View from the top

A beautiful morning to be out (sadly it didn't last, though it didn't rain either).  I was able to bring Ann home yesterday (16th), though we didn't leave until around 6.30pm,  so she's been able to catch up on some of the sleep she missed while in hospital.  (All that monitoring of temp and blood pressure every hour night and day can't be good for your health!)

A bit of a struggle on the walk as the farmer has ploughed one of the fields that I cross - you can just see it in-line with the autumn coloured trees.  Walking on ploughed ground is much worse than walking on dry sand!  Exhausting!  I might need to find a new route while he harrows and re-seeds it, which is a shame because I'm really into tracking the progress of my little groups of fungi.  I found several newly emerged Russula on the edge of the first field - under a small group of trees, which had been barely touched by slugs (I'm guessing that if I re-visited this morning they'd be grazed to bits).  I think they are Russula atropurpurea, which seem to be very abundant around here.  I found two places in the Millmoor woodland where different kinds of fungi are growing nicely and also re-visted my Cep that is growing among the beech trees  (the toadstool house or Penny Bun), which is now looking decidedly worse for wear. I met up with a couple of local men who were out walking their dogs in the wood and according to them people do come to pick fungi in that part of the wood, so I'm guessing they are coming for the Ceps.  According to my new book `Fascinated by Fungi' (which I have to confess I've become - you never would have guessed, would you), they were selling for £50 a kg back in 2008.  (It's not that I'm a bit of an obsessive you understand.)

So what else happened?  Washing - which dried outside in the wind;  lunch; and I've been struggling to work out what I'm going to do for the screen printing session next Monday.  I seem to have lost the plot as far as the printmaking is concerned - I just haven't had the space in my head to think creatively since May ... and the nature of the Hot Bed course has meant that we've moved on to try different techniques, so limited opportunity to build on anything, especially if your life has been running like mine has this year.  I guess the mushroom thing has been a form of escape and maybe I ought to consider how I can incorporate them into the printmaking.  I've certainly become much more interested in our local landscape again and creating more impressionistic images of the woodland - the trouble is I'm not sure this fits with the form of screen-printing he wants us to try out!  So ... I've been awake since four, pondering it all out in my head - then I escaped to Facebook for a while and now I'm writing about it rather than doing anything practical.  I'm sure it will all work out - maybe this has helped!