Yesterday we joined thousands of others to march through Edinburgh to protest against hyperscale datacentres, a large number of which are planned for Scotland. You can see the extent of the march of you click on the photo below
We then had a nice lunch in a local cafe and walked home via Castle Rock, where we were very happy to see around 15 rabbits, including the one in the photo below
after the snowstorm—
a magpie rearranges
fallen leaves
originally published in Sense and Sensibility.
**
and I have another haiku in the current issue of Sense and Sensibility - you can read it at this link (scroll down to read mine)
This autumn, the trees seem to be particularly beautiful! I always make time to look all around me when I'm near trees at this time of year, because everything changes so quickly and the leaves will all too soon have dropped. I love the way the sunlight makes the leaves shine.
We had a lovely walk round Corstorphine Hill this weekend. The autumn colours were still amazing, largely because, apart from one storm, we've not had much high wind, so a lot of leaves are still on the trees. Unfortunately the colours didn't come out particularly well on most of the photos, due to the lack of sunshine, but this photo gives a good idea of the beauty of the leaves
We were lucky with birds on the hill too (though no photos of the birds!). We had a great view of a Kestrel and also saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker working its way up a tree and five Jays flying across the hill. Jays aren't uncommon and we know they nest on Corstorphine Hill but they are oddly elusive and it's always particularly nice to see them
Last Thursday, I had had a lunchtime walk round Harrison Park, a short walk away from our flat, and the autumn colours were beautiful there too
Shared for Nature Notes.
The book progresses with poems on topics including the poet's childhood, war and its aftermaths, and the changing seasons:
leaves I saw born in Spring,
first green syllables,
burn russet, amber, gold,
from October
Throughout, the poet shares precise observations of the natural world around her, with often surprising descriptions:
as sky remembers blue like a sudden thought
from November
or imbuing nature with spiritual value:
'On the ash tree spire
a blackbird holds his world
with his psalm to summer.'
from The Silence
Clarke generally focuses her eye on nature rather than environmental issues though Was it For This? reflects on war and contains the following:
'Now war is poisoned air, the screaming sky'
and goes on to mention places recently and currently affected by war including Kiev, Aleppo and Gaza.
There's a lot of repetition in the poems, which has been hailed by some as echoes that add to the overall reading, but I have to admit that I found most of the repeated phrases annoying rather than anything else. Overall however, I found it a very impressive collection.
The Silence by Gillian Clarke, published (2024) by Carcanet.
**
Meanwhile, over on my Crafty Green Poet Substack, I'm thinking about Preparing for Winter.
Yesterday we enjoyed a lovely walk round Blackford Pond and through the Hermitage of Braid. The autumnal colours were particularly beautiful, especially the beech trees. Beech has a bit of a bad reputation among ecologists being a non-native species, but it is undeniably lovely in autumn as you can see in the photos below.
We didn't find as many fungi as we had hoped to find, but there were some, including, as seen in the photo below,Common Puffballs with Candlesnuff in the background
A few Grey Squirrels were running around too
Each chapter examines a different group of animals, looking at the ancient myths that people used to tell themselves about these creatures and the scientific experiments that have been done to find out facts about how each animal lives. Some of these experiments would now be considered cruel by modern standards, but that isn't pointed out. (I have no problem with the presentation of cruel experiments that shaped scientific knowledge if the cruelty is addressed, scientific ethics have changed after all).
I found the author's jaunty sense of humour irritating, particularly her seeming need to add 'amusing' comments to almost every paragraph. This book is worth reading, but nowhere near as good as An Immense World by Ed Yong, which deals with similar topics and which I (very briefly) reviewed here.
The Unexpected Truth about Animals by Lucy Cooke, published by Penguin.
Most weeks I do a patrol of Colinton and Craiglockart Dells alongside Edinburgh's Water of Leith. I often pick litter, and always record the wildlife I see. Today, I spent some time looking at fungi, and here are a selection of what I found. The photos aren't all of the best quality, unfortunately, as the light wasn't great for taking pictures. First we have a Collared Earth Star with a coral fungus in the background.
and the weird jelly like fungus below is possibly Tripe Fungus (but I'm really lost with this one!)
