Rainy days are here to stay
15/05/2023
Walking in the rain, jumping across puddles, squelching through mud. This May is not what you would expect from the normally arid foothills of the Velino massif in Abruzzo.
Through other eyes
Through other eyes... recent posts
It’s been a while
09/04/2023
The days have gone by, and the weeks too, followed all too quickly by the months… and the more time elapses, the more difficult it is to just simply dive in and start posting again without excuses and explanations. But here I am, back again!
Back from the windswept Canary Islands
08/06/2022
Back after a month long computerless pause among the windswept Canary Islands… tenacious plants, millennia of intense desertification, life-giving mists and boundless black and barren lava fields.
Cold winds and the first orchids
21/04/2022
The first orchids in the wind-swept stony pastures of central Abruzzo.
A new path amongst the juniper
07/04/2022
New paths amongst the juniper scrub and downy oak woodland under the stern gaze of the Velino massif.
Castel di Sangro… strange love and thereabouts
25/03/2022
A farewell homage to the town that’s been my (more-or-less) home for the last three years: urban sprawl, old village charm, mountain backdrop and an exhilarating mix of habitats and environments.
Previous posts
15/05/2023
Rainy days are here to stay
Walking in the rain, jumping across puddles, squelching through mud. This May is not what you would expect from the normally arid foothills of the Velino massif in Abruzzo. It does have its charm though and many plants, particularly the trees, thrive in the warm wet conditions. You can almost hear them grow. But others are finding it hard to adapt and the meadows are strewn with half rotten, soggy flowerheads of orchids, rockroses and flax. The cuckoos are in full call and in a quick undulating flash of colour, a hoopoe flies across the clearing in front of me. I stand for a while under a hazel tree, looking up through the dripping leaves at the colourless sky. Just breathing. Just one of the many life forms around me waiting for the sun.
09/04/2023
It's been a while
When I launched this restyled website, I planned to post updates to the blog section often, or at least regularly. But as they say… life is what happens while you’re making plans. And the irony is that the more life happens, the less time and energy remains for writing. So the days have gone by, and the weeks, followed all too quickly by the months, and the more time elapses, the more difficult it is to just simply dive in and start posting again without excuses and explanations. But on this ice-cold snowy pre-Easter Saturday, that’s exactly what I’m about to do, delegating to the images in the Day by Day section the arduous task of filling in the gaps. Will my good intentions be met by equally good results? I’ve no idea. The next post could be within a few days… or next year. Watch this space to find out!
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
08/06/2022
Back from the windswept Canary Islands
The heroic Helichrysum gossypinum on the barren lava fields of central Lanzarote.
So here I am, back in front of the screen after a month long Atlantic pause among the windswept Canary Islands. I was computerless, a strange and unfamiliar sensation and also a real pity as there would have been a very great deal to write, of courtesy and chaos, of tenacious plants bringing life to new stone and millennia of intense desertification at the hand of man, of life-giving mists caught and held close by deep green almost-tropical forests and boundless black and barren lava fields stopped only by the cold inhospitable ocean. So much of all this is already losing the sharp contours of immediacy, but in the next few weeks (or months), I’ll be fishing for memories among the sinuous recesses of my mind, with the help of the more than 2000 photos I’ve still to process. I say photos, but perhaps snaps would be a more accurate word as photography is for me a solitary pursuit in which I was able to indulge only sporadically on this trip in the company of my husband. And that’s fine, because seeing the world directly, without that technical filter of metal and glass, is often the best way to bring new vision to tired and often jaded eyes. There are a whole lot of things I’ll be missing, but on the whole… it’s good to be back.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
21/04/2022
Cold winds and the first orchids
While my fellow photographers blessed with warmer climes have already been snapping away happily at the new season’s flowerings for several months, here in central Abruzzo, spring this year is slow and cold in coming. I’ve had to wait for the last few days to come across the very first orchids braving the bitter winds in the rocky juniper-dotted pastures that have recently become my “hunting” ground. Not the rarest species, not the best photos, but special as those first eagerly-awaited courageous flowerings always are.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
07/04/2022
A new path amongst the juniper and downy oak
I arrived here together with the swallows, hoopoes and almond blossom. Flurries of snow whirled past as the boxes, bags and backpacks emptied and the drawers and cupboards filled. The snow passed, I remained. So this is where I now call home, a small hilltop village in Italy’s Marsica region, in the most central part of the central Apennines in central Italy, a marine creature washed up as far from the sea as it gets in peninsula Italy, last lapped by the waves in the Mesozoic. And that’s a very long time ago indeed.
As Spring struggles to shrug off the last chills of a winter determined to hang on until the bitter end, I’ll be here in this land of limestone, juniper scrub and downy oak woods, exploring new paths under the stern scrutiny of the Velino massif. Doors close and doors open.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
25/03/2022
Castel di Sangro... strange love and thereabouts
Castel di Sangro from the hill overlooking the town, urban sprawl and old-village charm against a mountain backdrop.
