Essex Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve, Fingringhoe Wick, is above all a place to listen.

Researching this blog, I stumbled on a quotation from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, which encapsulates the age-long fascination of poets with the elusive bird of the night.

“A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds;

Our birdwatching, or rather bird-listening, at Fingringhoe Wick left us hungry and we made our way to the nearby ‘Donkey and Buskins’ at Layer de la Haye,

Another month has passed and further efforts at peace-making at the international level have come to nothing. My mind returns to a beautiful verse in the New Testament letter of James:

Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.

In museums, I love to look for links between the past and present – elements we have in common with our ancestors. On a recent visit to the wonderful Fitzwilliam Gallery in Cambridge, 3 contrasting artistic depictions of dogs caught my eye. They made me wonder how far back we can trace the relationship between dogs and humans in art.

This month's blogs are all inspired by a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The caption by Monet’s vivid painting, Springtime, quoted the artist saying,

‘I have finally discovered the true colour of the atmosphere. It's violet.’

We visited the Fitzwilliam Museum on Holy Saturday, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, so the religious paintings in the medieval section were especially poignant.

In our local park this week, the ornamental cherries are in full bloom and this tree in particular caught my attention. Not content to display its candyfloss blossom on its branches, it has bloomed all the way down its trunk too!

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,’ by Khaled Hosseini, serves as a companion to his acclaimed ‘The Kite Runner’. Against the backdrop of the social and political history of Afghanistan from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, Hosseini paints a portrait of the lives and loves of Mariam and Laila, from their girlhood onwards.

This month my research for this blog sent me down a whimsical rabbit-hole of verbal delight.

Recently a preacher on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship spoke of a mentor who embraces a new challenge during Lent each year, instead of giving something up. One year she learned to juggle, another year to play a musical instrument and so on.

This winter, my binoculars have scanned the hedgerows in vain for some of my favourite winter visitors - fieldfares and redwings. Flocks of these thrushes migrate from Scandinavia to feast on our berry bushes.

A birthday jaunt recently took me to ‘Michaelangelo, Leonardo & Raphael’ at the Royal Academy of Art. 

I promised to delve deeper into ‘manifest,’ the Cambridge English Dictionary Word of 2024: ‘manifest’ - “To use methods such as visualisation and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”

In a quest for respite from world news, I’m adopting Philippians 4:8 as my verse of 2025.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Is this what a dolphin ‘sees’ when it looks at an expectant human mother?

I was very excited to receive this book for Christmas - 21 short stories inspired by ‘Jane Eyre,’ one of my favourite classic novels, in a collection compiled by Tracy Chevalier, my favourite living author.

The words of the year for the Oxford, Cambridge and Collins English Dictionaries form an interesting snapshot of the evolution of word meaning and of contemporary society.

For much of December 2024, I was unwell, along with so many others, but my advent readings were a daily uplift.