patterns of

I dipped through a college car-park this morning. The pupils were arriving in ones, not the troupes and gangs I remember from my time. They walked like old men, or like robots, asthough having learned to walk as infants and having been rewarded with their first iPad or TV remote, they abandoned any further style development. At their age my peers were learning the strut (power-walking was a thing), the stride, the swagger and even the flounce.

I went for my second Thursday ice-cream at lunchtime. The rule is a simple one: I get to ride to town and buy an ice-cream if I walk back. Today's walk was the usual route from the town centre; over the bridges, passing up through meadows of cows or hay crops, into woodland rising steadily back to work and a short passage in pig fields. I saw brown trout, a hundred meadow browns, a small white, admirals white and red, a cinnebar moth (probably), an orchid (common spotted in damp woodland, very tall). I am reminded to look up this year's sightings of purple emperors (there are none). In the fields the sun is hot, oppressive. In the woods it occasionally cuts in in shafts, scattered.

Three nights running over into the weekend the house was overflown around 9pm with jackdaws; as many as 3-400 on the first evening. Enough for a murmuration, making harsh yet cheering calls and a hissing of wings, looking to roost, gathering the year's young to statistical safety.

I near met a young green woodpecker when driving last week; red crown, freckled below and palely olive above, beaky.

The sky is a blue-board with strokes from the side of the chalk. Parallels and striations, hardly moving. Even as I read-back and review a board cleaner is swept over, forming little clouds of chalk as it blurs the marks; the clouds hang. A single fine line is added by an airliner, etching West.

An interlude in the headlong

Summer I think. A hard season to call with the signs of spring still emerging, slightly late. Although it is a month since the moment I always call the "million shades of green", foxgloves are still only just opening, the elder began to bloom just last week. Never-the-less, it is June and the forest has the crop of early foals gambolling already.

I left the house, which was mostly relaxed, ten minutes earlier than has been my recent habit. Back roads were quiet; crossing routes were so empty that I stopped to watch them almost hoping for other traffic to corroborate my existence. The Plain was full of beasts, some with young. A gathering of ponies pulled in excited animals, some tossing their manes, some trotting and leaping haphazardly on the road. I wondered if they were getting ready to greet a new-born or whether there was a fight; they milled amongst the still-standing gorse between open lawns that have been mown or burnt to increase pasture.

On Monday and Tuesday the weather howled in passing, pouring water that briefly sat in corners until the greatful ground sucked it in. The spring, as well as cooler than normal has also marked long dry spells, but it has been wetter for a couple of weeks. The water has been washing dust out of the air and sprinkling it onto windows.

Today's sky hangs restful. A thin sheet of cloud appears to be trying to spread from one horizon to the other, but there is enough energy in the atmosphere already to roll it into scattered crumb with sporadic doughy fluff.