“March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.”
– LM Montgomery
The gleam of chill sunshine on the dew-drenched field gives a surreal silvery glow.
A single crow stands sentry in the tree at the entrance to school.
I emerge from school into a peaceful pastel twilight of pink, blue and orange; birds chirp in muted tones from the trees, and even the sound of traffic feels hazy and distant.
Fat white buds are bursting into delicate white blossoms along the reaching fingers of blackthorn.
Fields along the roads edge have been ploughed into rich chocolate brown, velvety perfection.
Lexi giggles, “Miss, your voice is really cute. “
I currently have a sore throat and sound like a chipmunk … I’m not sure I’m feeling particularly cute!
Above the distant tractor, a cloud of white gulls wheel and dance; swirling down to the ground and then taking flight again.
Stately silvery-brown old beeches are wearing fuzzy, mossy slippers in bright green.
In the morning quiet, in that calm before the students arrive, I’m sure I hear a piercing whistle … the oystercatchers are back!
A woman in a padded coat walks her small, grey, curly-haired dog; her coat matches the colour of the ornamental cherry blossom above her.
Tiny diamonds sparkle on the velvet petals of a magnolia flower.
At the base of a fallen tree, a wolf struggles to stand from its mossy bed, gnarled wooden limbs enmeshed in roots and branches 🔽.
A heron flaps heavily overhead with a raucous screech.
Nestled in the flat, grey sky, a tiny patch of rainbow shimmers and glimmers.
Fat ivy stems, woven into intricate Celtic knots, crawl up the tree trunks along the path.
The pavement is littered with ash keys, as if some unknown entity has been rummaging through a drawer to find the correct one before trying to open an unexpectedly locked door.
It’s amazing how judgemental a pheasant can look when it feels that you are disturbing it.
In my seed trays, twenty seven tiny green sprouts have appeared … If they all make it to maturity, it’s going to be a very tomatoey summer!
Wind howls hungrily at the windows, battering and buffeting the glass to find a way in.
Along the branches of the pine trees, nestled amongst the needles, the ladybirds have come out to play.
“… bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.”
– Carol Ann Duffy , ‘The Bees‘
Picture the scene: A car pulls up and parks in a lay-by at the side of a back road. The driver gets out of their car and starts getting their dogs ready for a walk … only to notice a strange woman lurking next to the blackthorn bush on the other side of the road, peering closely at the flowers and occasionally taking photos.
Yup; that’s me. The strange woman (obviously), not the dog walker! But what am I supposed to do when there’s fresh blossom on the hedge and a low hum emanating from the branches. I mean, of course I’m going to practice my lurking.
Irritatingly, the bees were less than impressed at my skills and did their absolute best to stay far from my lens … although that didn’t seem to stop the low level fly-bys past my face. However, I did notice these little beauties who were rather more absorbed in their lunch than the others and seemingly oblivious to my presence.
They are, I believe, a Sphecodes spp; possibly Sphecodes gibbus, the Dark-Winged Blood Bee. But please take that with a giant pinch of salt; all the insect identification sites state that this is a difficult (some sites go as far as ‘impossible’) genus to identify, requiring expert identification using characteristics unlikely to be visible in photographs.
Whichever version of Sphecodes this is though, there are some things that remain the same. The genus is one of cuckoo bees; bees that are kleptoparasitic on other ground-nesting bee species such as Lasioglossum, Halictus and Andrena. They enter the burrows, kill the existing egg or larvae and replace it with their own egg. Apparently, this genus doesn’t specialise in parasitising a specific species and have been observed in the nests of multiple different species from the genera mentioned above.
The individuals in my photos must be females as the males don’t emerge until later in the year (July onwards). They were singlemindedly eating the nectar from these flowers; because they don’t feed their own larvae, they have no need to collect pollen.
I left them to it and wandered back into the woods, slowly making my way back to the car and in turn back home for my lunch!
“The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it. So while I was waiting it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more fun,’ said Lu-Tze.”
– Terry Pratchett, ‘Thief of Time’
Perplexed? Of course we are. Because I’m delving in to entomology again. And that’s always a recipe for bewilderment!
There I am, kneeling in the damp leaf litter, taking photos of the very first bluebells of the year (and trying desperately to remember when they flowered last year … was it earlier or later than today?) when suddenly I see something perched at the very top of a purple blue spike.
