Aaarrgh Greenfly, don't tell Blue ladybug

I saw the title of this and thought, "whaaaaaaaaaaa".. lol..

Well it's been warm, thundery, humid today.

Awful at work, so I left and made my weary way home.
Meant to catch the 4a bus but in my weary tiredness I got the
42 by mistake. I only realised when I noticed the detour. Lol

Anyway it meant I had to walk the last 20 minutes home, during the last
5 minutes of my walk I had to go down a tree lined road which has a beck
(small river) cutting across it. There was greenfly every, so there was
I waving my hands around like a demented extra from a bad movie, trying not
to swallow any!

I suppose the lady birds will follow in the next week or so, I will have to see if
I can spot any blue ones.

Anyway back to my detour, there was I tired, hot tryng not to breath in any
greenfly, when I realised how pretty and green everything looked. If I had caught
the correct bus it would have gone along a different road and approached from a
different direction.

The beck and fields are only a 5 minute walk from home and I spent many hours as
a kid with my friends playing in that beck and going home wet and muddy.

We would go down there with cheap fishing nets on sticks and spend hours catching
minows, frogs, crayfish, snails etc. There was always someone (usually one of the boys)
who caught a crayfish and chased the girls with it.


Cray fish look like this so you can imagine how they made us girls scream.

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Anyway I decided to take some photos and smiled at the happy childhood memories.
It made me think that sometimes it's good to catch the wrong bus in life, if it
makes us stop and smell the roses.


The wall on the right marks the point where the beck goes under the road, we use to
walk under the bridges along the beck.

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These are some sports fields over the road.

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Here are a couple of photos of the beck, it's only a few inches deep but after heavy
rain, it floods and spills over its banks.

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Warm? Humid? TODAY??? Pfft!

So a not-in-the-city drainage ditch is a beck? Crayfish I know. Beck I didn't. (I didn't get chased by flying crayfish because I was the one holding it to show the boys. But I did watch the boys act like they were their favorite toy airplane when chasing the girls. That's why they looked like flying crayfish. lol)

The second you mentioned beck my mind flowed into lovely English countryside scenes. The real thing is better than my imagination.

I grew up in a small town. I've lived in just-started subdivisions and way out in the country. I'm glad we live in the city now, because we can get to grocery stores and any hospital or doctor by public transportation if the car isn't working right or we get 19 inches of snow. But, man! I miss fields, trees, even not-city drainage ditches, but only the kind that sprout cattails and tadpoles (polliwogs? I think that's your word.) If I block out everything around me, I can pinpoint one tree without noticing the cars parked and driving by. I can spot the only robin in the neighborhood. I can admire the tiniest blue flowers among the weeds. I even spotted wild strawberries in the median strip of the nursing home parking lot and showed everyone as I walked down the halls before showing John. (Too much chemicals on it to eat it, but it was the cutest strawberry, and I wouldn't pick the rest, because I know their robbins like them.)

It's not just the wrong-bus routes. Your usual bus will show you the same kinds of things, if you look close.

But nothing beats a UK nature scene.

Cool!
Now I know what to do if I become really rich!
(In addition to the library, I'll have a prayer at the top part of my house!)

The thing is I don't live in the country. Lol

Our Council likes to leave plenty of open green spaces around and between housing
estates. They recently been planting more trees everywhere on the roundabouts,
along various grass verges.

I live towards the edge of the city - our distances are small compared to your's.
So 4 miles in one direction and and I'm in the city centre.
3 miles in the other direction and I'm out in the country.
3 miles in another direction and I'm at a stately home and garden.
3 or so miles the other way I'm at a small bird garden and grounds, flower garden etc.

I suppose it is a drainage ditch of sorts but really it is a small river.
Many moons ago before I was born and before the houses were built when it was all
farm land with squires and serps and tenants farmed the fields etc (think Robin Hood time).
There was a river flowing through the land.

Then people got clever, built houses made of brick and roads and decided to divert the
river underground. Only it had to come out somewhere so via a drainage system it got
diverted and ta da, now it's a beck. It's actually called Wyke Beck. Which apparently is
a very old English name for white (Wyke).

Ive no idea why a beck would be considered white! There is a bridge nearby called Wyke bridge.
So I suspect it has something to do with a land owner in the past called Mr White or Mr Wyke

That stately home 3 miles in one direction was owned by the Knights Templar.
It's actually called Temple Newsome and all around the top of the building in wrought
iron is a prayer to God. A centuries old prayer fixed to the top of the building like a border
around the top of the brickwork.

There is sn amphitheatre very effective, a rare breeds working farm, lakes, gardens, etc
Lots of antique set out old rooms and even a ghost called the Blue Lady, or so they say lol.

I had to look up the word polliwog, it's a very old word not used much in them these hills,
but yes it is any kind of tadpole. Lol Cattails are those things on trees! Catkins is another
word for them.


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Three miles north of me is City Hall -- the center of Philly.
Three miles south is our airport.
Three miles west is our hospital/university section walled in by an oil refinery, the ugliest highway in the country (The Schuylkill) and other industrial sites.
Three miles east -- separated by the Delaware River, which ships all the goods we need around here to one mile east of me -- is South Jersey.

When my city feels rich (which last happened right after World War II, and trees only live 60-75 years), they add "green space" with trees. Those trees are beginning to fall down now, but the city doesn't have the money to check out all our trees, so they spent money letting us get new trees.

Here is our "park."
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I really love looking at it, because I could see one of those trees from the front window in my house. They're ginkgos. You don't want to walk in that park when their fruit drops, because the fruit smells like fresh dog poo. And I think the dog had baked beans for dinner. lol

Ha ha ha, that's so funny, never heard of a tree smelling like dog poo.

Does it keep dogs away?