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.

On reflection

It was driving past a large and partially frozen puddle this morning that caused me to reflect on the books I always planned to introduce to my children when they reached the right age, but never have. My own teenage years were filled, and to a large extent, informed, by a steady stream of science fiction novels by an eclectic range of authors, either borrowed from friends or my local library. I was fortunate in that, once I had exhausted the library's collection of childrens' fiction, I had the opportunity to access the adult fiction too. This resulted in me occasionally reading subject matter considered inappropriate to my age, but on subsequent reflection I believe that this does no harm, because the topics that I did not understand left no lasting impression, in contrast to the stories and themes I was ready for.

My own children (mostly) are willing to read, but they have had their own contemporary diet of Potter, Rider and Snicket. Reading the same books as one's peers is always more interesting than something that an adult is pushing, so many of my recommendations were ignored, or only grudgingly accepted.

So I managed to palm off some Milligan and Adrian Mole, I was fortunate that the Tolkein bandwagon rolled through town. I managed to find time to read and share some of their contemporary fiction, but these failed to engage me, in the same way that re-reading my own childhood favourites fails, because they have to be read at the right age.

The single book that I read at exactly the right age (that sticks in my memory) is "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael G. Coney, which is a science fiction and coming of age story with sociological and political undertones. If you've read it, then you probably understand how its memory was revived by my morning drive; if you have not, then I can't recommend it, unless you are a slightly nerdy 13 or 14 year old. I haven't seen a copy for the best part of 40 years, and perhaps that is for the best, but it is still on my list of books I should have given to my children to read, when they were ready.

Opening soon

Creeping measures of another year; snow drops, daffodils, crocuses, icy panes, bees on camellias, wintery showers, spring light. A red kite.

Birds sing the sun into the sky and collect mosses and dried grasses to call home. Clematis buds and thinks to twine. Evenings gather, rather than fall.

I awake to pale curtains, retaining warmth, restraining the day.

Dusky

Salmon opposes the full, round yellow of the cratered man. As the fish dives and the man rises, points contellate into known patterns; bright sparks on the darkening canvas canopy.

Tiny isolated clouds show darker against the sky's scattered remains of sunlight. In the corners of fields, under hedges, the white remnants of wintery showers shine upwards.

Up

Driving last night, with the evening sky as a backdrop, I was distracted by the Western horizon, still bright with the setting sun. A cerise smudge touched nearly ninety degrees of the scene with traces of blood and milk marking higher cloud and the final rays of the day breaking through.

The same clouds acompanied me on my way to work this morning. A canopy of cryptic corrugations, like snow on willow hurdles , thinning in the East to show cracks of sun like the first shreds of processed cheese emerging from a grater.

At lunchtime the cloud had evolved again and passed from orange peel texture, through crumpled crepe and beach ripples to electron micrographs of prehistoric tooth surfaces, monochrome and strangely ridged.

These skies hold a drama. As picture backgrounds they steal from subjects. They defy cameras.

Wind of change

Earlier, the slight twigs of valley trees tangled a thin mist, preventing it from leaving the river course to form higher clouds. Seen from a hill the bare crowns of these trees appeared snagged in soft cotton-wool that thinned as the grazing land rose to my viewpoint.

The misted sky just fell dark heralding a swift storm of rain bringing wind and a sudden rush of water, like the overflow of a bath in the carpark. Soon this passed and the clouds tore, creating at first a rectangle of baby blue in the grey that had two horizontal stripes of white lit cloud like nothing else but a slice of angel cake. The tear spread from the North Western sky until, above the horizon, clouds made only small scuffs in the graduated blue canopy.

The rising breeze that whipped trees with the rain has waned. Enough to flash the underleaf colour in the evergreen oaks, but playfully; without violence.

Relaxed flocks of winter birds now lazily seek thermals or survey the agricultural landscape for the next safe beak-full. The washed world reflects the new sunlight and gently dries.