My first thought is one of the sweat bee species … it’s that kind of size. Under a centimetre in length. You know, the kind of size that makes it a real challenge to get your camera to focus properly. It’s got a small blob* (I don’t really know what else to call it) between the base of its wings. Its head and thorax are a reddish bronze colour and its abdomen is a deep burnt orange. It seems slightly hunchbacked; maybe because of that blob?
A Google image search tells me it’s some kind of gall wasp, although it’s remarkably close-lipped about exactly which species of gall wasp it might be. I was leaning towards an Oak Marble Gall Wasps (Andricus kollari) which seems to have the blob and be about the right colour, but then I read the bit about them being only 1.5 – 2.0 mm long and gave up on that idea.
Another possibility is the Bedeguar Gall Wasp (Diplolepis rosae) which is a better size at around 4mm in length. The colour seems about right, but in the few pictures I can find, it doesn’t seem to have quite the same blob between its wings. This is the wasp that makes those beautiful, wispy, feathery, ferny growths on wild roses. Robin’s Pincushion galls. The ones that look like clumps of moss, or harvest mouse nests. I’d love to know why they’re so intricately shaped. I understand that somehow the wasp larvae injects some kind of chemical into the plant while it’s eating it that makes it grow a structure in which the larvae can then safely develop. But why is it wispy? How does that benefit the wasp? Surely a smooth surfaced structure would work just as effectively? Does it benefit the rose? That doesn’t seem particularly plausible either.
Also, and this is completely unconnected to the structural mystery, havinf always assumed that they were named after the robin because of the way the gall turns red in winter, it turns out that the Robin is none other than Robin Goodfellow, otherwise known as Puck, who can be found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I have also just discovered that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the galls were used variously to ‘cure’ toothache, diarrhoea, whooping cough, rheumatism, insomnia, balding and as a charm against flogging. That last one feels like a bit of a stretch, even for then!
* I went off on a bit of a tangent in my mind here about those fungal species that infest an insect, making it climb to the top of the tallest plant it can find and wait there for something to eat it. It’s taken me this long to remember its name, but Cordycepsspp was what I was thinking of. I think we have them in the UK and maybe they’re the sort that cause insects to act weirdly. And then the insect in question moved and hid round the corner of a bluebell flower so I retracted that thought and went back to trying to figure out what it was.
“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
– Michael Crichton
Unlike my last, bee-centric post, this one is going to give you a definitive identification. And it’s a good one. This little beauty is the Yellow Star of Bethlehem (Gagea lutea). It’s rare in Britain, growing only in one location in Norfolk, where it’s thought to be naturally occurring.
I first found this about ten years ago and I try very hard to come and find it again every year. Some years I get the dates wrong, or I forget, or life gets in the way. Because of this, if I’m honest, it’s been a few years since I last saw it. Last year, I think I must have missed it by a week or so as everything was a little bit more advanced than it was today. Before that, the weather was just grey and wet and not conducive to a walk in the woods.
Today, I wandered the pathways, peering across the floor, trying to distinguish a weirdly invisible yellow flower from its surroundings. I say weirdly invisible because it’s always really difficult to spot. I know in photos it’s blatantly obvious but in reality, with Spring sunshine shining patchily on the woodland floor, with clumps of bluebell leaves springing up all over the place, and with the yellow flowers of primrose and lesser celandine providing just enough camouflage, they are virtually impossible to spot. Their petals appear almost translucent in the sun (especially in older flowers) and the back of each has a green line down its centre which makes it even harder to see. All in all, it’s not an easy flower to find … despite growing in reasonable numbers right next to the path.
It’s a perennial species, a spring flowering member of the lily family. It’s also, despite its name, absolutely no relation to the white Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalumumbellatum) or the Spiked Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum pyrenaicum), neither of which I have ever found in the UK, but both of which I have seen in the south of France. I really do wish that early botanists had got their ducks in a row before naming things!
“She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: Winter is dead.”
