Tag: grey

April 13th – I rode to work in steady rain heavy hearted. It’s not often I say this but the morning had no redeeming features I could find; it was wet, cold and very, very unlike spring. 2013 was a pretty bad spring, starting very late with heavy snows in the dying days of March like this one. But at least the sun came out and things dramatically improved. 2018 has tested even my usually stoical resolve, I must say.

Rolling through Kings Hill on an errand mid morning, everything was headache-grey – the roads, the buildings, the sky.

It’s rare I feel so bleak about the weather.

April 12th – Victoria Park in Darlaston was looking moody and dramatic as I passed back through, and I still adore the mystic bridge. 

This park isn’t doing so well for the flowers this year, sadly; the old cutting is usually a riot but there was hardly anything, mainly I think to over-enthusiastic grass cutting. 

Sad really. Darlaston does have some excellent parks and open spaces.

April 7th – An awful, terrible horrible day in which little went to plan and I just gradually lost the will to try. A spin out in light drizzle late wasn’t so bad though, and did make me feel a little better.

As I headed up the canal towards Newtown, I realised that things are greening up well – the fields of Sandhills and Hammerwich are bright green, but have had little chance to shine as yet.

The mist and murk would ordinarily have been depressing, but for the fresh air, solitude and speed I was grateful. 

Life can be tough sometimes.

March 28th – I’d been in Birmingham seeing a client and returned from Shenstone in a gap in the rain, down wet lanes, glistening and dripping in the odd light of a clearing sky.

The wind was against me and I was cold, but there was something captivating about the quiet and the sound of my tyres on the wet tarmac.

Winter seems endless this year. I just want to feel the sun on my face and the warmth to ride without a jacket a little.

Not too much to ask, is it?

March 9th – Somehow without noticing, I have managed to slip the camera into 16:9 widescreen aspect, which takes me back ten years to using my first Panasonic camera, the peculiar little DMC-LX2 which was native 16:9 widescreen. That camera was limited, but bombproof, and I used it for years. I never quite loved it, but we had a close relationship.

It had been a wet commute home from Shenstone Station, and having to call into Stonnall I took the backlanes. The accidental 16:9 really suited the atmosphere: Although pre-sunset, it was dark, foreboding and grim.

But mercifully, also warm.

Spring seems reluctant to reveal herself this year.

March 6th – It was still not dark when I returned along the canal to Brownhills. There was none of the snow remaining which surprised med, but there was still quite dense ice on some sections of canal like Catshill Junction.

Things are still looking a bit grey and colourless apart from the early spring flowers, and I’m looking forward to seeing some signs of fresh green soon.

Won’t be too long now hopefully, before life becomes colourful once more. I’ve had it with all this grey.

January 8th – Off to work on a miserable, grey and cold morning. I hit the canal in Walsall to avoid the morning crush hour and was accosted in Pleck by a very cross character demanding food. Sadly, my supply of corn was in another jacket, and the swan who was so aggressively begging showed it’s displeasure by repeatedly pecking my feet.

Of course, the swan was not starving, but urban swans are very lazy and accustomed to the high life, and when loafing in ice-free swim holes near bridges on cold days, they have little better to do that harass passers by for tidbits. I suspect the policy works best on passing mothers and fathers with children, whose guilt twanged, will come back with food.

The ice itself wasn’t severe. Moorhens and coots skittered about on it, but I doubt it would have supported the portly resplendent girth of your average drake mallard. 

On the wonderful Dru Marland Canal Ice scale, I guess it was somewhere between IC2 and IC3. Check Dru out here: she’s wonderful.

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December 26th – I headed to Chasewater, which was brooding and quiet. 

Quiet that is, apart from the bickering, squabbling flock of waterfowl of every shape and size gathering around the boardwalk balcony as someone fed them seed.

The water boiled with desperate pecks and defensive wing flaps. There were fights, squabbles, pecked heads and nipped tails.

We all love these lakeside clowns. But man alive, they have no manners…

December 26th – The Boxing Day weather was altogether better, but still somewhat grey and overcast with that keen wind. Again, bad weather was forecast for the evening, with heavy rain and even snow predicted. 

I slipped out at lunchtime into a grey landscape, and was encouraged to find these bright honey fungus clumps growing on an tree stump on the Black Path.

Some days, the mere sight of something natural and bright is enough to improve your day.