NEVER WEAR A SKIRT IN A NORTH EAST WIND

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SOME RULES

1. Never wear a skirt in a North East Wind. 2. Never wear a skirt which will drag in the mud. 3. Never explore the edge of a bank when the ground is slippy and wet. 4. Never take photos of flowers when they can't keep still. 5. Never take photos at all when the wind is shaking the camera and your hands are red, so red and cold you can't feel the 'take now' button and have to guess.

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(Advice I don't follow.)

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So . . . there I was . . . the wind was shrieking, I was cold, the reeds were flapping and bending . . . I'd gone out with a theory but the theory was blowing away . . . (never mind the theory) . . . what could I see that was out of the gale? (Well, not a gale exactly but . . . .)

I stuck my phone down a hole and round the corner; a burrow. Don't know who lives there but . . . see that? I'll ask Esther - is that how they grow parsnips and carrots on Mars?

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Badger setts are like towns - and I knew there was an ancient one a short distance away. It would have been better if I hadn't been looking for it along a narrow, muddy, puddle-filled, falling-down-the-bank kind of path. It would have been easier to find if the entrances hadn't been hidden by the reeds - because there are better ways to find a badger's front door than by falling through its overhanging porch. (My hip and leg still ache.) It would have been better too if the sun had been shining in the right direction. It would have been better as well if it had not kept going behind a cloud. On the other hand . . . there's not much sun in a badger's tunnel to start with . . . so, hoping everyone was fast asleep (they're big and they're fierce and they bite) I stuck my phone into the hole. (If I'd dropped it, it would have slid to the centre of the earth and that would have been the end of this blog but . . . .)

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Next . . . off to the unsightly red fungus. That would be out of the wind.

It has faded and shrunk. But the shrinkage means I can get my phone underneath with the lens facing up. (Fun this. A conventional camera wouldn't have slid between it and the ground. And no human eye could have peered there.) Hello woodlice! (One seems to have come apart in the middle. How?)
A sharp bit of undergrowth has pierced the fungus's belly and grown right into it. You can see the bruise.

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Another time, I'll tell you what I'd really gone out to look for.

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