The Dells are great for fungi all year round and my favourite fungi I've found there are the Larch Bolete, which I found a month or so ago
and the Scarlet Elf Cups that appear in late winter
Yesterday morning, we had a brief walk at Saughton Park, before the storm came in. The autumn colours are looking beautiful - I always particularly like rowan trees at this time of year.
secrets
you never shared -
falling leaves
haiku originally published in Shadow Pond.
**
This week's post on my Crafty Green Poet Substack is all about apples, you can read it here.
We had a lovely day trip yesterday to Linlithgow, just a short train journey away from Edinburgh. Whenever we visit the town, we walk round the beautiful loch. Here are some of the photos we took yesterday.
Linlithgow Palace (the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots sits near the loch and can be seen from anywhere on the perimeter path
There were also several pairs of Tufted Ducks on the lock
and a family of Mute Swans
Everyone seems to be talking about Digger, the latest Tom Cruise film, about Digger Rockwell, the oil tycoon. Most reviews are bad and it's doing really badly at the box office, but I saw it yesterday and it's well worth seeing.
It's a very difficult film to review without giving away the surprise twists (of which there are several, slowly revealed through the length of the film). However, without giving too much away, I'll say that it's a film that delivers uncomfortable truths about the world we live in and leaves the viewer questioning whether art can ever really make a difference to important issues. It's a well-made, thought provoking satire. Being satire, many of its fans find it very funny, though I always find satire less funny than it's supposed to be. I think I laughed three times in Digger, the rest of the time the satire was just too close to grim truth to be funny.
So, don't believe the negative reviews, go and see the film. There are a couple of good reviews on Wired (both of which contain 'spoilers' so read them after seeing the film):
Everyone Hates Digger - It's the Perfect Climate Movie.
Digger is a Box Office Flop. It might be the most Relevant Film of the Year.
An Immense World explores the many ways that animals perceive the world. It looks at how the senses that we share with other animals can differ between species, some species can only see in black and white, while others can perceive colours beyond the spectrum that humans can see. The human sense of smell is notoriously poor compared to that of many other species, such as dogs or elephants.
However, where this book probably becomes most interesting is in looking at the senses that other species have that humans entirely lack. For example, seals can follow the hydrodynamic wake (the swirling water currents created by the movement) of a fish from up to 200 metres away. Spiders' webs are effectively a clever extension of their senses, being sensitive to the movements of trapped prey. Bats and dolphins can navigate using echolocation, enabling them to avoid obstacles in dimly lit environments. The most powerful electric eel can incapacitate a horse.
As humans we experience the world in a uniquely human way and we cannot begin to imagine what it would really be like to experience the world in entirely different ways. Reading this book helps us to understand some aspects of what it would be like to perceive life differently.
The book also looks at some of the ways in which human activities make life harder for many species - excess lighting at night fatally attracts insects and disorientates bats and migrating birds; noise pollution changes the way that birds communicate with each other and underwater noise affects how creatures such as dolphins can navigate.
An Immense World by Ed Yong, published (2023) by Vintage
The weather is beautiful today. Here are some photos from this morning's patrol of Edinburgh's Water of Leith, an activity I do most weeks, recording wildlife and often picking litter (I pick litter every week in Summer, once a fortnight in Spring and Autumn and once a month in Winter).
all the things
I meant to do -
falling leaves
originally published in Issue 3:4 of Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society.
We enjoyed walking this stretch of Edinburgh's Water of Leith yesterday. There are several sculptures by Anthony Gormley in the river, the one below is near to the stairs that lead up to the Gallery of Modern Art.
We were delighted to get good views of two Dippers, this one was in a very busy section of the river, quite close to Dean Village, which yesterday was more crowded with tourists and others than I've ever seen it. The Dipper didn't seem to mind the crowds
We also had a decent view of a Kingfisher, but it didn't stop for long enough for us to get a photo!
For Nature Notes.
These stories vividly imagine futures that include a wide range of novel elements including: thermal imaging to reveal the past movements of people; quantum consciousness; eternal youth; smart clothing; payment in shops using traces of DNA; the expansion of human settlements across the universe; and the recurring tropes of nutrition using food capsules or similar replacing real food; people having AI chips implanted in their brains; and of course lots of helper robots.