For the last week or so, my local wanderings have been tinged with a touch of melancholy. As I rush from right to left and from down to up and down again, looking for the first fragments of spring among my local fields, riverbanks and woods, I’m aware that this is most probably the last time I’ll be seeing them. At the end of this month, for force of circumstance, I’ll be leaving the small central Italian market town of Castel di Sangro that I’ve thought of as home for the last almost three years. A long time in my geographically errant lifetime. Love is a very strange thing and it isn’t easy to explain why I’ve become so fond of this place, with its dreadful climate and no obvious immediate “attractions” to a creature of the wild such as myself. But so it is. Located at an altitude of about 800 m a.s.l. on the right bank of the river Sangro in Abruzzo, but bordering on both Molise and Campania, Castel di Sangro has somehow managed to glean the best of those three regions. A somewhat confused mix of peoples, cultures and good things to eat, it’s a place that doesn’t look too sternly on the newly-arrived or the different. And being both, that for me is a good thing.
Big enough to contain everything you need and small enough to have it all close at hand, it has its fair share of urban sprawl. But clambering up and down among the flights of steps, alleyways and feral cats in the old district of Civita it still manages to offer a convincing impression of a typical Apennine village, inexplicably aromatic with wood smoke even in midsummer.
I’ll miss the market where stallholders from three continents exchange banter in Neapolitan dialect, I’ll miss the bar where no-one asks questions or turns to stare, but most of all I’ll miss that extraordinary mix of environments and habitats accessible within just a few kilometres for the delight of my eyes, soul and camera lens.
Discovered in the long grass of the abandoned meadows, Eresus moravicus, as thrilling for me as any bear or wolf.
There is nothing “grand” to see. The soaring snow-covered peaks and boundless beech forests of the Apennines are a far-off backdrop… and that’s fine by me. Because while the madding crowds flock happily to the “authentic” villages, well-marked hiking trails and photographic high-spots to attempt that like-bait snap of a bear, wolf or roaring red deer stag, I’m away roaming happily, absorbed in the “lesser” world on my doorstep (or almost).
And within just a handful of kilometres from home, what an inconceivably varied world it is, with turkey and downy oak woodland, beech forests, small lakes, a stream and a river with its pebbly flood plain, strange rocky outcrops, high stony grassland, shrub-dotted abandoned meadows, deep valleys and even marshland, so rare as to be unique hereabouts. Each morning when I wake, the only dilemma is how to choose. It’s even delighted me with five plant species I’d never seen before… and believe me, here in the central Apennines, that’s quite a feat.
I’ll miss it, I really will… and as I empty drawers and cupboards, sift and pack for the umpteenth time I know it’s not going to be easy to let go. Who would have though it, yes, love is indeed a strange thing.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
14/03/2022
When the sap of inspiration runs low
Creativity. The most terrifying word in any language if you have ever, even for a moment, thought of yourself as a “creative” person. All the more so if you’ve built a reputation, a living, or even just a self-image, around the very act of creation. “The production of ideas and objects that are both novel or original and worthwhile or appropriate, that is, useful, attractive, meaningful, or correct”. That’s real scary. Now, I like to think of myself as creative. Does that sound conceited? In reality, it’s more of a sense of duty. Because if I can’t create something novel and original to give back to this world, then what the heck am I doing here? How else can I repay the world for all the beauty it has given me? All the emotions and the sensations? But the endomorphin hype of that special moment when everything clicks into place, the words dance and the light sings, comes with a price. A sweeping, swirling nebula of fear that it’s all just an illusion, a con trick, that nothing new and original will ever come to you again. That’s it. Finished. Done for. The grey has won. That’s when, if you’re lucky, “inspiration” steps in. For me, wild creature that I am, inspiration is a synonym for nature. Any nature in any form… but particularly that miniscule buzzing, pulsating nature that grows, hops and flutters among the long grass and undergrowth. That’s why, however beautiful, I just can’t learn to love the sterile stillness of wintertime. Why my creativity falters and fumbles its way through the endless winter months, battling with the nagging qualm that maybe this will be the year when my creativeness will fail to sprout again in springtime. Like those first tender buds, I wait for the sun to thaw the ice and get the sap of inspiration flowing again. Here in the mountains of Italy’s Abruzzo region, it sometimes seems like a very long wait indeed.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
09/03/2022
World War 3 and the buttoned snout
We live in strange times. Well, perhaps “strange” is not the most appropriate word. When I read or hear the news (something I cannot always avoid, although I do try), the words of a song from my youth come irrepressibly to mind. “The world has surely lost its head…” sang Fairport Convention back in the early 1970s and how not to agree as Russian tanks roll out across Ukraine, pushing before them a flood of refugees across the nearest frontier and relegating the still unresolved battle with SARS-CoV-2 to the mute subtitles running across the bottom of a screen filled with smoke, mud, rubble and blood. In supermarkets, shoppers are starting to warily eye the shelves of flour and toilet paper and nervy queues are beginning to form in petrol station forecourts, while pundits of every race, creed and degree of expertise expound their theories on geopolitics past and present, sneaking cagily around the no-longer-so dormant peril of nuclear escalation. Oh yes. Happy times indeed.
