There Be Dragons

DP

The clocks have long gone here, strictly living by the sun and the moon.   The autumn fair threatening to be an autumn foul, after the frost the flood, deluge after deluge.   Whilst you keep bodies in the freezer heavy rain here turns the ponds to leaf soup, natural acid baths, each one inviting a penny dreadful villain from under a nearby gas lamp.  Those leaves that remain on the trees turning more golden with each passing day.  On a long walk found some stock ponds on the West Heath, crucian puddles in need of duckboards, an adjacent chalk stream or a cork and quill float pushed up against the reeds and fished in hope.   Until that fantasy is fulfilled the rods stay up, lines uncast, waiting for the big flush and a winter warmer of a western front to herald the beginning of roaching proper on acid bath no 2.

No sightings of wild boar up on  Parliament Hill, but to the sound of Fleet Foxes harmonies echoing round the woods there was this dusky glimpse of the wood dragon still smoking after a night of spitting fire in the storm and lighting the way home with his eyes.


A quickening of steps on the birdtable

JA