Microcosmic

The path Walking along the canal towpath. Like a huge rockfall it falls away - the past shears off. Nothing ever happened. Nothing. And on the other side another landslip. The future. Nothing will happen. Nothing ever could. I suddenly arrive. I arrive here where I am. I'm a spacewalking astronaut, lifeline cut, no umbilical cord to before or after, floating in a starless, timeless void. I don't have any history, no name, I haven't done anything. Walking,, eating, drinking thinking, dreaming, sleeping - none of that. I drag no leaden ball of the past, no slights, hurts, heartbreaks. The slate wiped clean of wrongdoings, boasts, deceits, ill-thought-out misdeeds. That time, first day at secondary school when I wrote 'John Smith' on my exercise book, when all I had to do was write my name, and all the other boys laughed me back into a curled up fetus. Nope, never happened. But neither did those, smiles, laughs, kisses, loves, imagined culinary triumphs, successfully ...

The amazing sight of 100+ Goldfinches, just outside the window This is something I wrote on my first 'blog' Birds in a Cheshire Garden. Though back then - twenty years ago - blogs were still a twinkle in the internet's eye. I spent ten chairbound years looking out of a window onto a garden and a its birds. I was seldom down or bored - because of the birds. They kept me going. Finch Charming I can still remember the first Goldfinch I ever saw . A roadside of thistles glimpsed from the car held two excitingly unfamiliar birds. The sparks of colour brought a touch of the exotic to that urban scene. I knew I'd seen something like it in my Observers Book of Birds. Then came a flash of recognition as I mentally matched the painting of a Goldfinch with the finch-of-paradise I'd just seen It's funny how birds seemed more brightly coloured when I was a boy. Even so, many Goldfinches later, I still get a frisson of pleasure every time I see that combination of red, bla...

I’ve walked on the small corner of our planet – the one I call ‘my patch’ – maybe a thousand times. I’ve crossed this unexceptional parcel, when health allows, many times over the last few years. The same path from the cemetery on to the old abandoned golfcourse - nothing to see here. The track that becomes muddy after rain and seems want to stay muddy long after dryness has come back into fashion. But hang on... It’s never been muddy *quite* like this. I’ve had to skirt round it clinging to dry parts – but never *quite* in this way. And look at those thistles, that arrangement of flowers crossed with medieval weapons, one in front, two behind. And the way they seem to slide past the willows at the back, as I walk by – I’ve never, ever seen that – it's a totally new thing. What about that beech tree trunk with its network of byways made of darker bark as it dries out after rain. They'll soon go and only I will ever see these, and only now will I see them just like this....

This Skylark will change your life - no really! On my patch walk, I saw a skylark perched on a wall. I stopped to watch it for a while and took a photograph. It occurred to me that this bird has changed my life. All the subsequent moments after seeing the lark would have been slightly different had it not been there. And all those lark-rearranged causes and conditions will continue to cascade into the future. But what about the Skylark. It was only there, at that place and that time, because of a host of factors. That insect, would have influenced it – the one that laid its eggs, hatching into lark food….and that insect foodplant… And so it goes on. A ‘world wide web’ – an infinity of interconnections. Ripples on ripples. A friend on Facebook kindly posted a link to an article he thought would interest me. This reminded me of a documentary I’d seen before, which I then re-watched. My life will never be quite the same simply because of the handful of keystrokes and cli...

I stood beneath the Scots Pine, as if bathing in beams of solar flare, each shot through with swirling mist. One step to the left and it changed completely, another step forward gave me a whole new masterpiece. But not quite the same as a conventional masterpiece, say the Mona Lisa. At anyone time tens of people will be looking at it with you. And tomorrow many more. It's true each person will have a unique response. But they are apprehending, more or less, the same unchanging object before them. On the other hand I was literally the only person in the world seeing this lightshow. I was the only person who will ever see it and I will never see it again. My mood had been quite low before the shivelight extravaganza. I've seldom known such as a sudden uplift in wellbeing - a very dramatic example of 'nature cure'. In my eagerness to revel in the morning I walked further than I would have normally. I overdid it so today I'm rather our of action. But can I have compara...

Around the small pond in the muddy field stand eight herons in the form of trees. Three oaks, three alders, a willow and hawthorn. I have found a bounty of thisness. 'Whatness' - the essence of, say dog, that makes a dog a dog. 'Thisness' - the essence of - a particular dog - that makes it unique. Dogs and people have a lot of thisness. Robins, on the other hand don't, they all pretty much follow the same robin blueprint. What else can rival dogs and people in their thisness - well I'd say trees. These trees in particular. Two of them. The first one is a hawthorn. Two forks of tree lightning. Siamese twin trunks - conjoined and symbiotic at the ground, then living their own lives more and more as they ascend. At tree top height each has almost forgotten it ever had a brother. The right hand hemi-trunk has a gnarled, rugged exterior - it is being regulation hawthorn. But, almost straight from a builder's yard, the inside is bare wood. And it is revealing...

