I didn’t climb a pylon! And an update on owls.

Storms, public information films and entangled lives

I was looking at an email in my husband’s  inbox, which read: I climbed a pylon! And an update on owls. That’s the sort of newsletter he receives, the sort of email that gives me a complex, as I have not been climbing pylons. I’ve been wandering around a very soggy golf course, but you probably assumed that, because I wander around the golf course every week, and it’s been raining a lot. I do have an update on owls though, who after a quiet spell have once again commenced a sort of nightly territorial hoot off. I don’t know why they were quieter over the holiday; maybe  one owl got seen off,  only to be replaced with a different rival owl that needed hooting at, or, more likely, owls observe Christmas. Can owls get too drunk to hoot if they consume enough  eggnog?Asking the important questions,  even though I am not climbing pylons.

I will never climb a pylon as I am funny with heights and grew up watching those commercials where small children and their kites get horrifically fried for even looking at a pylon wrong. I also grew up well into the era of oven chips, but that didn’t stop them instilling a fear of chip pans (and the resultant fires they cause) without really understanding what a chip pan needed. Whenever my son questions why my generation is so messed up I like to show him a compilation of children’s deaths I was regularly shown of daytime telly at an impressionable age.

The footpath. Lucky I wore my wellies, I guess.

By tuesday, it been raining heavily, and the lake was looking rather larger than usual, or at least, the path around it was looking a lot underwater. There were no cormorants. I suspect, in hindsight, they knew something I didn’t. It wasn’t particularly windy when I left the house, or at the lake, but by the time I reached the front gate, the trees were definitely swaying (that particular tree would, a short time later, sway all the way down. RIP)

By the time we reached the row of larch trees that lead into the woods and I am becoming increasingly sure I do not want to walk into the woods; even skirting around it I am pelted with twigs and other debris. By the time I hit the open fields I are being buffeted, coat puffing me up like a mitchelin man, all the while getting text updates on power cuts and which branches had fallen off what trees from him at home.

Drawing a moving tree. Only the top bit I can see from the window.

Every morning I wake up and look at the top of the plum tree and think how I should draw it,  it’s what I look at every morning, standing outside my window, and I never seem to get round to it, because it seems that it will always be there outside my window, but suddenly, it seemed very likely with won’t be there tomorrow. The plum tree is old, prone to fungus and bent and wizened; for a tree to live a long life, it needs a nice straight trunk. The plum tree doesn’t have a nice straight trunk, it is bend ant a near right angle in several places, and is most swaying horrifically to and fro, apart from the branches that have already fallen off. I start to draw it then, partly to try and capture the movement of the branches, partly to save it from certain doom, as if my failure to draw it will cause its demise. I assumed it would be there tomorrow, so nature must teach me a lesson; it stands to reason. The feel of the pencil on paper is soothing as the lines work their ways into familiar shapes. By the time I am finished, the worst of the storm is over, and I am certain the plum tree will live to see another day.

Finished tree drawing.

Findings

As long as I have been conscious, I have been fairly obsessed with the life cycle of mushrooms. One of the very first photographs I took as a small child was of some mushrooms. This is why I bought Merlin Sheldrakes’ Entangled Life on preorder before it came out. I was very excited for it. should’ve probably ranted about how good it was then, before everyone else did, and it was a best seller, and got an illustrated edition.

My entangled lives.

Chatting with a friend who was  dropping off some gifts, I told her very enthusiastically that I had not bought her a copy of Merlin Sheldrakes’ Entangled Life, mostly because it’s me (and consequently my family) that’s obsessed with the Sheldrake brothers, so I was probably buying it for me, because  I really did want the illustrated version, but couldn’t justify it because I already had the hardback first edition, though my son has stolen that, so maybe I could  justify it after all? The jist of the conversation was that I didn’t have, but very much wanted, the illustrated version, and she said she had to work hard to keep a straight face because, obviously, she’d bought me the illustrated version of  Merlin Sheldrakes’ Entangled Life for Christmas . Thankfully I bought her a card game and a headband that had snail eyes on it so there were no repeats on last year when my brother and I did a straight swap of Kraken espresso rum.

Some Christmas presents. I bought me the blackbird, I’m going to turn it into a chough. People say I’m hard to buy for but I buy me great presents so that’s nonsense.

This year my husband bought me an ITV digital monkey in original packaging, and while musing on having the best Christmas ever  I realised that  the ideal present for me (assuming you don’t have an in-depth knowledge of printmaking materials) is a slightly different version of something I already own and really love. If you haven’t already bought Entangled Life I highly recommend this version. The words are all the same but it’s easier to read because of all the inspiring pictures of mushrooms. The only thing that annoys me is the photographs are all credited in the captions, but the drawings are not.