So what does all this have to do with the little brown moth that alighted yesterday on my computer screen cover. Well, absolutely nothing. And absolutely everything. Because in times like this, caught between the impossibility of turning a blind eye to the world’s madness and the frustration of my complete irrelevance to the improbable restoration of global sanity, the only sensible course of action is to throw myself willy-nilly into the things I love most… and one of those is without doubt photographing little brown moths (and not only).
So allow me to present Hypena rostralis, otherwise known in English by the delightful name of “buttoned snout moth”… buttoned for the pattern on the wings, snout because.. well, because of its snout. And you know, perhaps it isn’t as insignificant as it might seem. Because the caterpillars feed on hops (Humulus lupulus) and in my part of the world (the innermost mountains of Italy’s Abruzzo region), hops grow mainly in damp shrubby or wooded areas, particularly along watercourses, environments continually under threat from water regulation or drainage measures. So it’s safe to assume that I can thank the relatively high degree of naturalness of the banks of my local river Sangro for the presence of my snouted visitor who for a short while managed to oust the missiles and tanks from my personal cerebral RAM.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
02/03/2022
Who am I?
Who am I you ask? Well, that’s a very good question and one I’ve been asking myself throughout just about all my sentient life. How I envy those with a one word answer… I’m a vet, I’m a doctor, I’m a mechanic, or an opera singer (OK, that’s two words, but you get the drift). I on the other hand am no one thing. I have flitted willy-nilly through life, touching fleetingly on so many things that auto-definition fails me. Better to start with the indisputable facts…
Talking with owls and looking for magic
among the hedgerows and long grass
I was born in long ago 1957 in the British countryside where I grew up running wild among the fields and hedgerows, earnestly discussing the meaning of life with the owls nesting in our back garden and grovelling entranced among the thistles and brambles on scratched knees, enthralled by the mystical world of the myriad of life forms that thrived there. They were my fairy tales and my soap operas. Urged on by my nature-loving mother and botanist father, I needed no other magic and that has remained so to this day.
At the ripe old age of 16, I learnt to type on my mother’s old Remington portable typewriter, convinced I was born to be a writer and a naturalist. Or a naturalist and a writer. But although I suppose I have in some ways touched on both of these, circumstances soon grabbed me by the hand (or was it the throat?) and shoved me unceremoniously down other roads. Since then I have earned my living in many ways, from waitress to journalist at the European Parliament, in the press and fund-raising offices of an internationally renowned archaeological project, as a hiking guide in France and Italy, as a teacher of English as a foreign language and as a translator, to name but a few. All these have both given me something and taken something away. What is left is who I am today.
Flitting willy-nilly through life…
As a hiking guide in France, 1983 or thereabouts, when the cameras weighed even more than today.
Engrossed in what I love most.
Thoughtful.
Somewhere in the midst of all this (and don’t ask me why), I also changed countries, moving from the UK to Italy where I have lived and worked for the last thirty years or so. And maybe one day I’ll move on again, across another frontier, to another country where I’ll learn to dream in another language. Because frontiers are no more than lines drawn by men (and women) on a map and I’ve never really understood why they should matter so much on our spherical planet where all things exist in the continuity of time and space. At least until proved otherwise.
But I digress… back to the business in question. So at the end of the day, who, or what, am I? Well, when I rummage around in my fragmented ragbag of a life, I come up with three threads which, in the good times and the bad, have somehow held together all the rest: words, photography and, above all else, nature. And it is these three threads that are woven together in “lynkos”, a name that came to me uninvited in a dream some twenty or so years ago and has accompanied me ever since.
So that’s me taken care of…
what about “lynkos”?
Lynkos is part lynx, perceptive, fiercely diffident and attributed with the clear vision it takes to needle out the truth behind deception, part the too often lacking “link” between nature and the world of man, between enthusiast and expert, between layman and the world of science.So that’s me explained as best I can. Pleased to meet you and happy to have your company on this stretch of my life’s road, be it short or be it long, guided by the curiosity to discover what awaits me around the next corner, even if it’s just… another corner.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.
22/02/2022
Where the waves go...
Where the waves go, there go I. Down from the mountains like all things that flow. Seeking a breach through that opaque barricade of unpardonable high-fenced villas, then on again, a scented descent through the Mediterranean maquis down to the shore, where the hardness of the land turns to brittleness and crumbles before the surf; where the waves surge, hover, break, then fall back in an eternally repeated pause to reconsider. Here I am at peace… a transparent peace, salty, cold and sandy between the toes, posed astride the tenuous demarcation between the knowledge of the land and the mystery of the sea. Give and take. Take and give. Circeo National Park, February 2022.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.