I Am The Autumnal Sun

That was Thoreau, one of the few thinkers I'd be happy to say inspired me in a serious way. Read Walden. It's stunning.

More pictures of Cannock Chase. Click for embiggening, or see the rest here.

A disobliging stag

'Now Autumn's sun so warmly gleams'

That was John Clare. It came to mind because a bunch of us went walking on Cannock Chase yesterday. We saw deer all over the place, not many birds, and a lot of stunningly beautiful sunset scenes. My pictures are here, and here's a sample (click on them for bigger versions).

The Wrekin (Shropshire) from Cannock Chase

A few more picture (not of the Map Twats, thankfully).

OK, these are the last ones I'll post. The rest can be seen here. Click on them for larger versions.

Is this the last Wimpy franchise in the world?

More Map Twat day out pictures

More pictures here

Map Twat Christmas Walk

We went walking on Cannock Chase yesterday - Dan, Neal and I. I'm missing swimming (none until my ears work again) and it showed - I was falling behind those rangy gits.

The weather was perfect. It was very cold, really clear and crisp, and the sun shone. The light was perfect and the ground was icy. As we traversed the hills and valleys, we spotted a woodpecker, deer (mostly deer arses, actually) and the wonders of nature. We ate fine cheese and Dan's homemade olive tapenade (!), then back to cosmopolitan Stafford for dinner with Dan's partner, which was very convivial.

It wasn't an official Map Twat expedition: Dan went mapless! More pictures here.

Action Neal

Have you met Neal, originator of the Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack©?

This is him in action on Cannock Chase yesterday. What a figure of a man. He's into swinging.

If you go down to the woods today (redux)

Morning all. How was your day of from my incessant, vacuous ranting? Thanks to Emma for keeping me updated with cricket scores. England + Wales/Australia sounded like fun, and Ireland hammered Kenya!

We went to Cannock Chase for a good long ramble. No dogging involved at all. It's a weird place. Some of it is horrible commercial timber plantation, some bits are quite bleak, while other areas are idyllic. We saw green woodpeckers, buzzards, kestrels, rabbits, lots of bilberries and two types of deer (roe and fallow). Needless to say, they all evaded my camera very impressively - here are a couple of snatched shots of shy deer. The Map Twats didn't get away quite so easily - the full set's here

Obviously, being in the woods and on the heath didn't preclude me from buying books: Oxfam in Stafford is very impressive. I picked up an oldish translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Nancy Mitford's lightweight Voltaire In Love, Michael Frayn's witty A Landing on the Sun and two very throwaway books for summer reading: The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies and Michael Dobbs' House of Cards.