Down the road, early evening

The cold moist air is refreshing on the skin, the sky is lit in bands of blue-grey and lilac.

A fieldfare flies from the chestnut tree with a whirring trill.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning

The heron has been here often lately, it flies off but reluctantly.

The maples have no more leaves now, but abundant clusters of stiff brown keys linger on the twigs.

Hill above Henon, morning

I have secateurs and gloves, and cut some sprigs of well-berried holly.  Molly loses me, but after I've returned to fetch her, she tracks me back to the holly tree.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning

Two herring gulls and two black-headed (their heads winter white), float serenely in a group; they are symmetrical in two planes, sometimes like bookends and always reflecting in the water.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning.

The leafmould underfoot is thick, brown and slippery, with splitting acorns making specks of pink amongst it.  A few last yellow flickers of birch leaves still light the uppermost twigs.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning.

A  flock of long-tailed tits enliven the trees and bushes as they often do here; are they the same ones or is it just somewhere long-tailed tits like to come?

Up the road, morning

The young bull, foaming-mouthed and bellowing from two fields away, and Ludovic's border collie on the corner, are both excited at the  new heifers being delivered to our field by trailer.

Up the road, afternoon

A swallow in late November, something I've never seen.  It lands on the wire, preens, shits, rests then flies.  I wonder what its story is, and what its chances are.

Up the road, late afternoon

Four larks, then another four, then many more so I give up counting, fly up from the field of young grass.  They  ripple across the sky overhead as I walk.

Down the road, late afternoon

Momentarily a smear of rainbow appears across the massed abundance of cumulus above the hilltop.  Across the sky a lighted window opens in a dark cloud, Cecil B deMille style.

Beach at Béliard, afternoon

Picking up flakes of oyster shells, pearl white and rose pink and iridescent black like oil plumes, we conclude that oysters are altogether magical things; we'll hear nothing against them.

Lamballe plan d'eau, afternoon, with Iso and Princeling

Duck-feeding: one magnificent buff-coloured, orange-billed, hissing goose holding court, mallard ducks and a green-headed drake, numerous feisty coots, and a greedy ballet of gulls over the backs of the others.

Tredaniel plan d'eau, morning

A flatbed lorry pulls into the carpark carrying a Maniscopic earthmoving vehicle.  In vermilion, black and steel, with earth caked in its massive tracks, it looks a proud, heroic workhorse.

Up the road afternoon # 2

A cock pheasant hunkers down when it see us among the grass and late dandelion clocks, then flies up, tail trailing, chestnut brown and bottle green and sealing wax red.

Up the road, afternoon # 1

The crowded, yellowish roots of the feed beet, as thick as small tree trunks, jostle and shoulder their way out of the soil,  still throwing crowns of shiny, spinach-like leaves.