Six At Daybreak

We had a beautiful dawn earlier this week and I went out on a short village walk to enjoy the spectacle, take some photos and share them with you. I was hoping that our local geese might overfly the recreation ground as they do most mornings, but that was not to be.

That seems a rather short post. Lets find some music....

....so....

....from February to April, and from the dawning of the day to perhaps the dawning of a musical career. This popped up unexpectedly on YouTube the other day. If you click on the image below it will take you to the music on YouTube. That will allow you to click on the "thumbs up" icon below the video to let a young lady know that you like her music.

When this was recorded she was just ten years old. (As if you needed me to tell you, she won the competition).

Take care.

Evening Skies

There have been some unlikely shifts in perception in the last few days. There is of course one big subject, but there's not much new to be said about it. Most people seem to be content with a simple "You doing OK?" when they meet and then move on to other matters which, as one matter is pressing down on us unrelentingly, have bobbed unexpectedly to the surface. What's more, these things, which we'd usually keep to ourselves, are discussed in loud voices as we maintain a physical distance from others while, at the same time, we are all in this together.

Thus it is that, with no football to talk about, two middle-aged men might find themselves involved in a conversation about birdsong, wildflowers and sunsets. Oh, and did you know that there's a "super moon" tonight?

A new moon in April is apparently known as a "pink moon", not for its colour but from the flower which they say is blooming at this time in North America, from whose indigenous peoples these poetic terms are derived. Yesterday evening though, perhaps because of the thin cloud layer in the upper atmosphere, it had a glorious golden glow for a few minutes shortly after sunset.

Browsing absent-mindedly through the less-visited parts of the internet yesterday I came across a radio programme which is usually a brief biography of a major figure in the news. This episode however concerned a young Polish pianist whom the presenter had recently discovered and whose music brought his some solace in recent evenings, opening up peaceful, gently shifting landscapes in his mind.

Funny thing that, because somehow I'd discovered the same music at roughly the same time.....

That's Hania Rani playing "Esja", a track on her solo piano album of the same name. It takes its title from a mountain in Iceland.


Take care.

The Moon In January

This was the moon as she appeared last night from my backyard. That darkening on the lower right edge is a penumbral eclipse, caused by the edge of the earth's shadow creeping onto the surface of the moon. I was alerted to this event by a phone call from my brother and the weather was unusually co-operative, with crystal-clear skies.

The news media would have you know that January's full-moon is known as a Wolf Moon, being so called by the First Nations peoples of North America. I'd often wondered whether there was any real justification for these names, but never bothered to find out. The nature writer, Jim Crumley, is more tenacious than me and researched the names given by the various peoples in his book The Nature Of Winter. He found that every tribe had a different name for January's full-moon and only one of these had any connection with wolves.

There were certainly no wolves around as I shivered in my back yard last night.

Friday's Music arrives on Saturday this week. John Field was an Irish composer who found fame in Russia. It was he who devised and named the musical form, the Nocturne, which Chopin later developed further. Here is just one of his short, but perfectly formed, compositions.

If you enjoyed that then you'll find the entire album an absolute delight.


Take care.

Seven Skies

The weather we've been experiencing lately, with band after band of rainclouds sweeping from west to east, separated (sometimes) by narrow clear interludes, has produced occasionally interesting skies, especially around dawn. Here are seven such...

Before dawn, with lemony shades along the eastern horizon. The view may be ethereal but the location is more prosaic - the village recreation ground, just a short stroll from my back door.

Sometimes we're blessed with some candyfloss pink at dawn.

One can see how people could imagine that there might be gods dwelling up there among these heroic-looking cloud formations. A little later in the day it takes on more usual colouring....

I love to see these broken clouds over the fields and in such a flat landscape as Cambridgeshire you can often see a huge area of sky. 

Sometimes grey overcast conditions break up into these patterned clouds that are generally known as "mackerel" skies. And sometimes you come upon something that is unique and inexplicable....

The temptation is to say that it's been somehow caused by jet contrails, there is certainly plenty of air traffic over East Anglia, but it doesn't usually leave great gashes through the cloud layer. It might be a very long and narrow "fall-streak hole", perhaps caused by pollution from a jet exhaust.  It could also be some sort of wave cloud but I really don't know. Though I do understand roughly what's going on in the photo below....

"We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter".

Mark Twain - A Tramp Abroad

Take care

English Skies

Every so often one should look upwards....

Take care.