CUTHBERT’S WAY and BEYOND Beth was home for a few days in November. Unbelievable weather, still and sunny, saw us out walking along the ridge to Wideopen and Grubbit. The rolling hills stretched away to the horizon left and right. Below, the Bowmont and Kale valleys slowly filled with mist. A kestrel flew by and […] Continue reading → 
SYNCHRONICITY It was to be a week of physical endeavour with all the old tools, the mattock, peck, shovel and bushman saw, to be deployed. To what end? The removal of previous garden making, a willow pergola along with its associated planting, a golden spruce. After twenty years this grouping had outgrown its space and […] Continue reading → 
After last week’s re-launch of birdsbikesbuttercups, I discovered a missing link: an article from November 2016. It is posted up today with a post script at the end FOREWORD Globalization promised much and yet has ultimately delivered its antithesis. Its new internationalism could and should have brought peoples together by harnessing and nurturing the bounties […] Continue reading → 
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN “Communication breakdown It’s always the same I’m having a nervous breakdown Drives me insane..” (1) How many of us of ‘certain age’ have called on Led Zeppelin’s lyric, manic vocals and pounding guitar for succour following a computer/internet meltdown? I certainly did when birdsbikesbuttercups.co.uk crashed in mid May with a deletion of two […] Continue reading → 
BIRDS, BIKES, BOTANICS and more in the RAINBOW NATION. With Barbara’s sister to visit and our daughter to meet at the end of her African adventure, South Africa beckoned. Our timing proved to be fortuitous for while we were away the whole of the UK was gripped by a prolonged icy blast and carpeted in […] Continue reading → 
FOOL ON THE HILL FOOL ON THE HILL “Day after day, alone on a hill The man with a foolish grin Is keeping perfectly still…… ……….The fool on the hill sees the sun going down And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round” So sang Paul McCartney on the 1967 Beatles E.P. […] Continue reading → 
HARVEST “ Every one of us is now in the position of the indigenous Americans when the Europeans arrived with guns and smallpox; our world is poised to change vastly, unpredictably and for the worse.” (1) This statement by Jonathan Franzen on the consequences of global warming pulls no punches. Just how shockingly apt this […] Continue reading → 
NEW HORIZONS TWO “I got my new horizons out to see” With the Moodies already in the back of my mind, it was no surprise that this lyric from a classic Hayward track hummed away as we drove down the M50 to mid Wales.There we were to spend a few days at Garddfady Farm home […] Continue reading → 
METAMORPHOSES From ‘singles’ to ‘albums’ From caterpillars to chrysalids And some lessons learned. Reflections on Metamorphoses With a little imagination metamorphosis can be applied to diverse forms of life from the obvious to the unlikely. Anyway that is what I will try and show. Let’s start with a reflection on the latter. Back in the […] Continue reading → 
WHAT’S NEXT Buttock scrunch times ten Ankle flex and knees depress, This is rehab.Yes. Many repetitions and chanting of my rehab mantra see me well placed five weeks after my hip-op. The downtime between each of the daily four sessions has been devoted to reading with the Dave Hepworth review of the music of 1971 […] Continue reading →