Category: Right now
At the British Museum.
Holding a mobile phone up to an amp.
Bikes make things better.
I’m aware that digging in to the link below could (and should) take up a fair chunk of your time. But if you’re interested in how we can make our everyday lives happier & healthier, our environment safer and cleaner and potentially help our communities and economies grow stronger, the link below is a fascinating read. For those that don’t have the time, maybe watch one of the two videos below – I found them both incredibly enlightening.
The Cattle are Lowing
I’ve just come back from my first ever visit to the Lake Districtand there is so much I could (and might) write about. The place is incredible and, in the autumn, an amazing mass of colours. Whilst there, I visited Tarn Hows and bumped into these Belted Galloways. They were awaiting feeding time and were pretty noisy! In the recording you can here the cows calling to one another over the hills and here the sound ricocheting across the landscape. The sound was unbelievable! Cows are big animals and when they are expelling that sound and it is mighty loud!
This was recorded using the iPhone Soundcloud app so you’ll definitely need headphones and a bit of volume to get the full effect here. The only day I didn’t bring my recorder out with me but I really like the SoundCloud app for quick snapshots and placing it on a map.
stamp of the week (of oddness)
A regular and mundane stamp for an irregular week for me. Or has it? It’s been a week where regular everyday events just appeared to carry more weight. I turned 40. There was the funeral for my next door neighbour. Friends all sitting together at the end of the garden, chatting about old days as the sun slowly set. Then but two days later in the garden backing onto that, young people celebrating something else, voices raised in high spirits, laughter, singing. Then my eldest daughter leading the orchestra into their final piece at school.
These kind of things happen everyday everywhere – they just seemed to be in a different colour this week.
her morning music
these words like drums and singing and magic
I can hear skylarks
Bright sunny day. A small breeze teases wisps of cirrus cloud in a near perfect blue sky, long shaded trails of white. Sitting on the grass, looking up at the tall thin trees gently swaying. Then above the shimmering rustle I hear skylarks – somewhere higher than the trees in front of me and beyond, above a field somewhere up in the air. The fantastic fluttering melody rising as they fly, unable to place the sound as it’s carried off by the wind and then returning. I remember the first time I learned the sound of the skylark, I was instantly taken back to fields in Norfolk where that sound seemed to be everywhere in summer.
I’ve only seen a Skylark once before, as I was cycling up a hill in Church Langton in Leicestershire but that sound is such a wonderful, beautiful sound.
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/s/skylark/index.aspx
sudden blossom
I was walking from work to the recycling bins with an empty coffee jar. As I went down the road I looked around me and listened. A bright day, bird song, sudden blossom on trees. There was pop music coming out of an open door – something r’n’b with bleeps and beats, a simple rhyme spoke/sung/rapped over the top – I thought to myself ‘How can we make this?’ I thought to myself ‘Is this how I will be judged too?’
I carried on walking past the coach works, the sound of angle grinders and panels being beaten and I looked at the jar in my hand. Once as a child with my brother we would take jars like this down to the river with brightly coloured nets, hoping to catch sticklebacks. Holding it up to the light amazed at we are, at what we have become.
peter wyeth 