Scrunching

Very important.  Before the last leaves of autumn are blown away, make sure you take time to scrunch through them!

The Christmas Markets Of Cologne

I love continental Christmas markets – the tantalising smells, the festive music, the delectable food, the pretty wooden stalls, the handcrafted goods, the happy atmosphere.

This time last year, I was at Munich’s magical market.  This weekend, it was Cologne.  And here’s what I’ll remember:

Crowds, crowds and yet more crowds!
The scent of aniseed
Apple punch and big baked apples - and the smiling girl who served them
Cologne cathedral’s vertigo-inducing organ loft….and the building itself, poignant survivor of a city destroyed by war
Scrunching through dried leaves
Hot chestnuts
The chocolate museum
Catching bubbles blown by soft toys, sitting on top of the wooden stalls
The exquisite Café Reichard

Hmm….food seems to figure heavily!

The Nature Table: November

By November, the landscape has been pared back….has assumed a starker outline.

Leaves have fallen, stems withered, flowers died, seed heads shrivelled.  The colour has leached from the land.  There’s a shutting down, a withdrawal, in preparation for winter.  What energy remains is garnered within the plants to sustain their diminished forms until spring.

My eye is drawn to the spare stems with their interesting silhouettes, to the waving grasses and rusty bracken.  Hidden by an abundance of leaves for much of the year and overshadowed by flamboyant flowers, the structure of plants finally reveals itself as the year draws to a close.  Everything, after all, has its moment of glory.

To honour and recognise these modest forms, I’m giving the nature table over to them this month.  I’ll let the remaining berries and blooms live on where they are; and instead I’ll gather dry and dying plants, willowy weeds and curling twigs.

This month belongs to them.

How To Brighten A Foggy Day

Having your work displayed on someone else’s site is generally a bit of a morale booster.  So, when my husband called yesterday to say the Daily Telegraph was looking for photos of the fog and mist that’s been so pervasive of late, I e-mailed a few iPhone pics through to the picture desk.  Half an hour later, two of them were up on the Telegraph’s website.  Which made the day seem altogether sunnier.

The Magical Morning Of Mist

You never know when magic‘s about to occur.

Yesterday Joss and I set off for the moor in thickest fog (yet again)….only to arrive there and find ourselves in an extraordinary sort of fairyland. 

Great, huge clouds had come down to earth.  Dense, white pillows were nestled in the valleys while strands of cotton candy drifted about the moor like shape-shifting ghosts. 

It meant I could face in one direction and see a vista stretching for miles under a sky of clearest blue.  But, turn forty-five degrees, and the fog was so thick I could barely see the dog in front of me.  Forty-five degrees more and the aspect opened out again, with ribbons of mist lying across the landscape in the most beguiling way.

Joss and I moved in and out of the cloud as we wandered about the fell.  Things visible one minute had disappeared the next.  People loomed suddenly into view then vanished.  Faint wreaths of mist, wide-open skies and all-enveloping greyness swapped and changed constantly.

Seasoned dog walkers were going into raptures; tourists running about with cameras and binoculars. 

It was far and away the most spectacularly beautiful morning I’ve ever known on the moors.  It was true magic.

(I'm taking part in Mosaic Monday over at Little Red House today.  If you have a few moments, take a look at some of the other lovely collages posted there...)