Category: wildlife
Breakfast with Boris: there’s a thought to make you shudder. The ubiquity of TVs in public places is a regular complaint of mine; and a screen with the loon in question was not what we wanted as we ate our croissants and eggs (not simultaneously; we’re not savages!) the following morning. There he was, though. We chatted a bit with another pair of walkers who were going as far as Kirk Yetholm today “though we might go further”. All the guidebooks were very clear that there was nothing but hills between Kirk Yetholm and Hethpool (where we were staying in the only available rooms), so why tell us that? What’s all that about?thing 9: ‘married to amazement… taking the world in my arms’: a murmuration of starlings
Extraordinary, mysterious and beautiful. And happening live, in front of us, right here, right now.
At the beginning of part two of his autobiography, Clive James comments on his first sight of snow and the English cityscapes, noting: ‘what I was seeing was a familiar [sight] made strange by being actual instead of transmitted through cultural intermediaries’. Replace the word ‘strange’ in that sentence with ‘make-you-weep wonderful’ and you have something of what it was like to see a murmuration of starlings. I’ve seen them on TV and youtube, seen the images reproduced (more…)
thing 2: ‘named by sunlight’: the morning walk
Marooned on a far-away planet, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker, Arthur Dent, wakes up and gives ‘his early morning yell of horror’.
A Martin Amis narrator talks of ‘the difference between cosmic reality and how you sometimes feel when you wake up in the morning’. Doctors (and obsessively-Googled medical sites) refer, more blandly, to ‘diurnal mood variation’. But whatever you call it, how you feel in the morning is not always good.
Or at least, how I feel in the morning. I shouldn’t make assumptions, though I suspect I’m not alone in frequently finding myself struggling, on waking. There’s a greyscale (more…)