  On a couple of days on our recent trip to Shropshire I was unable to do much because of health limitations. This proved to be no hardship. I contented myself by sitting in the garden in front of a small patch of Pearly Everlasting. I could have been watching the comings and goings at an African waterhole! Certainly no wildebeest, crocodiles or elephants, but a similarly diverse and fascinating cast of visitors - just on a much smaller scale. No leopard came by, but instead a hornet. And then an extraordinary insect that looked as if it would be at home in a David Attenborough documentary on somewhere exotic like the Amazonia. A Gasteruption wasp carrying a javelin on its back - an egg laying structure as long as its body (picture 6) No cheetah pursued a gazelle in a twisting and turning chase of life and death. But instead an incredible variety and abundance of small, buzzing, flying things made their appearance on this tiny stage. So if your mobility is limited, or if it's not, ...

If heaven exists I think it will be a bluebell wood, it will always be late April, and the sun will always be just coming up. There will be a joyous dawn chorus and there'll be the sound of nearby running water. I asked people on Facebook what ingredients would be in their own personal heaven. I made this poem from the suggestions, taking them more or less 'as is'. a collective heaven curlew call, my grandmother, a bacon butty swallows in puddles by the Co-op meandering footpath, fly agaric I can walk again wood pigeon calls “coo coo boogaloo” cat purring on my lap, rooibos tea fragrance of cowslips and gorse a ripe apple fallen in the first frost sunrise through a tent doorway blackbird's evening song, new notebook laughing in surf, skylarks singing fat pigeons stuffing their faces new leaves to dance our troubles away dappled cool and fresh, woodsmoke, mist never ending summer country lane someone to take the bloody windchimes down! a ladybird’s first spring outing ...

Yesterday morning I wasn't able to walk very far. But I like to watch the sunrise when I can, so I drove to a layby with a bench and an excellent, high vantage point. Something I haven't done before - I decided to put music on. Sunn O))) - pronounced 'sun' - very loud on the earbuds. They are drone metal - deep, thick layers of guitar noise, not doing much except making a vast, ambient, monolithic - sonic cathedral. A bone -shaking but strangely ecstatic sound. It was around -7 degrees and the sky was Rothko. A smooth gradient - oranges through peach, ochre to a grey blue. A sky of deep, thick layers making a vast, ambient, monolithic - sky cathedral. I sat on the bench in the extreme cold, with the half moon still high in the sky, flask of tea in hand. Waiting. Waiting. The first sun's pinprick punctured the horizon. Everything revolved around this one bright point, flowed out of it, flowed into it. The sun rose like a glowing bathysphere. Rising up from the se...

Common Puffball releasing spores Everywhere on the patch there is an extruding and issuing. Toadstools are emerging from nooks, crannies and crevices. Agarics are bursting from the soil. Brackets are banding tree trunks.  Crusts, smuts and mildews are coating branches and leaves. Tripe, jelly, ears and brains are erupting their bizzare shapes from rotting wood. Fashioned, as if from the very stuff of underworld , from the soul of beneath. Fungi are brilliant!...here's why... Clouded funnel (Clitocybe nebularis) They are mysterious. Aristotle puzzled over the nature fungi, coming to the conclusion that they were an odd kind of plant. On the other hand,  a lot of his less scientific contemporaries believed them to be earthly manifestations of a magical realm. It's easy to see why. Their sudden appearance overnight, has something of the conjuring trick about it. Even plants move around, and rustle in the wind. Fungi just stand there - silent and still – myste...

These posters are available as downloads and as prints in my online shop microscosmic.shop Leaves of British -  Trees Buds of British Trees -  Bark of British Trees Absolutely Barking! Examples of different bark types trees which I've photographed on the patch Bark is like almost everything in nature – the more you look the more you see. If you walk through  a wood you will, of course, be aware of the trees, but only have a vague sense of the variety of bark. Once you stop to look you’ll see that every tree species has its own kind of bark, and even amongst trees of the same species – no two are alike. My latest patch project has been to photograph an example of the bark of each of the tree species on the patch – the result being the photos on this page. A quick glance through these is enough to show the range of bark types, colours and textures to be found - as well as their beauty . Some are rough,...