First Week Back in Work - Achievement Unlocked

Well, there we go then. A week that started very nervously, but improved as I got used to things and rather perversely felt more interested in things than I had been for a couple of weeks.

It was lucky that I was alone in my office for a fair bit over the past two days.

I'm very paranoid of course. I carry around paper towels to touch all the metal door handles that you have to pull to move around the building, sanitise my keyboard and mouse two or three times a day, sanitise my hands when ever I touch anything that isn't on my desk.

That sort of thing is tough. OCD is such fun during a pandemic.

And being around people in a confined space is a very "new" experience as well. I was washing my hands in the bathroom when another guy walked in while I was walking out, I nearly lost it.

So getting out at break times are important to me, even on a blazing day like today. I like to do a circuit of campus, exploring the planted and wild areas. Yesterday, for instance, I traipsed across the wasteland towards the drainage ditch, where a big clump of hairy willow herb was buzzing with bees. There's some whopping big blackberries growing too, but right next to  a busy road.

Mmmmm, toxic berries.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCRackeredNature 31.07.20

The Island of Colour

Today I mounted possibly the strangest expedition I've ever done, in both my own eyes, and those of my readers.

I ran to a traffic island near where I work, about a 5km journey, to photograph the flowers there.

It's an odd thing to do I know, but every day when I cycle home from work I've noticed this traffic island, a large one near the end of the Newark Bypass, is just a mass of yellow and white flowers. I've been longing to take a closer look, but on my bicycle and without a camera it is both tricky, and rather pointless.

Well today I went. I did my urban Robinson Crusoe routine and stranded myself on this oasis of beauty within fast moving streams of heavy traffic. The wind was blowing a brisk westerly, which meant that I wasn't able to smell KFC, Mcdonalds or the sewage farm; just the odour of tarmac, rubber, and belching engines. I had only brought a bottle of Asda sport drink for provisions.

Luckily, I wasn't going to stay long.

THe predominant colour on the island is yellow, courtesy of the golden variant of ox-eye daisy that grows taller than anything else here, including its white cousin. As always their flower heads, formed actually of a colony of tiny individual flowers, act as a home to a multitude of tiny insects, the sort of insect your shirt gets covered in when you go cycling in summer.

Also present were corncockles, which for a plant that was down to a solitary specimen in the entire UK in 2014, seems incredibly numerous round here, poppies, and blue flowers that could either have been cornflowers or chicory. Plenty of red tailed bumblebees and hoverflies were feeding here, and I caught a glimpse of a great or small skipper.

It is such a bizarre place, an ecosystem that very few people must ever visit. I can only assume that at some point, perhaps like the wildflower meadow at Gedling cricket ground, someone has been carrying out a bit of guerilla gardening seeding the place with wildflower seed balls, until a permanent population took hold.

However it came about, it is great place to sail myself too on my running shoe boat.

Si

I saw nothing...but on my doorstep

My eyes were watering so much because of the gale I was idiotically trying to run into, across Sonce Park and around Millgate. Any sane bird or animal would have been sat at home with it's claws up watching Back to the Future 3, unless it wanted to be blown to Zeebrugge.

It wasn't a very long run either. Hey! I did 11 miles the other day. Slacking is allowed.

So really, all I saw was one I got home. On my driveway, a young blackbird was sitting, stump tailed and gaped, before it flew off on catching sight of me (I don't feel aggrieved), and then right on my doorstep, a blackbird egg (or was it a song thrush - it was turquoise and speckled) broken. Either the blackbird chick was a superfast growing mutant, or I've got blackbirds slash thrushes nesting under my eaves as well as the endlessly scolding and chattering sparrows.