The afternoon began with work but nature soon took over, and the work can wait ’til tomorrow.

A talk I’m doing on Tuesday at the University as part of a ‘Teach Out programme of alternative learning on strike days’ left the house with me, in the format of a mind map I’d work on as I walked. My usual way of thinking. And work on it I did for a while. Thinking, stopping, notebook out, adding to, moving on. Until the late November afternoon took over and turned into this set of photographs.

I love these kinds of afternoons. Still and dark, the sun seeming to have barely risen all day. Autumn turning to winter now, with more leaves on the ground than there are left on the trees.
“On the trees.”
After all these decades of walking around, trees are mostly still trees to me. Not so to my partner Sarah though, who walks into a glade of trees like she’s opening an encyclopaedia.

“I’m going for a walk in Calderstones if you want to come with me?”
So I put my work away and went to Calderstones with Sarah. Calderstones being a feast of trees. Described from now on by Sarah, you’ll be glad to hear.















Walking round the perimeter of the park we could see across where the orchid houses used to be to the now empty greenhouse where the Calderstones themselves had been stored until recently. Across Mr Roscoe’s Garden, in fact, in a story we’ve told before if you want to read it.



Late November light nearly gone and our walk nearly done, Sarah closes her botanic encyclopaedia for now.


And the work I’m working on for Tuesday morning?
