A warm and sunny day, too warm really to be out yomping another ten miles over the Lake District, but I think I survived it. The foxgloves were certainly relishing it. Pictured on the descent of Steel Fell, which is up there to the right, and above the valley of Greenburn Bottom (a name, which if unpicked, could result in all sorts of images).
The sun appears to have arrived in Hebden Bridge, bringing with it the bugs. But whatever bugs actually are, most of them in a British summer are not usually turquoise, with orange legs.
Working at home this morning, this thing starts crawling up the wall with its extraordinarily long legs. Imagine translating those legs to human size, they’d be thirty feet tall, you’d be one of the tripods from War of the Worlds. But seeing as it only has six of them — a spider this is not….
Despite the lack of encouraging conditions, some of the foliage is giving it a go. It can’t be easy under the monsoon, probably our equivalent of crawling out from under the duvet at 6.30am in February. Hence the ragged look of this bloom.
It’s not been the most exciting of weeks and local flowers and walls are about the limit of my ambitions for a time. Summer colours perhaps, but no summer weather: the monsoon remains clamped overhead with few signs of it shifting just yet.
Another of Hebden Bridge’s resident birds makes a reappearance on the blog — 8/11/15 was the same Muscovy duck, for instance. Not that it looks very happy about it today. Perhaps it’s just glum about the gloomy weather, the same as the rest of us.
It’s always good when one of the local heron population is posing in the morning on an otherwise photographically inert day.
Who knows for sure whether this is the same specific bird I’ve pictured before but (allowing for the foreshortening effect of me having taken today’s shot from about 30 feet above the heron’s head) the markings certainly look indistinguishable from those of our old friend Humph, as seen on 25/5/16 for example. How long do herons live, I wonder?
If you’ve been anywhere near the Mediterranean you know that it’s an ecosystem in which cats are one of the dominant lifeforms. These three are in charge of the taverna lying near the house of the friends I have come here to visit. Last day in Corfu. May it be less time than eight more years until I return.
There are over 3,000 species of dragonfly in the world, and they’re probably all a bugger to photograph. But this one sat still just for long enough, in the woods of Agii Deka (‘Ten Saints’), somewhere in the middle of Corfu. They are voracious predators, and this one does seem to have a ‘what are you looking at, asshole’ kind of stance. And yet, so beautiful.
After last year’s glut, our plums are going to have one of their years off, this is obvious already. But there are dozens of these little babies on the branches of the apple tree. Come back to us in September for the harvest.
Being 42 