theoreadexpress

Have camera, will travel (puffballs, inkcaps and wild flowers)

Today is being a little odd. Maybe clacking along on the keyboard for a bit will reveal something or maybe I’ll just witter on about a photograph or two. Consider this a miscellany of random bits and pieces stuck together with selotape and chewing gum, even more than usual. There is an old road reasonably…

Be friends with the night, there is nothing to fear

If Dendrophobia is the fear of trees and Nyctohylophobia the fear of wooded areas at night it might be supposed that Dendrophilia and Nyctohylophilia are the love of trees and the love of forests at night respectively. My favourite time of the day is evening, heading for twilight. There is that sense of the world gathering…

Oaks of Charleville Forest

There has always been a tree in my life I considered *my* tree. My very earliest memory is of a swing, a plastic yellow swing seat tied with heavy-knotted rope onto an old but sturdy fruit tree. It is a dense sensory memory, full of prolific leaf on gnarly branch, lush grass and yellow, and…

Humans are terrible at taking advice.

The way my twitter feed is now I seem to have spent the last week constantly alerted to the fact that reports say people need at least two hours in Nature to be happier and healthier. It’s that kind of story that all the papers and news streams seem to latch on, probably as vaguely…

All creatures buzzing and small

I remember once cycling along a bog road as a teenager when they still cut turf to one side of the road. Thinking about it I may even have been travelling home after visiting a friend when we both had spent the afternoon footing turf as summer work for her father. It was heading for…

What makes a wood good?

The very best type of woods for me are large, they move from age to age, each whorl in its landscape wearing the personality of some signature tree or consultation of trees. Perhaps an opening amble through a busy flurry of hazel or birch, all sap and energy forging new forest paths through glens and…

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore..

I’m not much given to anger, to be honest. I know a great many people who are usually pretty content with their lot and not at all given to irritation, yet alone anger. It is a very remarkable thing that that’s changing. The weird notion that we, ordinary people who voted for more Green policymaking,…

Scattered thoughts, the environment and elections

This post is likely to be as bitty and through-other as my brain currently feels. It is reasonably late on and Election Friday night and I seem to be having as much trouble catching a solid thought as I frequently have catching those annoying midges that whine uncomfortably in my face almost as soon as…

There was a sort of secretly pleased part of me relished the idea that I was part of Generation X. It sounded properly fitting to my geekish way of thinking, as if somehow we’d be the generation that might start to manifest powers, or that we would somehow work up to heralding in the kind…

Biodiversity Go! (Irish wildflowers)

I briefly played both Ingress and Pokemón Go. I may even have deliberately gone km out of my way just to get new portals once upon a time. Imagine how my eldest son reacted when I told him we were taking a spin out to a totally different part of the county so that I,…