Thursday, June 15, 2006

Walk Fifty-two – Oooh-er bit of a shock!

greenrape
WALK52


When I was a child I recall being quite disdainful of some Australian children who were on holiday at the same place as us in Fiji. The reason for this was that as they left their holiday ‘bure’ (Fijian syle house) to go down to the beach they ran like the clappers through the coconut trees that fringed the beach, just in case a coconut fell on their heads and killed them. Obviously coconuts fall off trees but in all the years I’d lived in Fiji I’d never witnessed a coconut falling off a tree, let alone falling on someone’s head. Similarly here in England, you can see the evidence of branches and even entire trees that have fallen onto the woodland floor, but you never witness the event – until today. As I was emerging from the first little spinney on my walk, there was the most God almighty crash behind me, birds flapping and squawking and flying out into the open together with what seemed to be bits of debris flying through the trees. I was too nervous of the first tree destabilising more trees to go back and look so I stopped at the first stile and calmed my nerves with this soothing watercolour. And yes that slice of field in the background is the formerly bright yellow oil seed rape field that I painted in a previous post.

6 Comments:

Blogger Hashi said...

Wow. I'm glad you didn't get hurt. I'd have been freaked out too. I have to tell you that I lived in North Queensland, where I saw (and heard) coconuts falling on many occasions. Maybe it was during hurricane season :-)

10:13 pm  
Blogger Julie Oakley said...

Ah ha was it you running through the coconut trees? Actually I think I did hear them fall off the trees from time to time but it never stopped any of us playing under coconut palms.

10:45 pm  
Blogger Weichuen You said...

Beautiful watercolor illo! I have not been to Britain yet, but your project makes me think I really should go there some day, and asap:-).

11:54 pm  
Blogger Alison said...

Yes, this is the sort of soothing view that one thinks will be 'forever England'. I once missed by an hour being on an enormous rock in the middle of a river that split into pieces - parents wouldn't let us stay and continuing playing on it and on the walk back it had gone.

12:48 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

these "out of the blue" near misses
can make one wonder....

truly soothing watercolor

1:48 am  
Blogger Linda T said...

I love the variety in media of your pictures. Each one is wonderful.

3:25 am  

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