Tuesday 24 March 2015

My Personal Weather Vain has Gone with the Spring

Every night as I cycle home, I have my own personal method of working out whether my journey home will be a pleasure, or a teeth-grit slog into a wall of wind.

It is the Beaufort Scale of my commute. It is the Newark Sugar Factory.

Every evening, as soon as I get out of the car park death trap at work, I look West towards the sun set, and the great factory that has dominated this town with its size and smell since way before I arrived here. Its tall chimneys belch smoke into the air, and it is from these that I can gauge the strength and direction of the wind, like a bladderwrack toting bumpkin from an ancient episode of "Countryfile".

But only for six months of the year. The sugar beat only rolls in on teetering wagons for the colder months, and then when it is all out of the ground, the factory falls silent. The annual campaign, they call it. The smoke is stilled, and I have nothing by which to predict in what state I will get home.

Today was such a day.

Luckily, skies were clear, winds were light, and a moon fit and rested after swallowing the sun guided me home with Venus lower to the horizon. The twilight was beautiful, and needed to be preserved in memory both synaptic, and electronic.

Si

The Moon and Venus

Jupiter the star atop the tree
Looming tree

Smack in the middle, a nesting collared dove I think

Magnolia's open more and more each day

Beautiful colours

4 comments:

  1. I grew up near the Cantley sugar beet factory ... can still recall the aroma! Thank you for visiting my blog. Lovely sky pics.

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  2. Oh I'm always dropping buy everywhere, when there are good blogs to be read. Here, you can tell which way the wind is blowing from what you smell sometimes. Sugar beet, rubbish tip, maggot farm, sewage tratment works....

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  3. My husband cycles home every night thinking why are these hill so big, but he is enjoying the lighter evenings. There is quite a lot of farm land round us and we all can tell which way the wind is blowing , when they have been muck spreading..
    Amanda xx

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  4. Oh I get lovely whiffs of that too on my out of town runs!

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