Back to the Writing Life? (Or Towards the Desk: back to the writing life?)

So is it back to the writing life, or back to the writing life?

The Hawkesbury Indie Author’ Pop-up Readings (etc) is only a month away, time to re-discover the Writing Hat.

Gatekeeper, Hackney Wick Wood

Before then, at last a ‘proper’ July post: the last guest has been waved off on her journey to Scotland, and the new lodger has moved in …Through June, and on into the holiday, I was taking walks and photographs of wild things to join in with the 30 Days Wild project, (see earlier blogpost featuring the wildlife of Wick Wood in Hackney, London,

(where we saw this lovely Gatekeeper butterfly on a beech tree,) and continued to discovered a few interesting things.

One, what we had assumed were caterpillars

of the Cabbage or large white butterfly, which cover our pink berbers bush every summer, and consume the leaves, are not. They are the lava of the Berberis Saw Fly.

Large White Butterfly Caterpillar on Mullen

If you look carefully at the photos, you can see that also very similar, the beasts are distinguishable. We caught up with the caterpillars living and feeding a wild Mullen on the sandy cliffs above Sennen Beach, which they shared with several other creatures in kind of multi-occupied house arrangement.  (See right, e.g., green iridescent beetle)

On the same Sennen cove cliff ramble,

a lovely Skipper butterfly was resting on bracken. Notice its really strange, big black composite eye! 

 Many moons (well, probably only one, but it has felt a bit like many) have also passed, it feels, since we spotted large numbers of Moon (or common) Jellyfish at the cove, on beautiful Whitesands Beach..

Pity the poor Moon Jellyfish,

and its relatives: as I read on someone else’s blog, ‘they are 95%water, and have no brain’. The purple design inside the jelly bag is apparently its gonads … ‘I have sex therefore I am’?

So that was our summer holiday. Wonderfully, before the weather really slumped into cool and grey! On the way home, visiting a friend in Wells (Somerset), a swarm of bees was resting in the car park on a telegraph pole.

Back home,

we were pleased to see again the day-flying moths: two Scarlet Tigers appeared resting together on Cranesbill Geranium leaves and for a few days afterwards these, and Five Spot Burnets (or narrow-bordered 5-spot Burnets) appeared doing courtship dances. Scarlet Tigers love nettles, and I’ve been allowing some to grow around the very edges of the garden the last couple years to encourage them.

I’ve also been watching the progress of a pair of swans who built a nest on the reed beds

nearby the canal.  Shortly before we went away, they appeared by the canal with their three cygnets. Lots of photos for another time, and I’m horrified to learn that ‘cygnets numbers are down by a third due to air guns’. How cruel and short-term some people’s thrills can be.

And this was a writing about writing blog? The desk has possibly begun to call at last …