Images

October 5th – As I noticed yesterday, the dark evenings are on their way. Once more incontrovertible, it was dark at 6:40pm as I cycled up Clayhanger Road. Grim, dark and for boding, This is what many commutes will be like for the next few months – time to start carrying the gorilla pod again.

October 4th – I was accompanied by a forgotten companion on my return from work this evening – nightfall. It was 6:45pm, and nearly dark when I arrived home. A little bit of a shock to the system. This made photography difficult, as I hadn’t got a tripod or gorillapod on me. Sweeping down a dark and deserted Maybrook Road, the dusk made for an interesting shot with the camera sat on a street cabinet. This part of town – on the Walsall Wood/Brownhills border – always seems deserted. Even in the daytime.

October 2nd – Sadly, the optimism of the previous day had evaporated with the good weather, and it was back to the damp and grey. Something, though, has caused a step-change; somebody has flicked the ‘on’ switch for the leaf fall. Mainly sycamores at the moment, but trees all over are turning colour, and shedding. For a while, everything will be golden. The best bit of autumn. Here in Telford, the cycleways are beautiful, if a little bit treacherous, as the foliage sheds.

October 1st – October? How did that happen so quick? After the grimness of the day before, the bright morning was a joy. For the first time in a while I was in Telford, and the rose hips on the cycleway beside the M54 are beautiful. Rosehips can be used for so much stuff – wine, jelly, syrup – but few seem to pick them. Sad, because it’s been a great year for the roses.
There are a whole host of fruits here, from blackberries to dewberries, crab apples, medlars, rowan berries, catoniasters and even nightshade seem to be showing well. Autumn is also coming on here fast, more of which later in the week. 

September 30th – A grim and unphotogenic afternoon. I’ve been considering for a few days now, what makes the winter landscape so grim? Lack of greenery, muted colour? Or is the winter light different? As I looked out from Clayhanger Bridge on a previously beautiful view – lush and verdant in summer – I realised the landscape was still green, really. Still lush. But the light that was now dying, wasn’t kind. It was grey and unsupportive of colour. Rather than enhancing nature, it seemed to be muting it. Perhaps that’s the key.

September 25th – After a bright start, I’d braced myself for a very, very grim commute home, the forecast was awful. As it happened though, it was just drizzly wet, and the wind was behind me. I think I must be getting inured, but I haven’t noticed webs developing between my toes yet. Coming up the ramp at Walsall, I looked, as I often do, at the overhead supply catenary for the railway. The complexity of this system fascinates me, and today, I could hear it crackle and buzz in the wet. Years of design refinement have made this system generally very weatherproof, and that’s a remarkable thing. The 25,000 volts coursing over that metalwork doesn’t take prisoners and will arc long distances in the damp. Railway people are given to calling the overheads ‘knitting’, and you can see why. 

September 25th – The mystery of the bean field continues. The commute home was grey and made grim by late trains, but at least it was dry. Coming back along green Lane to Walsall Wood, I noted that the fields of beans here – unlike the ones in Lynn, near Stonnall, hadn’t been harvested. They’re just rotting in the fields. Whether that’s the plan, and it’s just a crop rotation technique, or whether the lousy summer ruined the crop, I have no idea, but I’m hoping someone can explain…

23rd September – This is an awful photo, but it was an awful evening. It does, however, show that the flooding problem at Anchor Bridge, Brownhills, has been alleviated somewhat. In very heavy rain, a pool still forms on the southbound side, but of nothing like the severity it was, and I think most of that is more to do with the physics of the road than any drain blockage. It’s taken a long time, and an awful lot of folks to sort this out. Well done to everyone who’s had a go over the years – from councillors to locals.

Sorting stuff like this shouldn’t be that hard…

September 22nd – a bright, sunshine autumn day. A ride through Staffordshire. My goodness, it was nippy as evening fell. It’s been one hell of a bad year for the oaks. I’ve previously recorded the absolute plague of knopper galls around Brownhills, devastating the acorn crop, and I’ve hardly seen any unharmed ones at all. Out in Staffordshire the story was the same. The ones that aren’t victim to the tiny, drilling wasp are small and sickly, affected by the lousy summer.

I hope they (and we) have a better time next year. To me, oaks are the epitome of the English tree, and when they suffer, I feel we all do a little bit.