This was today - a stream running through a wood in East Bedfordshire - on my way to join a friend's writing group in Cambridge. There was a small bank of celandine near the water. There was a blue line of hills beyond the trees. But actually it was darker, with far more ivy, and criss-crossed with an even denser lattice of twigs and fallen branches. Hardly had I started to understand it, than the rain began. I abandoned and headed back to the car. When I got home, I tried to remember how it had been. It had seemed like a stained glass window in reverse, with shards of colour separated by alternately light and dark lead. It looked like a road map of a city, but it very much wasn't. |