Far from the madding crowd....
Sunrise over the North Sea, streaming across the extraordinary poppy fields that this year have coated north Norfolk in waving fields of blood.
A little while before sun rise I just caught the moon going down, a tiny bright pinprick in the sky:
And then here comes the sun, and I say, "It's alright...."
It all happens so fast. Daylight like a rising flash, a lightning, I find it all hard to believe, so I ask a passing skylark to take my pic from above:
And then he takes a speckled stutter of spatters without me (can you trust anyone these days?):
And that was last week.
Yes, life is racing by. Only a few weeks ago the cowslips were like a delicately quilted coverlet spread across the countryside.
Then they gradually faded, seeping into beige and pale lemony green. And then we had the poppies, fields and fields of them, filling the air with a dozy haze in the evening air while we walked.
Today I walk from my home to the north coast, some eight and half miles along lanes and footpaths, and the poppies are pale and fringed with age, their petals bruised with the flapping winds we have had in the last few days.....
And now they are being succeeded, by hawkweeds, or hawkbits, or common cat's-ears (please excuse my inexactitude; life is too short....)
So anyway. I've been in the city. I've had some slightly startling speedy heartbeats, and I am glad to be back in the fresh air, walking comfortably above the ground, fluttered by butterflies:
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| Two ringlets exchanging greetings |
I am just off the Peddars' Way, only sixteen miles north of Castle Acre,
The landscape tells human stories. Here a dry cereal crop leads you down to a red stone farm which lies just by the old railway line from Hunstanton to Fakenham.....
Here a shady oak frames a bucolic fold of hills with, though you cannot see it, a red kite trawling for worms.....
Then we have the hedgerows and wildflowers, exchanging their bodily fluids with the insects of the air to enable life, of all sorts, to go on. Without this, you should know, we are all doomed.... Insect sex is everything we need....
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| A white-tailed bumblebee on knapweed |
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| A six-spot Burnet moth on Knapweed |
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| A six-spot Burnet moth on field scabious |
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| A small white butterfly on bramble flowers |
John Clare wrote:
Though simple to some I delight in the sight
Of such objects that bring unto me
A picture of picturesque joy and delight
Where beauty and harmony be
Oh I love at my heart to be strolling along
Oer the heath a new impulse to find
While I hum to the wind in a ballad or song
Some fancy that starts in the mind
All seems so delightful and bring to the mind
Such quiet and beautiful joys
That the mind when its weary like hermits may find
A retreat from earths folly and noise
The Heath
John Clare
I walk on. Every day is new. The shift from yellow to red to brown and so on is all part of the rich weft of colour that our world, when undisturbed, offers to the wanderer. Seasonal. Transitional. Always changing; always developing. I am just perplexed by the rapidity of these changes.
Don't read anything into these musings. I breast the hill leading down to the coast and see, distantly but clearly, Lincolnshire to one side, and a wind farm to the other. As far as I can see there is life. And life only.
The foreground is filled with asparagus ferns, from the young plants that need to mature before they are harvested. This is where I live, now. This is beautiful. I am happy to share it with you.....
Time flies by
In the blink of an eye
When you get paid for having too much fun
Kicking out the foot lights
Living the night life
Like tomorrow ain't never going to come
Wouldn't change much of nothing
About this road we've been running
For of wild times, wild women, and a song
But we would've taken much better care of ourselves
If we would have known we would live this long
Live This Long
Willie Nelson
Merle Haggard
