HEADING FOR OGDEN WATER

On my other blog, Message in a Milk Bottle, I've posted photos from time to time of a little of the countryside within reach of Halifax.

So you may already have seen a view from Jerusalem Farm

or from Burnsall in Wharfedale

or caught sight of the beautiful bowling greens in Todmorden with hills beyond; not that bowling greens are exactly countryside!

But on this blog, Loose and Leafy in Halifax, I've so far concentrated on the town itself; for that is my immediate context - home. Perhaps now I should widen the field and introduce you to more of the wonderful and very varied countryside near at hand.

We're heading for the green deep in  a fold between the fields and moorland.

And as I do, I should also point you to Everyday Life. Lyn has been writing and posting photos about this part of England since 2009 and has been warming my heart to it ever since I first came across her blog. Our experiences and approach are very different and the reasons I moved to Halifax are broadly based on money, culture, work opportunities and a need for change. The choice of Halifax specifically was largely down to chance. So arriving here is pretty random. However the strong images of some of the country walks she has introduced us to over the years have been nudging away at me. "Cor," I've been thinking, "that's not an 'arf bad place to live!" Blogs have a lot to answer for!

In previous posts I've mentioned the Greek Village books of Sara Alexi. There are masses of them and in the same way as we have moved from Dorset to Halifax, people in the village don't necessarily stay put. In the first book (The Illegal Gardener) one of the main characters is Aaman from Pakistan who finds work re-shaping an English woman's newly acquired garden. Later, in 'Saving Septic Cyril' he and his wife travel (legally, this time) from Pakistan to England where they rent a house in a tiny village near Bradford.

Bradford is quite near Halifax. Indeed, they are linked vaguely by a sequence of fields and villages; and between the two we can look down the hill . . . beyond the sheep . .  not to to where Aaman and Saabira live (for their place is much smaller) . . . but to a village which makes me think of them. (Saabira and Aaaman are, by the way, in my mind, perfectly real people.) 

Through the village and a bit further . . . Ogden water. A fifteen minute drive from my house. What can I say in a short post? That we walked round the reservoir. That when we go back, you can come too.

(Quite a large stretch of water along the right-hand shore was frozen.)

Wherever I live, wherever I go, there are places where I like to be alone; I feel almost possessive about their isolation.

And there are places where there are so many people I can't cope and want to go home.

But here - it was such a jolly atmosphere I felt swept up in the happiness; masses of people walking beside the water before or after their Sunday lunch - and the woods ringing with laughter. There were people of all ages, little children, parents, older people; and teenage boys who were putting great efforts into shuffling awkwardly round slushy patches so they didn't get their flash trainers spoiled in the mud: people bringing Christmas trees to be re-planted or turned into dead-hedge wind-breaks. And, hurray, hurray, no cyclists! I've nearly lost friends over this cyclist issue. As a pedestrian I've had bad experiences with cyclists both in Dorset and in London. I have only one recurring nightmare and that's of hoards of cyclists bearing down on me waving their arms and shouting. It's horrible.

I've always liked the look of wind turbines - but am not yet entirely convinced they are the way forward. Having complained about cyclists I'll try not to raise your hackles further by worrying about their proliferation. Hopefully they are nothing but an early stage in the development of 'green' power and with any luck won't last long. But against a dark sky they are pretty impressive don't you think?

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Linking to Our World Tuesday

WALL PLANTS ON OCTOBER 16TH 2017

You know when the sun went red earlier this week? And the sky went orange? And it was because ex-hurricane Ophelia had brought dust from the Sahara and debris from Iberian wild fires in the swirl of her skirts? It was a very wonderful orange and the atmosphere almost pre-eclipsical and it cast a special and golden glow over what was already a golden autumn.

Naturally just about everyone who owns a camera went out and took pictures.

Yellow leaves looked fantastic but, initially, my camera was keen to over-do the look, to make it seem pretty much as if we were ourselves in the middle of a forest fire or that the end of the world was truly nigh. Indeed, while I was taking a photograph of the sun - with lens pointing straight at it (what a day!) a man walking by stopped to let me know that this strangeness was not caused by humans but it was God's way of telling us the world was about to end. This might be today, tomorrow, five years time, ten years or hundred . . . but end it would . . . and that people who had accepted Jesus into their hearts (hand on chest) would be ok but everyone else would not. He said this in a very cheerful way so perhaps he's hedging his bets on a hundred-year scenario.

I didn't quite subscribe to his end of the world theory but if it were to be the end of the world I was anxious to get my photographs in first. So I think I should be congratulated for patiently and politely waiting for the man to stop warning me of my possibly imminent demise while what I really wanted to do was to capture the red circle which was the sun while it was there.

Previous arrivals of Saharan dust have left gritty deposits of brick red on the roofs and bonnets of cars. And on Monday I assumed the red of the sun and the orange of the light were because sand in the Sahara is red. So I pottered around town thinking about camels and celebrated the light with an ice-cream . . . and fiddled with the settings on my camera . . . and found which colours 'worked' and which were distorted in the eerie atmosphere.

Later, a weather forecaster explained that the reds and oranges were nothing to do with the colours of sand but that debris in the atmosphere was deflecting greens and blues from the rainbow which makes light white. (All science is daft.) But that was later. By then I'd already found I could filter out Ophelia herself and that my camera could turn everything back to 'normal' if it wanted. Or if I wanted. (That's the challenge.) So . . . while photographs of wall plants in this post show what things really looked like on October 16th, the street picture (cars, van, buildings) shows what things look like on ordinary days even though I took it when the light was orange. It's a camera lie.

Clever things cameras. Strange thing light. Funny thing reality.

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To see the red sun, go to my other blog (Message in a Milk Bottle)
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 4 - The Sun
and the preceding posts
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 3 - Leaves
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 2 - Street Light
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 1 - Portrait