All the stories refer back to the COVID-19 pandemic in some way and several of them include future pathogens. Zhao Haihong's The Moon Returns (translated by Andrew Rule) sees a resident of the moon struggle to cope with the pathogens when he travels to take up a job on earth. In Ling Chen's Miracle Grass (translated by Xueting C. Ni), a pandemic has broken out among the residents of a space craft exploring the distant Kuiper Belt, while Anna Wu's Archaic Dust (translated by Christopher MacDonald) features a coronavirus that can be passed from computers to humans, which can be made visible using the Archaic Dust of the title. Cryogenic freezing means that characters in this story meet again well into the future. Meanwhile, the characters in Zhou Dedong's I Want a Different World (translated by Jack Hargreaves) actually time travel in this entertaining missing person case. It's a twisting, turning mystery and ultimately a beautifully tragic love story.
Many of these imagined futures are, unsurprisingly, depressing to contemplate. Tang Fei's This is a Good Path (translated by Judith Huang) explores the downsides of immortality. A film-maker and his acquaintance find out that they're too selfish to take on looking after a house plant in this future where no-one wants to care for anything other than themselves. The main character in Yimei Tangguo's Dust Rose (translated by Mel ‘Etvolare’ Lee) is threatened with eviction for not being a productive member of society. I found it heartening though, that, in this horribly believable dystopian future overseen by AI police officers and state control of everyone's personal finances, the main character is an author, giving us hope that perhaps the arts will survive the AI takeover. Qiufan Chen's Glaze (translated by Xueting C. Ni) is a compulsively readable but highly disturbing story, which I'm tempted to describe as body horror (though I'm not really familiar with that genre). A stage performer who remodels part of her body during shows, is haunted by nightmares of being taken over by a monster and eventually finds that the nanobot system that she relied on to repair her body after every show is no longer working and her body starts to disintegrate.
He Xi & He Zun's The Wasteland Courier (translated by Gigi Chang) didn't really work for me, with it's overwrought descriptions. When I started reading Dan Shi's Fire (translated by Yahia Zhengtang Ma) I thought this was going to be another story that wouldn't work for me. However, I ended up loving its thought provoking approach to exploring history, censorship, gender identity and equality. I also was fascinated by the idea of historical hubs attached to historical buildings and locations so you can explore the history of the site through a virtual reality set up.
Lu Hang's The Concrete Farm (translated by Xueting C. Ni) follows a young woman, who teams up with a former student of her late horticulturalist grandfather to convert a failing housing development into a horticultural hub. This is a fine example of a thrutopian tale, a genre we need more of. There are problems all the way along to hold the reader's attention (alien fungi!), but it's a story with a satisfying, optimistic ending that gives us hope for the future.
Overall this is a fascinating look into possible futures for China 100 years beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.China + 100 edited by Xueting C Ni, to be published 8 October 2026 by Comma Press.
Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book in return for an honest review.
Yesterday morning was mild and sunny, perfect autumn weather for a walk round Edinburgh's Arthur's Seat, one of our favourite places for a weekend stroll.
Everything looked particularly sharply focussed in the bright light
Later in the day it started raining and in fact is still raining as I type. We need the rain, but it was certainly lovely to be able to enjoy the sunshine yesterday morning.
Shared for Nature Notes.
Before we came home from Dumfries and Galloway, we spent some time wandering around the town and along the River Nith.
We generally travel everywhere by public transport. However, we usually hire a car when we go on holiday. Sometimes we travel to our destination by public transport and hire a car when we get there, other times we hire a car in Edinburgh. We don't find we need a car at all if we visit the Isle of Arran; Perth or Peebles as in these places there are enough very local walks and enough decent buses to get us to locations for walks further afield.
You can catch up on all my posts about this year's trip to Dumfries and Galloway by following the links below:
A Few Days Away in Dumfries and Galloway.
Nature Walks around Lockerbie.
Murray's Monument; Talnotry Woodland and Waterfalls (plus bonus Red Deer).
It's rare that we stay in Dumfries and don't visit the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust reserve at Caerlaverock. It's a wonderful place with a great range of habitats supporting loads of wildlife. It's famous for both wintering wildfowl and dragonflies.
It has a lovely wildlife garden that's full of butterflies, in the photo below you can see a Painted Lady (at the top) and a Red Admiral with a Small White in the background
As we came out of the wildlife garden, we found a young hare, hiding in the grass
The aptly named Teal Pond was full of Teal
and a few Mute Swans
Common Hawker Dragonfly