– A A Milne, ‘When We Were Very Young’
After a couple of days of warm(ish) sunshine, Spring, it seems, is springing into action. And I am back to being slightly bewildered … or should I say bee-wildered? (I’m really sorry, it just happened; I’ll try very hard to ensure it never happens again!) Anyway, moving swiftly on; the bees are out buzzing around and I’m out chasing them round with a camera and then spending ridiculous amounts of time trying desperately to identify them.
Today’s bee is, I (very) tentatively posit, the Bronze Furrow Bee, otherwise known as Halictus tumulorum. Slightly less than a centimetre long, I found two different individuals, both sitting motionless along the petal of a Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna). They are metallic green or bronze and have hairy white bands on their gasters (or abdomens for those of us who are slightly less entomologisty). They are also basically impossible to definitively identify without dissecting the male genitalia … which feels both a little bit mean, and impossible for a mere amateur. So I’m going with a likely match, based on size, colour, and time of year.
As always, if I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me.
Now, I will freely admit that I have a terrible habit of anthropomorphising nature wildly. I’m blaming the many, many hours I spend every term trying to get students to recognise and recreate personification in their writing. But sometimes, you see something that is such a human characteristic that you cannot help but personify it. These two bees were laying out full length on glossy, sunshine yellow celandine petals, liberally dusted with pollen and entirely immobile. Despite the large human waving a phone in their faces, despite the malfunction of said phone camera and the need for the large human to turn it off and turn it back on again, despite the camera needing to be very close to their faces, despite all this, they didn’t move. To the point that I had to nudge the petal and get them to wave their antennae at me to ensure they weren’t deceased. They looked like they’d had several drinks too many and were sleeping off the after effects. They were flower drunk and not afraid to show it!
“I kept turning pages in my mind I kept crossing paths and crossing lines And I saw more Than these doors and corridors“
– Clare Bowen, ‘Doors and Corridors’
I feel like I’ve been much more negative than usual in recent months and it really isn’t sitting right with me. The point of this blog has always been to concentrate on the positive and burble away in a (hopefully) relatively entertaining way. There are a myriad little reasons (nothing life-altering, but lots of deep-rooted irritations) to explain why my attitude has become a little more ‘survive’ and a little less ‘thrive’ recently but I’m damned if I’m going to let external factors keep dulling my sparkle and enjoyment of life any longer.
To try and combat my annoyance* with various things at school, I decided to start a Writers’ Group. We are going to meet on a Wednesday lunchtime to see if we can develop a (deeper) love for creative writing. Being a lunchtime club, it is, of course, voluntary … which meant that on the first Wednesday I had absolutely no idea who would turn up. Or indeed, if anyone would turn up. Half of me was expecting that I’d be sitting there all alone *can you hear the sounds of a tiny violin?* in my room. I mean, what self-respecting teenager wants to spend their meagre lunchtime thinking about English, and words, and writing? Happily, that half of me was, well, in a word, wrong.
I had about ten students, which was perfect. I didn’t want too many; that would have just meant I didn’t have the ability to speak to each of them on an individual basis. I also didn’t want just one or two; I’d really like this to be something interactive and that’s just plain difficult if there’s only a couple of kids there. I explained how I thought it would work and then we got on with it.
Now, our lunchtime is a grand total of twenty five minutes long … which is going to make this a bit of a challenge at times. It’s hard to deliver a new idea, get the kids going on it and get any meaningful writing down on paper in such a short period of time. But we shall do our best.
For the first session, I’d come up with a couple of different ideas, but decided to roll with the concept of cut up poetry. I hadn’t had the time (or the forethought … I mean, how does Wednesday roll around quite so quickly every week?) to ask students to bring any printed material with them, so I raided my stash of past issues of Wanderlust magazine and photocopied lots of random pages because they’re so beautiful, I just couldn’t bear to chop them up.
We cut and snipped and chose our words. If I’m honest, I let them choose their words first and decided I would work with whatever was left. We didn’t have a lot of time and we mostly got our words chosen and stashed away in poly-pockets to work on at home. It was really lovely to see how enthusiastic the kids were about crafting something. I’ve seen a couple of the poems they created since and they are beautiful.
It’s surprisingly therapeutic to sort through someone else’s words and choose the ones that resonate best in your own head. I spent a happy couple of hours playing with words, moving phrases around and substituting something that worked a little better. This was where I got to: It’s not the most profound piece of writing, but it pleased me at the time.
