So, Christmas Tree: How Green Are Your Branches?

The tree is easily my favourite part of Christmas, and has been since childhood. Since I left home I’ve always had a small one in a pot, the second of which, having already done two Christmases, was doing really well up until about three weeks ago when two-thirds of it started to go brown. The time had come to replace it if I were to have a tree at all in my own home this year.

I’ve always preferred real trees to the artificial alternatives, partly because we always had a floor-to-ceiling Norway Spruce in our lounge when I was little. It smelled delicious and shed characteristically all over the presents every year. However a friend of mine suggested the better option for me now might be an artificial one, as I wouldn’t have to worry about nursing it through to next year, they never drop needles, and they are much better for the world than real ones (that aren’t in pots) as you keep re-using the same one instead of cutting down and disposing of a new tree every year.

I did feel a pang of guilt: Christmas is an incredibly wasteful time with 3 million extra tonnes of rubbish produced every year in the UK.

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Just Around the Corner

Down the river path from St Gluvius towards Flushing sun was glazing the water of the incoming tide as it swilled up the estuary towards Penryn Bridge. Spring, I thought, is just around the corner.

The Trouble with Ruins

Glastonbury Abbey – the Abbey House from the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel

Rain was spotting as we descended from the summit of Glastonbury Tor. By the time we got back into the town it was raining properly, presenting the conundrum of where to eat lunch. I suggested we had for the abbey, much to the protestation of Cee who was convinced they wouldn’t let us eat sandwiches inside the abbey despite my attempts to persuade her that it would be more ruins than anything else. The trouble with ruins is, though, that there’s not much shelter from the rain.

Summer Still October

naturalised red-hot pokers, St Mawes

St Just in Roseland churchyard

Pasco’s boatyard, St Just

view from the fields adjacent to the A3078 between St Just and St Mawes, looking across the Carrick Roaads towards Falmouth, Trefusis and Mylor

Bosloggas leat

Percuil Creek

parasol mushroom

October’s here. Let’s dress for the weather – you’ll need that scarf. Bright is the blue of sky and sea and creek; fat are the clots of cloud like overwhipped cream piled up over the inland sky and far dispersed to the distance over the coast. Too bright the colours; too sharp the shadows. Not yet the autumn glow

“Who’s this moving alive over the moor?”

and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

So the composition’s not perfect and the  light balance isn’t quite right but hey, I’m not a photographer and my camera’s a ten-year-old point and click, and this is  one of my favourite photos I’ve taken this year so here it is to celebrate World Photo Day and the anniversary of the invention of photography.

Coastlining 30: Bude – Marsland Mouth

Date: Thursday 25th September 2014   Distance walked: 9.5 miles  Total distance: 296 miles

Bude

Bude was quiet at nine in the morning. A few dog walkers. A few determined swimmers in the sea pool. To the south a pale blue glimmer in the sky, the rest was grey with lowering clouds that had me fretting on the way in that it might rain and I’d brought the wrong coat. Cee and I parted at the car park tucked in behind the beach and the harbour. I set off up round by the sea pool. Past a row of 1920s beach huts with painted doors and window shutters: red, blue, green, navy, light blue, red. The tide was low. Bude beach was a deserted spread of smooth sand the colour of foundation for a skin tone darker than mine, pocked with morse code lines of footprints

Coastlining 29: Crackington Haven – Bude

Date: Wednesday 24th September 2014   Distance walked: 10 miles  Total distance: 286 miles

Crackington Haven

Woke to showers which cleared to a brisk wind from the north-west, bright colours, cloud-shades indigo on the sea and crisp white waves. There were sharp shadows on the double peak of Cambeak to the west of Crackington Haven. I climbed the first hill, 100m or so above the dusky pink beach and handful of dwellings in the crease of the valley mouth, and could see Lundy for the first time since Pentire Point on the Camel Estuary.

Coastlining 28: Tintagel – Crackington Haven

Date: Tuesday 23rd September 2014    Height climbed: 4045 ft   Distance walked: 11 miles    Total distance: 276 miles     

Tintagel Head: the haven, Merlin’s Cave, the castle remains and the Island

I returned to Tintagel at about 10:30am this morning to find it bright and misty, which sounds like an oxymoron but in early autumn on the Cornish coast this is what it’s all about. The shadows were sharp, rocks, corners and caves black and deep; the remains of the castle on the headland known as the Island were picked out by the morning sun from the south-east. From the bottom of Tintagel Haven, where the tide was out exposing the caves and cove below the land-bridge to the castle, I headed on up to Barras Nose, the next cliff-head east of Tintagel Head, to get a view of the coastline ahead.