Autumn walk on Armistice day.

We found this rather wonderful place a few months back - an unsung nature reserve of interlocking lakes and natural woodland. Long may it stay unsung as there are no cars, ice-cream vans or crowds. It's not mentioned as a place to visit at our local tourist office and the vague attempts at fencing suggest whoever owns it would rather people stayed out.
Today it was exceptionally beautiful in the autumn sun: majestic tree reflections in the calm water, a new carpet of gold and yellow leaves and many water birds including herons, moorhens, winter-sheltering cormorants and a colony of white egrets.
Also, wonderful to see was a veritable village of bee-hives which we had to pass (gingerly) a few bees lazily buzzing around their respective edifices. I don't know whether this place might have been ex-gravel pits or is a series of natural lakes but I think it will become a regular haunt through the different seasons.

                         

                        

                                              
                                                                      Egret colony






                       

          And as if a quiet reminder of what this day commemorates - a field of autumn sunflowers we passed on the way to the lakes.

Everyman is a cormorant, sometimes.

I was trying to find an image of the cover of my book, and uploaded this by mistake.

As it's from the inside of the book I'll leave it here.

Its title is above, and the subject concerns those times when we feel that it's all just a bit too much.

When Mark (husband and over-doer) is challenged thus, he reminds me of a cormorant drying its wings — a gesture of hopelessness, a shrugging of the shoulders; not that birds generally have shoulders, and probably not feelings about the impossibility of everything.

Time to stop. Need to watch DVD episode of Life on Mars. We are addicted to it at the moment.