The following week’s challenge was very different. In August, I read Gareth Brown’s ‘Book of Doors and it stuck with me (well worth a read if you’re looking for a book recommendation). The idea that doorways can be made interchangeable is a very appealing one. Stand in front of any door, clearly visualise the door you want to walk through, open the door and step into your chosen location. How fantastic would that be? To be able to travel anywhere in the world without the hassle of airports and traffic and parking.
So I spent a happy Sunday afternoon Googling doors around the world until I had a collection of varied, beautiful, colourful, decrepit, and just plain weird pictures of doors. I printed them, cut them all out and got ready to deliver my challenge: for them to choose a door that spoke to them and write a response. If they went through their door, where would they end up? What would they find? How would it feel?
I got a bit sidetracked then by a student who’d popped in for a last minute chat about an abbreviated version of ‘An Inspector Calls’ that they were performing the following day. A great chat, but inconveniently timed; I ran out of time having given the group very little input and was really worried they’d think I didn’t care and would drift away and not bother turning up today. Which made it all the more wonderful when I had some extras come to join us today. Betsy wandered through the door, full of apologies because she’d forgotten her notebook; could she possibly grab some paper to work on today. Iris scuttled in a couple of minutes late, having had to brave the cafeteria queues to get some lunch. Gabi, Lilly and Poppy waited ages before quietly saying, “Have you got any spare books, miss, it’s the first time we’ve been?”
We had a look at a local, Norwich based, writing competition that they could submit some work to and then we got on with writing. I think we all jumped when the bell rang to signal the end of lunchtime. I can’t wait to see what they produce.
If you’re interested, this is my door. It’s a photo that I took in Rouen last August, and I just love it. There’s something about the air of gentile decay that you find so often in French towns that really appeals to me … and who doesn’t love a bit of graffiti to spice things up?
* I have just realised that there is no noun form of the verb ‘to irk’ and if I’m honest, this feels like an egregious shortcoming in the English language. Irkation? (Following the examples of irritation, exasperation and vexation) or irkance? (Following annoyance, inconvenience and nuisance**)
** Even more vexatiously, there is no longer a verb form of ‘nuisance’. In the Middle Ages, from about 1350 to 1500, it used to exist. The verb was ‘nuise’, from the Latin ‘nocēre’, by way of the French ‘nuisir’***. And they just let it die out. Leaving us with a random gap in our language. English really is a constant trial to those of us that like a little bit of logic with our imagination!
“I have seen tempests when the scolding winds have rived the knotty oaks.”
– William Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar’
In Old Norse, Knútr means knot. This has been translated to Knud in Danish, Knútur in Icelandic, and Knut in Norwegian, Swedish and German. The anglicised version is Canute … as in King Canute, the man who is famous for attempting to control the tide:
When he was at the height of his ascendancy, he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, “You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master.” But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king’s feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, “Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthyof the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws.”
Henry of Huntingdon, ‘Historia Anglorum‘
But all that is an aside; what I’d really like to do is introduce you to Knútr. He’s a relatively new acquaintance of mine, but he’s fantastic. Knútr stands in the confines of Wayland Wood, right at the back in an old growth area. He’s a field maple, as per the tattered pennants of maple keys fluttering from his topmost branches, and his trunks stand guard around a central space where the ghost of an ancient trunk lingers. This is one of the most ancient patches of woodland in the UK with records of coppicing dating back to at least the 10th century (there are some ideas that it may have been here since the ice age, there have been artefacts found dating to the Neolithic period). Who knows what Knútr has seen; his current iteration may have only been around for decades, but his rootstock could have seen people from centuries ago.
In a couple of weeks, his feet will be covered by a sea of colour; the delicate pinkish-white of wood anemones, butter yellow primroses, the glossy, sunshine yellow of celandines and the soft, almost purplish blue of bluebells, but at the moment it’s all crunchy dry sepia leaves interspersed with the promise of bright green leaf shoots. A cold wind blows straight through the trees, colder somehow than it should be, perhaps because I usually spend much more time in this woodland later on in the year and I’m expecting something different.
