Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
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.’