In the Office

The rain has stopped.
From my desk, I watch
October sunlight play
on the white walls
of the football stadium
across the car-park.

Upstairs, someone else’s boss
moans about the weather
‘It’s raining cats and dogs
and dark as winter’.
I am my own boss
free to watch the slow movement
of sunlight across white walls
as geese fly overhead
winter on their wings.


Originally published in the seemingly now defunct Work Literary Magazine.

Rainy Season haiku

no rain

in this 'rainy season' -

silent lightning 

 **

Inspired by my time in Malawi, where the rains failed in my second autumn.

First published in The Mamba, Issue 14, the journal of the Africa Haiku Network.

 

Along the River Tyne at Haddington

Yesterday we had a lovely walk along the River Tyne at Haddington, a town in East Lothian, a short bus journey away from Edinburgh (This is a different River Tyne to the one that flows through Newcastle upon Tyne.)

We spent quite a lot of time looking at the pictorial wildflower meadow that stretches from the bridge in the photo above quite a distance along the river. There were a reasonable number of Eristalis hoverflies enjoying the flowers 

and a few Banded hoverflies (Syrphus sp) which have been very elusive so far this year

The meadow includes a nice variety of flowers including red poppies

and Wild Carrot, my favourite of the umbellifers, especially at this time of year, when it's in seed

Three Days of Scottish Summer

 We've had a really poor summer as far as weather has been concerned. However, we were lucky enough to get three days of glorious sunny weather early last week which coincided with our brief trip to Peebles in the Scottish Borders. 

You can read a wee bit more about our trip in my latest Substack post.

Corstorphine Hill again!

 Yesterday, we walked around Corstorphine Hill again! It's one of our favourite places to walk. Also, I had, earlier in the week carried out a butterfly survey there, when the weather was only just good enough to do such a survey. Yesterday, we started our walk thinking that the weather might be better. So we started in the Walled Garden, where the butterfly transect route starts

 We saw a few hoverflies in the garden, including this Bog Hoverfly (Sericomyia silentis):

We didn't see any butterflies at all and soon realised that the weather wasn't going to be good enough for a survey, so we didn't keep to the survey route and just walked where we wanted to around the hill.

At another part of the hill, we were impressed to see this web of a Funnel Web Spider

Viewing a Landscape through Cataracts

Nothing is clear, all is blurred green
with blotched lights strung out like beads
while every dew-drop glows
at the centre of its own rainbow.
We seem to be in the middle of fields
and there looks to be woodland over there.
I wish I could see the birds that are singing.

Surgery will soon fix my eyes:
these blurred colours will resolve
back into shapes and meaningful things
but nothing is clear for this land -
any time in the future, all this greenery
could be erased just by the whim
of a bureaucrat's pen.

(inspired by Green Terrain by Kelly Austin-Rolo, and originally published on Ekphrastic Review. 

**

Since writing this poem, I've had cataract surgery on my left eye (my right eye was done seven years ago) and my eyesight is much improved. 

Sadly, despite the change in government in the UK, the future for the UK's green spaces is no more secure than it was with the previous government.

Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart

 

Subtitled Unlocking the Secrets of Existence, this book is a readable tour through the maths of biology and ecology. The book is very accessible for those who don't enjoy too much maths and covers topics such as the Fibonacci series, the maths of genetics, game theory, networking and patterns. 

I've got a Botany degree, and so a lot of this felt like revision, but very engaging and sometimes entertaining revision with a new focus on maths. As a student, I had been aware of the importance of statistics in populations studies in ecology and also the importance of mechanics in environmental physics (my least favourite subject, far too much physics!). Reading this book, though, really opened my eyes to the hidden maths, particularly that which determines the pattern and form of living things.

This is an excellent book if you want an overview of the hidden importance of maths to biology, but if you want some serious mathematical investigation, you may need to look elsewhere! 

Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart, published (2012) by Profile Books.