Wild in the City

Wild Around the Block
 
Years ago, when I worked at Pizzaland, Charring Cross Road, London, the company paid for our taxi fares home if we had to work late. I had great conversations with my taxi driver, who looked the spit of Abraham Lincoln; he told me that Scandinavians have a term for people who thrive in the city - they're called 'pavement flowers'. I liked that. I loved living in London; but also here, down by the sea. I decided I'd go for a city stroll & find me a bit of urban countryside on my doorstep.
 
 

 Have to consult my bird books, aware I'm not sure of the names of some common birds, as in the one below...tsk! A sparrow? No sea gulls, but loved the urban blackbird & colours on the pigeon (not a great camera for close-ups). I'm not that good at formatting pictures when blogging, either, so it's all a learning-curve....
 
 
I like how nature works around whatever is in its path, including this abandoned bike!
 
My own front doorstep is pretty wild, too!
 
It feels 'naughty, but nice', I'm sure my mother would be horrified, but I kind of like how Nature just gets on with it - in such an irrepressible & exuberant way...
(sorry, mum!)
I'd like to be able to identify all these things I see
 
 
 
 Pizza & Poetry
 
Thursday is 'Pizza & Poetry Night' at my house. To celebrate 30 Days Wild I weeded out all the nature-related postcards from my Big Stack so we could pick a couple of cards at random to use as prompts for writing exercises. Great poem by Polly Ballantine, playing on the theme of remembering & forgetting: lapel poppies & all they stand for & the effects of the opium poppy. Dave Patchett drew out the painting of 'Ophelia' by Sir John Everett Millais & chose Aspen from my book on Trees.
 
 Helen tackled a picture of the developing skeleton of an embryo chick - beautifully! I had a picture of a 3rd century (textile?) of a shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders beside two others, with the quote on the Good Shepherd on the back, & later a post-card poem by U.A. Fanthorpe called 'The Apple War'. I drank a cup of delicious mint tea - from leaves I'd picked from the garden in the morning to celebrate today. Delicious all round!
 
 
 
 
 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waxing Lyrical on the Wax Plant

Image
Memento Mummy: The Memory Plant       Well, that's what the Hoya Carnosa means to me,. I only found out its name when a friend posted back an excerpt from a plant book in answer to my query on facebook last year. It always struck me as being the kind of flower a scientist might invent, or something a robot would have in a bouquet if robots got married. A little bit sci-fi, is what I'm saying. But, that's just the first phase before it realizes it can be something quite other & sheds that artificial plastic look for something more like a 1970s paper-&-bamboo lampshade. Evolution on a stalk. The plant in my kitchen, growing out of an artist's jug, came from a cutting my mum took from a Massive Waxplant just inside the lobby entrance to the eye department of King's College Hospital in London 7yrs ago. I'd grown up with her sudden calls to shove some cutting she'd just procured whenever we went on a w...
Read more

Crickets vs Grasshoppers

Image
Clearing Things Up...     I knew I'd have to do some research to learn the difference between crickets & grasshoppers, my friend & I had no real idea what it was that was making the characteristic sound of...er...one of them. Turns out that chirping sound is known as stridulation - they both do it, but it's achieved in different ways. Grasshoppers rub their long back legs against the serrated edge of their wings; they're much longer - can grow up to 4 inches, but have short antennae. Crickets stridulate by rubbing their 'sort of' wings together, and their antennae are very long. The legs & wings of the grasshopper means they can jump and fly; crickets can only jump [www.softschools.com]. Grasshoppers are green - to blend in with their habitat; crickets are pale green or brown, or dark. Thing is, all that's academic if you can't actually see them. No worries! The fact that it was afternoon when w...
Read more

Spider to the Rescue!

Image
At Home With Spider: Protection   I was utterly charmed watching 'Charlotte's Web' this weekend, the film of the book by E.B. White (it can take me the longest time to catch up with the rest of the world & Wilbur the Pig). It reminded me of a workshop I ran years ago around making dreamcatchers, touching on myths & legends based on spiders and their web-making.   This rather large chappy hangs from the handle just inside my front door. I learned today that, 'if spider appears in your life' it's time to confront your fears rather than suppress or run from them. Good to know, as I was in hiding - whenever the relentless onslaught of Smart-phone trolls gets more than I can bear, I go into shock & into retreat, feeling defeated. Amazing to learn that a spider spinning a web across the cave mouth where Robert the Bruce was hiding after his defeat in battle, gave him the resolve to keep going; to persist; to try, try, try again, which...
Read more