Muddy paths. Seeing wildlife. Works of art.

 On my usual daily running route is a stretch of woodland, not really dense enough to be called a wood but still a fair collection of trees in the valley bottom. The path through the trees has been consistently muddy for months. For a short time it was also frozen but that didn’t last long. People walking that way have taken detours off the path, establishing a new path in places and wearing away the grass and undergrowth. 

Yesterday, for the first time in ages, after a few days without any significant rainfall the path had dried out. Now, since we came home from our visit to Portugal Phil has not been out walking much, hardly at all in fact. He’s been busy but he’s also been rather knocked flat by some kind of virus - sore throat, cough, runny nose, generally feeling under the weather. Even before that he would decline to walk the path through the trees while it was so muddy. I ran it anyway, as my filthy running shoes bear witness! 

But yesterday I persuaded him to do that walk with me: past the cricket club down the lane, past the first millpond, through the trees, past the second millpond and the  circumnavigating the village centre and back home. The path was fine. We were rewarded with the sight of two deer on the hillside and the heron flying over the second millpond. All good.

During the night, of course, the rain returned. I expect the path is a quagmire once more. It was still raining when I woke up this morning so I chickened out of running and didn’t inspect the path. I needed a couple of things from the coop store and took a fairly brisk stroll in the rain before breakfast. The weathermen have promised some finer weather this afternoon. Maybe we’ll get a longer walk.

Here’s an odd item of not quite local news: 

“A town centre in Lancashire was placed in lockdown on Saturday, with British army bomb disposal experts forced to remove and destroy a grenade.

It is understood that a member of the public had donated items to a heritage centre in Darwen which included the grenade.

Emergency services were called to Railway Road at about 2pm and police cordoned off a large area of the town centre as bomb disposal experts carried out the operation.

The British army said the grenade was subsequently removed from the area and destroyed by a team from 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment RLC, its specialist unit responsible for improvised explosive device and conventional munitions disposal.”

I wonder how long the donator of the historic items had had a potentially dangerous grenade sitting in his attic. 

We had got into the habit of listening to Desert Island Discs after breakfast on a Sunday morning, always an interesting selection of music and anecdotes. And now the BBC has changed their Sunday schedule so that omnibus editIon of the everlasting radio soap opera, The Archers, now airs from 11.00 til 12.00. There was a time when we listened religiously to The Archers but during lockdown we found their system of recording individual actors, to avoid risking their infecting each other with covid, was unsatisfactory and we got out of the habit. Now, annoyingly, the soap opera has taken the Desert Island slot. Perhaps I should complain to Broadcasting House.

On Radio 3 there is a programme similar to, but not the same as, Desert Island Discs. Famous people talk about the events, music, people, books which have influenced them over their lifetime: This Cultural Life. Yesterday the guest was the sculptor Anthony Gormley, who created The Angel of the North, up in Gateshead, and the iron men, all cast from his own body, which stand on the beach, and sometimes under the water, at Crosby beach, not far from my birthplace, Southport. 

I remember seeing The Angel of the North with some friends in Gateshead not long after it was erected - impressive! I’ve also seen the standing men at Crosby. When last I saw them somebody had dressed one of them in Liverpool football kit. This happens quite a lot apparently. He spoke about having erected similar figures in Belfast, one of which was “necklaced”, having a tyre placed round its neck and set alight as a kind of protest, a reflection of that city’s troubled past. But Anthony Gormley accepts that such things happen; he wants his work to be “out there”, provoking reactions. 

One of the things that he said had influenced him was work by Walter de Maria, an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New York City and whose work was connected with what they call land art, popular in the 1960s. The specific work he talked about was The Lightning Field in Catron County, New Mexico. It consists of 400 stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular 1 mile × 1 kilometre grid array. It is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation as one of 12 locations and sites they manage. While the work's title, form and best-known photographs may suggest the installation attracts lightning strikes, in fact these happen rarely.

I found photos of this art work but was unable to copy them directly. So instead, here is a link which should take you to a photo.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!