Downs and ups

The down was a sitting down.  I believe that it is impossible to sit on a bookcase full of books without realising (even if said bookcase has somehow been swathed in a jacket carelessly thrown at it). The worst that a book can suffer under said carelessly strewn jacket and then my backside, is a creased page or folded cover. The same cannot be said of a Kindle alas! This I found to my cost the other day. As I recovered the Kindle I saw to my horror that the screen now resembled Etch a Sketch on a high, and accessing any of the scores of books I have stored on it was a total none starter. Yes, I had managed to sit on a virtual bookcase of books.

A lesson learnt the hard way, though at the end of the day, the Kindle is just part of the physical "stuff" that fills our lives, useful and fun but not essential. Luckily for me I was able to go out and get a replacement, and thanks to the wonders of technology all my books were still out there in the ether for me to restock the virtual shelves.







The up is absolutely not "stuff" that can be easily replaced; it was seeing the wonderful spectacle of a starling murmuration. We went out to Leighton Moss one afternoon last week and watched the amazing massed balletics of thousands of starlings as they gathered into a huge crescendo of movement before finally all coming to land in the reed beds.

Attempts at capturing it all on camera merely give a taste of what it was like. Distance and fading light were not conducive to getting good images.

Such was the spectacle that we went again yesterday to see the incredible sight. We put cameras aside and immersed our eyes in the experience. It started with small cohorts of birds which gradually joined forces to form a huge shape shifting pattern, serpent like sliding over the hill top and then morphing into a great fish like  creature ebbing and flowing as more birds joined. As the light caught wings and bodies there was a constant flux of pattern and motion. For their finale, we saw a turn in direction as the shape became a funnel and the birds poured themselves into their night time reed bed roost.