Everyday beauty

I often write about, and take pictures of things that are unusual, things that stand out from the ordinary, but this week I want to celebrate the everyday.

In previous blogs I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the normal but today I’m going to focus on nettles, leaves, gulls, and water, things that couldn’t be more normal or plentiful on a lakeside walk

What started me off on this train of thought was looking closely at a nettle, not something I or I expect you, think of doing very often as they are associated with stings, something you want to avoid, meaning you don’t notice just how pretty they are. In fact, the longer I looked at them the more I saw, the curls of little flowers, the little white hairs on the stalks which waved in the wind, and the precise patterning on the saw-toothed leaves.

Having looked so closely at them it made me start looking at other leaves and branches, and the play of light on and through them,

how they hung over the water, the perfect framing for a picture, a device used often in Japanese woodcut prints of the Edo period

and how they can create multicoloured rippled reflections

In turn this drew me to looking at the ripples running across the near empty lake, their colours and their shapes, undulating ridges and small soft-floored ‘valleys’.

Have you noticed that the same rippled effect is left on the sandy beach at high tide?

Ripples and reflections, nature’s R & R, are beautiful and have for me at least a gently calming effect.

Less calming, in fact, damn right noisy are the gulls which are now probably the dominant species of bird on the lake.

Beyond thinking of them as white, the differences in their appearances can easily be overlooked but if you watch them particularly when they are in flight you notice how varied the colouring can be.

The feathers in the wings often aren’t white but brown, black, grey or a combination of all of these … and because they fly slower than the rapid terns or the speedy swifts, they are easier to photograph too.

Not surprisingly I snapped one or two.

All in all, it was day to teach me that just because something is plentiful or always present, it does not mean that it isn’t beautiful.