We wander winter afternoons where the light is too weak to keep the ghosts at bay. Stumble onto paths that can only be haunted. Each footstep scuffs up stories, scuffs up spirits. We walk and leave a wake of whispers. – #DAKilroy, 1982

'Great flakes of snow blotted out all the distant view. The bushes in the garden were upholstered with fat snow cushions. The yew trees by the house were like huge tattered snow umbrellas ' A world transformed by snow in Lucy Boston's Children of Green Knowe #BookWormSat ❄️

Xmas book haul @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social 📚

Nice of the weather to provide a giant outdoor fridge for the festive period. Just shifted lots of stuff to the shed 🌲🎅☃️

A tangle of mistletoe adding some festive colour to the bare branches in Hollybrook cemetery, Southampton

Today in the cemetery: 2 mistle thrushes loudly rattling and chasing each other through the trees Blue tits pecking at buds on the horse chestnuts A carrion crow perched, hunched against the cold, occasionally preening A goldcrest at eye level, prospecting through a privet hedge 🪶

Harold M. Lambert, Three Deer Laying Down in Snow, photographic print, 1940

'Winter Night in the Mountains,' was made in 1901 when critics were trying to associate Harald Sohlberg with Impressionism. He dismissed the idea saying he had no interest in capturing ‘half-hour of devotion,' to atmosphere but the vastness and physical presence of the landscape.

Hi! We have 1 wish for Christmas! That in '26 we reach 100,000 followers on @bsky.app Please help us by RTing your endorsement! Follow us! Birds of the World is a groundbreaking resource where you can find deep ornithological content on birds, stunning multimedia, and range maps for every bird!

A song thrush singing despite the gloom The wheezing chatter of goldfinches in the plane trees The winter song of robins The hoarse cooing of wood pigeons Somewhere a chaffinch calls #Winter #Birdsong 🪶

I met this wonderfully characterful old tree mantled in thick ivy in a Killarney industrial estate. Wild beauty, and giver of shelter and life to countless creatures, hanging on defiantly in the midst of banal uniformity, relentlessly growing all around.

Torhousekie Stone Circle in Galloway. The central setting of three stones is reputed to be the grave of the mythical King Galdus. #StandingStoneSunday #Galloway #Wigtownshire #history #legend #folklore #ancient #Photography @stoneclub.bsky.social

When I see an ad boasting of all that A.I. can create for me

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." "He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." The Satanic judge from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, who rides with the outlaws #BookWormSat 👹📚

The brainiest orange rock posy lichen (Rhizoplaca chrysoleuca) I ever saw. Northwest Territories, Canada. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

I heard so much in the early days of this book (ESPECIALLY from publishing industry people): that it was "too weird" & I was "asking too much of my reader". What they didn't realise was that I wasn't writing it for them or the other people they talked about. I was writing it for people like Robbie.

Feeling very lucky to have bagged this signed first edition of the #Booker winner when it was published earlier this year #books #fiction 📚

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported our Kickstarter! 🖤 If you would like to dance on strange, wild music with the witches of Flanders, consider backing our project! Every little bit helps! ✨ kck.st/492NqKt

Went on a ramble yesterday from my house through the local woods and fields. A late-flowering thistle still attracting bees. A variety of fungi despite the dry weather. Flocks of finches and tits patrolling the hedgerows in the former pasture between the M27 & Broadleaf Park, Rownhams #NatureNotes

"In this autumntime, why do I so feel the years? In the clouds a bird" By Matsuo Basho, translation by Andrew Fitzsimons Autumn Haiku Picks From Japan's Poetry Tradition | Tokyo Weekender share.google/LKSkMCotaksm... #Autumn #BookWormSat 📚🍁

Morning

Some Entish trees along an old cart track near Botley, Hampshire today #Autumn #Trees

The sun sets into the wine-dark sea, Paphos #Cyprus #Sunset

Fragaria vesca, Wild Strawberry, Invert Associates Native of woods, scrub & hedgerow, embankments & road verges, an important element of the ground flora. It supports 51 species of invert as a larval host, of which 14 are Coleoptera, 30 Lepidoptera. 📷 CAM Lindman, Bilder ur Nordens Flora 🌱

Edmund Berninger’s The Bay of Naples, with a hazy Vesuvius looming beyond, its smoky plume dwarfing the chimney smoke at far L (late 19C)

Cemetery portal, Southampton Old Cemetery.

Gorgeous day with good views of several ospreys and marsh harriers. Finished with a large flock of spoonbills on Brownsea lagoon in the company of numerous waders, terns & gulls 🪶

Really looking forward to @harbourbirds.bsky.social Osprey cruise today, looks like the weather will be fine 🤞 🪶

Great news! For the record though, my current boss is lovely

Fishlake Meadows, Romsey yesterday. A breezy day with periods of light rain. A huge flock of house & sand martins chattering & feeding above the marshes. A tree creeper exploring the fissured bark of a giant poplar. A pair of ravens patrolling. A lesser stag beetle on the path. #nature #UKBirding 🪶

'Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world' The Road, Cormac McCarthy - the darkest of #dystopias for #BookWormSat

Walked along the shore at Lepe on the Solent shore. Flocks of linnets twittering in the scrub. 2 wheatears and a whinchat showing autumn migration is underway. A couple of swallows hawking over the woodland. #UKBirding 🪶

Green Carpet Moth - a multi-plate etching and aquatint print by Edinburgh artist, printmaker and scientist, Douglas Reed What a beauty! 💚 More of this artist's work, here: douglasreed.uk #art #printmaking #moths #lepidoptera #insects

At least 14 house martins chirruping and swooping above the copse earlier, with a sparrowhawk above them looking down #UKBirding 🪶

Pumping from this stretch of 'protected' chalk stream has more than halved water flow, depriving the river's only remaining breeding population of brown trout of habitat & oxygen - in a waterway that ought to be a thriving lifeline for wildlife. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Sat in my parents' garden, listening to a very noisy juvenile peregrine begging for food somewhere by the abbey. Saw a kingfisher earlier from the bridge over one of the Test streams #CasualBirding #ukbirding #Romsey 🪶

"This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life" Kate Grenville, The Secret River #BookWormSat #Australia

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming" First they came for the crabs... 🐙 www.itv.com/news/westcou...

Autumn beckons

Under my tree roof slanting lines of April rain separate to drops ✍️ Matsuo Bashō 🎨 Utagawa Hiroshige, Night Rain at Karasaki #BookWormSat #trees #haiku

'That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig' #BookWormSat The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

Good morning

Morning walk. Got out nice and early with Ralph - a slight autumnal feeling. There are still a few curlews around, still protecting their young. I saw a few hares hunkered down against the wind but the lapwings, snipe & oyster catchers are nowhere to be seen. There are berries on the rowen tree.

#bluesky dappled with cirrocumulus clouds. Looks like it's going to be a beautiful day 🌞 Southampton, UK #clouds #summer

Southern Water, & regulators, asleep at the wheel on water availability in a changing climate - not reducing leakage enough, or consumer demand Southern Water now want to commit long-term damage to a rare habitat, taking water from a chalk stream, to plug the gap www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Good to see - well done Test Valley borough council 👏👏👏 #ChalkStreams

Argynnis paphia, Silver-washed Fritillary, 03-08-21. Paphia, named for Paphos, Cyprus. Where Aphrodite came ashore. So many of the Nymphalidae named for goddesses, Muses & Graces. Be more pantheist.

Humpback whale tail, Marino Ballena National Park. 8th July 2025 #whales #CostaRica