Moonshadow

A winter’s afternoon: ‘It was as cold and crisp as an ice cream with . . . um . . a crispy coating. The Moon rose like a pizza splodged with mozzarella . . .’

Okay, I’ll have to face it, after a harrowing day, a short walk over Horbury Bridge to the post office isn’t going to give me the material I need for my ongoing nature diary.

For once there are no birds on either the canal or the river . . . but what’s that bicycle doing down there on the strandline?

There was an early feminist proverb: ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ Perhaps this one has been abandoned by a large Sea Trout (see http://wildyorkshire.blog/2011/01/salmon-or-sea-trout/ ) trying to make its way upstream.

A flock of a dozen or more Jackdaws flies over as the Sun sets and the fleecy clouds over the wood are tinted coral red like flamingos.

More lights in the wood this evening; bright blue starbursts threading  through the trees. A police search?

No, it’s a group of lads (or possibly fish, I can’t actually see them in the darkness) are cycling around the quarry area.

The rear lights are equally clear: ‘Blue as they approach, red as they recede,’ – like the spectra of stars moving around our galaxy – as Alan Garner described motorway traffic in his novel Red Shift.

Great writer Garner; he’d never have come up with ‘The Moon rose like a pizza.’

3 comments

  1. I LOVE this post! The sketches (and text) are delightfully extemporaneous and made me laugh. And what a surprise for it all to end up with Alan Garner, a favorite author of mine, which caused me to pull from my bookshelf an out-of-print edition of his essays THE VOICE THAT THUNDERS. I include a marked quotation in regard to nothing in particular: “An onion can be peeled down through its layers, but it is always at every layer an onion. I try to write onions.”

    1. Sunset over the wood brought a welcome Garneresque touch of mystery and magic to my day which had until then resembled a frantic situation comedy, with myself in the Basil Fawlty role! – although my day was more like that of Richard Briers in the comedy ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’. A short walk over the river and seeing the wood at sunset was just what I needed.

  2. i also loved this post. It is nice to see you flex your litterary mussels, hope your success is not a fluke, and you can show a clean pair of eels.

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