October 23rd – I was riding to work when I met a gorgeous little lady with a happy, proud brush of a tail. Trotting though The Butts, she meowed at me as I was answering a text and then hurried towards me, greedily accepting chin and ear tickles and nose boops.
Circling me and begging for more fuss, she was hard to photograph, but happily pottered off when she could see I needed to continue my journey.
A little bit of furry, tiny tabbyness on a damp Monday morning.
October 19th – A day marked by a ludicrously early start and thoroughly wet, rain-sodden homeward darkness commute. The weather really isn’t being kind to me this week.
The riding wasn’t bad, really – they do say drowning is quite pleasurable once you stop fighting it, and I flowed like the rainwater through the streets from Darlaston with an occasionally startling crosswind. Reaching the town centre, I took a short cut past the civic centre. With nobody about and beautifully glistening surfaces, it made for a good night shot.
If the weather-gods are reading this, can I please have some dry, non-windy weather for a short while please? I’d be ever so grateful…
October 18th – A week or so, I posted a video ‘Welcome to the suck’ pointing out the dark winter commutes were upon us, and every year I note that when the dark nights come, the traffic behaves oddly until around Christmas, when drivers finally get used to the dark.
Tonight was a grim commute. All the way in not quite rain, a penetrating mist-drizzle soaked me; it was cold, and the traffic was awful. But seeing this was astounding. Sorry it’s so blurry with rain on the camera lens but I’ll explain.
I’m stopped at the cross roads of the Pleck Road (Ring Road) with Bridgman Street in Walsall, near the Manor Hospital. I’m at the front of my queue heading northbound straight on. The lights are red.
Heading south in the opposite direction, pushing through the traffic which is moving aside are two fire appliances on blues and twos. I can smell smoke. Their shout is local.
The engines get to the the lights opposite me, attempting to turn down Bridgman Street to my right, their left – but are blocked by two cars, just resolutely unmoving. Eventually a small movement is made, one appliance takes the outside line, the other the inside line.
It’s not rocket science, and it’s in the Highway Code. Get out of the way of emergency vehicles when safe to do so. After all it might be your family, house or business these people are rushing to the aid of.
There’s a word for these obstructive people: arseholes. But totally symptomatic of the madness of the first dark evenings of winter.
October 12th – The united colours of… a Black Country Autumn, on the canal at Bentley Bridge.
I can moan about Autumn all I like, but that’s just stunning.
October 11th – Again returning as darkness fell, I caught sight of the Walsall skyline from North Street Bridge, and gave it a shot in a different mode.
The TZ90 is streets ahead of the TZ80 for night shots – and it needed to be; the last decent poor light performance from this range of camera was two generations back in the TZ70. This seems a lot better.
And Walsall, with the modernist buildings of the risibly named Gigaport, was a good subject.
August 9th – Spotted on the way to work, quick mobile phone pictures of something I was ages about. On Sunday, I found a fresh puffball on the Chase, and posted a quick snap on social media. Someone asked what it was, and noted that they’d found one and when touched, it ‘deflated’.
This ripe puffball was just on the edge of a verge in Central Walsall, so I recorded it whole and squashed – I didn’t feel too bad about squashing it, as that’s how it works; the body case crumbled and the millions of spores – the grey-brown smear in the second image – escaped like a cloud of smoke to be dispersed by the wind.
Thus the puffball rises, and lies waiting to be spit by debris or passing animals. Or a large-footed cyclist, in this case.
Of all the plants and species of life, sometimes fungi seem the most opaque, yet fiendishly, simply clever…
October 4th – This is a great Autumn for fungi – everywhere I look there seem to be great examples of different species, and stuff I haven’t seen before.
This interesting clump of button toadstools is growing on the exposed, fractured roots of the spot where a tree fell near the Tannery flats in Walsall. I think it may be some kind of honey fungus, but I’m really not sure. It’s really colourful and the photo doesn’t do it justice.
I suppose this is the tradeoff for the damp, grey autumn – great toadstools!
September 29th – Shaky, handheld, badly focused film, but these little guys stole my heart. The nose-boop with mom was just gorgeous.
Bless them. They made my week!
29th September – Near Walsall, my attention was snagged on a bright, sunny morning by a small family, apparently living in an open, junk-cluttered garage just off a main street. They seem healthy, happy and don’t look malnourished. Clearly wary of humans, but mum, who was attentive and nervous of me, stood her ground and watched her kittens closely.
A rare treat. I have passed this with the location to the Cats Protection branch as I strongly suspect these cats are feral.
September 28th – My quest for fly agaric – the red and white spotted toadstool of folklore and fairytale – was satisfied today when I visited a familiar patch that unexpectedly exists between the Darlaston Road and canal in Walsall.
This edge land, under self-seeded silver birches at the top of the cutting, is host to the largest colony of these toadstools I’ve ever seen; there must be at least a hundred of them in various stages of life.
This is a remarkable find and confirms my suspicion that I’ve largely missed the season this year – they seem to have peaked earlier this year, but this spot which is quite hard to climb to contains some of the best, most perfect examples of the fungi I’ve ever seen.
All in one of the most built-up, urban patches of Walsall.
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