Otter

she recalls those playful days
when her silkiness would glide the riverbed,
curl, stretch, coil and tease,
confident of her sleekness
she would catch the river's flash,
float it on her back,
clasp it to belly,
web and claw,
gasping,
so sure of herself

Kreativ Blogger Award

Thanks to Sue Richardson for nominating this site for the KreativBlogger Award.

Having received the award, here's what I must do:
1. List 7 things that I love
2. Link back to the blog that awarded it to me
3. Choose 7 blogs to award as ‘Kreativ Bloggers’
4. Comment at each blog to let them know they’ve been chosen

So, off we go. Seven things I like: my reclining chair; walking in wild places with wind blowing through my hair; comfortable shoes / boots; getting on with my sons; my job; garlic bread; having a shower with fragrant shampoo and body washes; and loads of other things especially still having use of the five senses.

I love wildlife photography so am passing the award (in no particular order) to:
Brian Rafferty
Paul Foster
Richard King
Pete Woodruff
Bill Aspin
Richard Spencer
Frank Whitney

Hope you enjoy visiting them

Bracken

... wrens summon it from slumber
and it rises through its brittle dead
with fronds of frightened caterpillars,
soon linnets romance over it, unfurling it,
their feathers flutter through its growth,
then stonechat - they proclaim from it,
breed in it, feed in it, shelter in it too,
young wrens lose themselves in it,
voles scrabble through it,
kestrels hover over it,
and sheep - they lie down in it,
let its russet hands enfold them
back into its peat.

The Invisible Month

... and it all builds up to this,
these summer months
when the garden quietly goes over,
young robins start to make their own way
with fire fanning through their feathers;
their parents tick amongst the undergrowth
skulking as they moult their roles.
And out in the pastures, curlews'
instincts are being tugged towards the coast,
to the silver pauses left
each time the tide rolls back.

Bitter Blue

I've just read Bitter Blue quickly - because I was scarcely able to put it down. Private Investigator, Sally Kilkenny, is a single mother and many readers will identify with her contemporary struggle to juggle work around childcare.

It's got everything you'd expect from a crime fiction thriller: pace, increasing drama, location (Manchester), tensions within the PI's personal life and carefully placed clues to keep readers just ahead of the PI at strategic points. She also had be chuckling at her ever-so-timely flashes of wit.

As a writer, I'm also interested in the cross-genre skills. Cath Staincliffe's script writing skills are also apparent here especially in her plot structure. Almost ready made for screen adaptation.

Do you agree that writers can benefit by regularly writing in more than one genre because it enables them to sharpen transferable skills?

snap, crackle and drop

Having heard all the exciting news about the juvenile terns at Yarrow Valley Park, especially the older chick: starting to fly - splattering into water - nearly drowning then managing to fly learning how to fish, I really had to go visit them tonight. After all the day's exercise, the younger was resting on the raft and the older stunt-chick was limiting his adventures to swimming around the raft (or maybe mum had grounding him? I am, of course, assuming he is male - certainly sounds like it!)

My camera isn't good enough to get a decent photo so I took one of this cygnet instead which spent ages grooming itself.

On our way round, we noticed this peeling birch tree. No idea what has happened here. Man made damage perhaps?

Later we paused under a beech tree and heard it snap, crackle and drop its nut cases on us. It shed them like a shower. At first I wondered whether there was a squirrel in the tree but there wasn't evidence of the beech nuts being eaten - just falling. A magic moment (even if I wasn't wearing a hard hat!)

We also saw a juvenile grey wagtail looking very lonely (Awww) and a frog. It's always worth a short evening stroll; you just never know what you might happen upon.