Spinning thoughts

 

 

 

Spiegel im Spiegel, plays its slightly monotonous tune on my laptop, but it is soothing and as I spin, thoughts drifting everywhere, it at least relaxes the mind.  Images of skylarks rising from the grass, the golden plovers flight one early morning, swooping as they dive in formation the soft shush of their wings overhead.  What else, deer caught in the early warm orange glow of sunrise, standing still by the woods, listening and debating flight.  The old green lane, where I used to imagine the Saxon family lived, the bowl of hills lined with hanging woods, broken tarmac in places, where once military traffic had gone up in the 2nd World War to the planes which temporarily  took off from the old bronze age barrow cemetery on the Lansdown as they defended Bristol and Bath.

But cease, talk of war is not on the menu, I prefer to return to the ash trees that line the green lanes and the downs in this part of Somerset.  Have you ever seen a 'parliament' of crows, once I saw one it must have been summer, and they lined the white fencing of the race course, chattering away to themselves.......

 

 

Here is Monty at the start of our walk, some sort of hound, I used to walk round with his owner Alison, chattering away.  Monty was not terribly intelligent, Alison said of  him that two brain cells floated around in his brain

and occasionally collided giving rise to a thought!.  When snow lay on the ground, he would gather snowballs on his feet and mither about it, till in the end he would sit down and refuse to walk till they were removed.  He also chased the deer, one day he went off and we all searched most of the morning for him, Alison frantic because she adored him.  But as I was searching around the woods above in the first photo, he turned up through an old gate in the field, completely whacked and exhausted and pleased to see me, so all was well.  In the photo above you can see the sun rising next to Beckford's Tower, soon the old Victorian cemetery with its sunken graves will be full of violets and primroses, not something I see much in this part of Essex.