ROOTS AND WATER

This is a post about water. Water and roots. There used to be a railway line between Weymouth and Portland (this is in Dorset, England). The track was lifted long ago and the path it once followed is now used by pedestrians (lots of them). Some are walkers and tourists but, mostly, they are local people going to school, college, work, to the shops - on foot. One of the best bits is the tunnel. (Especially if you are in the company of young children because that gives you an excuse to hoot.)

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Water drips from the roof - and it runs down the walls.

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The minerals dissolved in it re-form as patterns

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and stalactites.

There are trees on either side of the tunnel . . . trees and ivy.

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The stones of the buttresses at the entrance are pulling apart.

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I put my phone into one of the cracks - roots. Roots like the water too.

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It's fun going through the tunnel. It's fun to hoot and hear the echo. I avoid the drips. I worry about r o o t s .

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SUCH THINGS ARE LEFT WHERE OUR EYES CAN'T REACH

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I once saw a lady with a dustpan and brush, scraping lichen from her front wall with a knife and tidying it away.

Housekeeping can go berserk.

People will sweep anything.

The last bit of ice from a pavement.

Leaves.

Others have the opposite instinct - to leave things lying around, to place things where they shouldn't be. Sometimes, they seem to put a lot of effort into taking inappropriate things to inappropriate places and going away without them.

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A lot of this we don't see because such things are left where our eyes won't reach. But I send my phone where my eyes can't go - and it reports back.

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Here is a box.

I didn't know I was taking a picture of a box. I didn't know the box was there. I changed the exposure on the phone so it could look (on my behalf) through a blast of July sunshine at what I expected to be a sort of cave in the gorse. And there was the box.

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Another place our eyes won't go is inside trees.

14th September 2008

Here is a pool of water inside a hollow trunk - with little creatures showing up white, like stars.

(It's worth clicking on!)

Above it, insects have been busy eating the wood, boring holes, flaking it away - and there's somebody's grub up the top, on the left!

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And another something with antennae, also showing up white . . . and, in the water, cheerful, colourful and floating - rubbish.

7th February 2009

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Winter.

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It's all gone quiet. Less visibly busy. The insects are gone.

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But, still there in the sludge . . . cheerful and recognisable and intact - the same, durable, reliable, what-on-earth-is-it-doing-inside-a-tree? rubbish!

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For the Post Before This - Blackthorn in the Gloom

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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