River Tweed, January Sunset 2

River Tweed, January Sunset 1

Winter Field

Walkers and Swans

Wintering Swans on The Lees

The bridge in the background of this photograph is a remnat of the Borders Railway, a ghost railway that is now rising Lazarus-like between Tweedbank and Edinburgh, rendering parts of Galashiels temporarily chaotic.

We are being threatened with snow, which may ravage the flowers already shooting up in the garden and in the woods.  However, the frost on the ground this morning has disappeared, so I shall take a brisk walk up to the farm on the top of the hill, with its union jack flying from the top of the silo, and then walk down the lane between the russet beech hedges. It is dark this morning, which feeds melancholy, but I shall soon feel happy ensconced in the Tardis, with new songs to listen to, the blower heating up the place, the birds feeding outside the window to provide endless distraction, and the mounting pile of roughs to work on.  It is a good feeling to find new ideas moving into a story that I wrote in a couple of hours more than a year ago. If an idea still interests after a year, that is a good sign. Soon I shall sharpen some crayons on my miraculous Mitsubishi hand-cranked pencil sharpener (which came all the way from Japan with instructions in Japanese, so I have only just worked out how to use it properly) and get out my array of new gouache paints, and really get to work.

 

The Signs

Iced Puddle 2

Iced Puddle 1

Female Blackbird

Throughout the summer we noticed that the garden was totally devoid of blackbirds, but now they are all over the place – not just in the garden, but in the Hirsel woods, where they putter around under the trees, turning over the dead leaves in their search for food.  They do not seem frightened much of humans, they almost seem to have an insouciance (the four-and-twenty blackbirds put in a pie were rooks, apparently).  In my old house blackbirds would wander into the house, leaving their droppings on the wooden floor.

Now, through the Tardis window, when I take a break from wrestling with the rough of my book about a Boy and a Hare,  I watch them chasing each other away from the food. I put out some curious red suet-plus-seed balls from The Factory Shop in Kelso that thebirds wouldn’t touch at first, but now they consume them eagerly – the blackbirds were the pioneers in the tasting test; though with all the birds, dried mealworms seem to be the food  de luxe.

There are blackbirds looking down from the ridge along the top of the greenhouse, blackbirds in the hornbeam hedge, blackbirds rattling about in the holly, blackbirds sitting in the silver birch. Blackbirds here, there and everywhere.

Reflections Between Two Countries