Knútr’s trunks are gnarled and knotted with great circular bumps at intervals all the way up them. On closer inspection these bumps are formed from bundles of tiny twigs and buds springing from an underlying lump of wood. These are, I think, burrs (or burls if you’re either American or a woodworker); unusual growths on a tree which are caused by stress, fungus or viruses. It might seem like Knútr is deformed on the outside, but these growths create beautiful patterns in the grain and their wood is highly prized by woodworkers. Not that I’m going to chop him down or chisel out the wood, but it’s good to know that internal beauty lurks behind something that could be seen as ugly.
His burrs are adorned with wisps of bright green moss and the greyer green of lichen. There are mysterious holes amongst the twigs, like something escaped from inside. They make me think of galls, but everything I’ve read suggests that is not what these are. It’s easy to believe in magic when you stand here in this ancient space; to believe that fae creatures could have emerges from these holes and fluttered away, that these could be hatching chambers for winged beasts or a place for dryads to centre their being.
I leave Knútr to his contemplation of the world around him, and continue on my way. I’ll go back and visit again once the woodland has sprung a little further into spring.
“Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest.”
– William Sharp, ‘Where the Forest Murmurs’
On the screen, chilly blue fingers of shadow point the way down snowy slopes under azure skies; outside, the fingers are damp, grey digits, sliding under collars, pinching fingers, and smearing moisture across cheeks.
Black beans bubble in the crockpot, their steam redolent of spices from warmer climes: cumin, coriander and chilli … almost as good as foreign travel.
As the wind rises, the leylandii shakes out its branches; a flamenco dancer settling her ruffles as she gets ready to dazzle a crowd.
Despite the Merlin app telling me that their presence is ‘unlikely in Norfolk’, four cranes trumpet loudly across a wet field. It sounds like elephants roaming the county.
A hunched dark shape perched on one of the thinner branches of a tree turns out, on closer inspection, to be a buzzard, and not a vulture or a gargoyle.
In the flowerbed on my way to work, under the deep shadowy edge of an evergreen hedge, a single purple muscari has appeared overnight.
The quick, flittering movements outside the kitchen window resolve themselves into two robins, busily feeding in the winter flowerbeds.
Packets of mock standardisation material have arrived on my desk; February is the start of an extended exam season that begins with Year 11 mocks, continues with Year 10 mocks and culminates in the GCSEs.
Wish me luck …
Like small children playing hide and seek, arms and legs sticking out all over the place, two trees peer over the top of the privet hedge, their blossoms pale and messy in the grey morning light.
“My cat fell downstairs!” announces Erin; an attempt to distract me from the fact that she has managed to leave her glasses at home again and can’t actually see.
It almost works … why would her cat not have the balance its species is known for?
A tiny sunshine star is buried in the grass by my car.
The lonely ‘kee’ of a buzzard echoes through the sky as I hang my washing out; the world feels like it’s waking up again.
Gazing out of the window while the photocopier does its thing, I notice that the untidy gaggle of seagulls on the field bears more than a passing resemblance to the students at lunchtime.
Scarlet elfcups scattered across the woodland floor fool me into the belief that someone has discarded small pieces of plastic. Reality is so much better than my fear.
Freya comes to show off the creative writing book she’s decorated following our inaugural Writers’ Group session on Tuesday. She shyly shows me the beautiful poem she worked on at home.
Buds are appearing on the fruit trees; it won’t be long until they burst into flower and leaf.
I tuck seeds into their beds of compost, dreaming of long summer days, a glut of Cosse de Violette beans and tomatoes, and the things I can cook with them.
Crabapple blossom has appeared along the hedgerows; delicately crumpled scraps of blush pink, offering hope for the coming year.
“The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.”
– G.K. Chesterton, ‘Heretics’
I have a bit of a confession; I rather like fence posts. I recognise this piece of information probably makes me a bit weird, but it is, nevertheless, the truth. We have some great fences round here … gnarled, weatherworn, and deeply grooved. I mean, just look at that texture!
Sometimes it’s the post itself, but most of the time, it’s what’s growing on top that really makes my day. Atop these characterful posts, there are tiny little worlds just waiting to be explored. Lumps and bumps of vibrant green. Velvety cushions strewn across hardwood floors. There are red tipped lichenous spikes, an orchestra of grey-green trumpets and many slender, fragile columns holding aloft the foundations of the next generation.
