without a dedicated patro...

The Time-travelling Botanist

Recently, whilst browsing through a box file of family history notes, I came across something which I thought had been lost forever, either to a house clearance, various down-sizings or maybe just one move too many. The fact that I had, over the years, occasionally asked family members about it, clearly showed I had absolutely no idea whatsoever as to its location. Please do not worry, it is not some precious heirloom, well, not to the world at large, just to me. So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you an old school project from when NaHaL wasn't so naturally high (tall). A snapshot of the wild (I hope) flora around me in the north east of England when I was a child. Back then, home was an old station house alongside a disused railway, the passengers and freight a distant memory, the infrastructure dismantled and even the track bed recycled for its stone. This left behind a barren substrate of polluted material courtesy of more than a hundred years of coal and diesel-powered locomotiv...

Two become one

Whilst contemplating the reason for the recent lack of blog posting (a bloggage blockage, I suppose), the obvious conclusion was that a lack of wildlife watching (and therefore source material) was a major contributor to the problem. The causes of this were manifold: Weather - lots of it and all quite unpleasant; Work - when able (see below); Wellbeing - we picked up a cold bug at the end of November and it is taking some shifting; Wherewithal - our stamina has been hit for six. Let me clarify that statement about the lack of wildlife watching... there's been a lack of actively going outside with the intention of watching wildlife. Meanwhile, indoors, there's been much perusal of live webcams from at least four continents. I'm not complaining, mind, as I think we would have gone mad without the distraction from the previously-mentioned Four Double-ues of the Apocalypse. Thankfully, there have been fleeting moments of Nature's magic to lift the spirits and gladden the h...

Making a point

Our recent trip to Aberdeen for the Niteworks gig meant a couple of nights away from home. Outward bound, we sailed on the ferry from Shetland which called in at Kirkwall en route to Aberdeen. Leaving the ship the next morning, it wasn't until we were having breakfast in a cafe with a view of the harbour, that I noticed the huge mural on a building by the docks. This is " I am the keeper of magic " by Jasmin Siddiqui, a 12 floor tall mural adorning the Union Point building featuring a girl cradling a unicorn. At this juncture, I recalled that the unicorn is Scotland's national animal, and wondered if this type of art was a branch of pointillism? After a leisurely breakfast and some clothes shopping, we checked into our hotel early to deposit our rucksacks into a room, before heading out to explore a bit of the city. Our previous visit to Aberdeen had been three years ago, and although back then our room looked out over Union Terrace Gardens, they were in the middle o...

The morning after the night before

At the end of October, All Hallows' Eve passed quietly in our neck of the woods but, the following morning, a walk into the centre of town provided a glimpse into the previous night's high jinks. Flour, eggs and (hopefully) tomato ketchup were coating walls, doors and pavements as if to suggest that there had been an outside broadcast of a monster episode of MasterChef. Indeed, there was also a profusion of empty paper bags, egg boxes and plastic containers strewn around, and even some full bags of flour dumped in alley ways . My curmudgeonly reaction probably owed a great deal to my advancing years, but maybe also to the fact that when I was a youth, the ancient custom wasn't yet known as trick-or-treat in the UK, and was certainly less commercial. However, here in the 21st Century, and wearing my Love Food Hate Waste hat, I was a smidgeon irked. Returning home, I fired up my computer to see what a starving person (albeit one with internet and a functioning kitchen) m...