Wonder

Birds of the air have nests...

but not in winter.

~~~

The mobile rang just as I reached the farm. 

'What have I forgotten?' I asked impatiently.

'That's what I was going to ask you.  Why did you stop, did you have a problem?'

I forget he watches to see the car pass the corner.

'No.  I stopped to look at the lapwings.  They were so close to the road.'

They taunt me all winter.  They rise up in whorls from the half-bare fields, dance and swirl over the hairy treetops as I stand by the kitchen window, then disappear before I can get outside.  They sit in pied and forest green splendour in the greening furrows, large as ducks, their crests art nouveau flourishes, as I drive past, and when I stop the car they rise in a crescendo of dazzling black and white rounded wings.  But only when I don't have the camera.

It occurred to me to wonder when I went out at dusk the other evening, where do they go at night?

I daresay I could find out.

~~~

Flickr e-mailed me.  Someone was including an old waterlily photo of mine for a gallery.  Galleries are a new Flickr thing, and a good one, I think.  You can collect up to 18, no more, of other people's images and curate them in a themed collection.  They are different from your own sets, and from the group pools which are endlessly added to and changing.  I am tempted back to Flickr, but I know I don't really have the time.  It needs input, and keeping up with, or it just becomes a back room with spare copies of photos in it, as it rather has for me now.  Mind you, I did get tired of the loud moving bits and pieces and gismos that people were always planting in the comments threads.  This place has to be my main on-line priority, and betimes you have to choose. 

But I did spend a very enjoyable bit of time browsing the galleries.  The best of them hang together with more satisfying consistency of style, texture, feeling than the work of any single photographer ever does.  It may not seem very creative simply to collect other people's work and put it together, but it is a reall skill to find compatible pieces, and the imposed limit of 18 images concentrates things.  One of my favourites was called 'Silences' . Some real breathtakers, I particularly loved the prow of the Viking ship in the museum, but altogether they are more than the sum; something about the dry,spare simplicity and the pale chalky colours, here and now in a wet Brittany November when everything seems dull, dark, smudged and saturated, was intensely refreshing.

You can browse more of them here, but be warned, if you find one you like, bookmark it, there doesn't seem to be a specific search function for them, it can be quite difficult to find one again.

~~~

Other wonders.  Steve's squirrels.  Growing up in England, red squirrels were a long-gone story from a mythical golden age, passed like Tolkien's elves into another place when the age of the American grey drew on.  I have seen them here in France, in Normandy and in the pinewoods of the Biscay coast, but rarely in these parts, with farming and deforestation.  But, in Bavaria Steve has them for neighbours and regular visitors to his house, and they are the main subject of his blog.  He must spend all his spare income on nuts. One of the squirrels is even black, with a dear little white bib and tucker!  Irresistible.

~~~

And finally, why, I wonder, isn't everyone reading Jarvenpa's poems?  I can't leave them alone.  I wish they were in a book, I want to carry them away with me, keep them in my bag, take them to work, keep them in the glove compartment, prop them up on the toaster, take them to bed with me... I've been trying to find a quotation from them to give as a taster, but they are all too good to select anything from.  Passionate is a very over-used word;  she seems to live in a perpetual flash of lightning.

~~~

The world is so full of a number of things....