On the day I took these photos, everything was sprinkled with a glitter of diamond bright droplets. Not from rain, but from mist. Or low-hanging cloud. Or mizzle. Or whatever name we were using for it that day. Somehow, it made the moss look alive. I mean, I know it is alive, but it started to seem sentient. Tentacles reached out from behind tuffets of green, each one topped with an eye and bejewelled along its length. Even the velvety cushions seemed to be small furry creatures, hunkered down against the rain.
As a kid, I read a book called ‘The Forest of Bowland Light Railway’, in which my favourite characters were called cowzies (Looking back, they form a very tiny part of the book, but they were the bit that stuck with me!). Small bundles of fluff, they lived deep in the forest alongside the gnomes, the leprechauns, and the wild animals;
A cowzie is about as high as a rabbit sitting up on its hind legs. It has no arms and no legs to speak of, and its eyes though small, are hidden under long hair like a toy terrier, the kind old ladies and old maids loaves to carry about and which are always yapping.
The cowzies’ teeth, though hidden in their long hair, were as sharp as needles and about the sane length.
– BB, ‘The Forest of Boland Light Railway’
To me, tiny lumps of moss always remind me of cowzies; there’s no telling what teeth, eyes and features might hide under their fluffy exterior; they’re incredibly resilient, surviving hot dry summers, soaking wet autumns and freezing winters; they huddle together for warmth, and look incredibly cute and whimsical throughout all of it.
I mean, this one basically has whiskers to sense the world around it.
“Not lovelier. But a different kind of loveliness. There are so many kinds of loveliness.”
– L M Montgomery, ‘The Blue Castle’
Just in case anyone is wondering, spring has not sprung; Norfolk is still brown; and it’s definitely still raining. Ugh. I watch the pictures of gorgeous, fluffy flakes of snow falling thickly over the Olympic venues and dream of proper winter, of frost and snow and ice. And then I glance out of the window and my dreams come squelching down around my ears, soaked through and dissipated by the ever-present, constant drizzle a Norfolk winter brings.
Despite the rain though, I managed to get out today for a very short walk. I’d been over to my local garden centre to pick up some compost; thinking about planting my veggie seeds for the summer is helping banish the blues, even if they’ll have to be inside seeds for the next little while. On the way back, I took a slight detour and stopped to take advantage of a short break in the weather. I’m not sure if it was beginning to get dark, or whether it was just the approaching clouds (it’s difficult to tell the difference), but it wasn’t what I’d call a cheerful afternoon whichever it was.
I meandered down the road from the car, splashing through puddles and marvelling at how much water the edges of the road can contain before it’s actually called a flood. I’d chosen to go and investigate a local ford. It’s not really on the way to anywhere, so not somewhere I’ve found myself for years. The road only leads to one of the entrances to the battleground* so nothing but army trucks ever fords the river. Probably a good job given the huge amounts of water currently swirling and gurgling its way along the (much wider than normal) river bed.
*There’s a huge area (30,000 acres) just down the road from me that’s been used for training by the army since 1942. They co-opted and evacuated six villages during WWII and created a huge training facility. Apparently, there’s all sorts of training areas within it, including barious villages used for urban warfare training. It’s the reason why living here is sometimes like living in downtown Beirut, with machine gun fire and circling helicopters all night, and occasional tanks when you go round corners on the surrounding roads. It was also the source of great confusion when, several years ago, myself and our Head of Year 7 sat down to work out the buses for transition week. We had a map, and just could not work out which high school half the villages sent their kids to. Turns out there were no kids and the battleground was not marked particularly obviously on the map …… oh, how the rest of the team laughed when we asked what was going on🤦♀️.
Anyway, the skies were grey, there was so much water hanging in the air that I really needed gills in place of lungs and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to take pictures. Everything was just so … monotone. But as I stomped up the road, surrounded by the drab brown of last year’s plants with their hanging leaves, I noticed something. Here and there, in and amongst those leaves were tiny flashes of orange and red. Despite the damp, despite the cold, despite the wind, a loveliness of ladybirds had tucked themselves in for the winter and still slumbered, one can only assume peacefully, in their beds.
Proof, that even on the darkest and most miserable of days, there’s always a scrap of something positive to be found.
absolutelynotnormal 