Evening light, Stroud

CleanSteve drove me to Twigworth, near Gloucester, where I was attending a workshop on helping children with autistic spectrum disorders to sleep. (It's a big issue). We were in a Premier Inn in the open countryside, with the very walls being shaken by rough winds. Every now and then we'd glance out and see birds being hurled around in the sky, unable to fly.

After the excellent sessions, I walked up the cold road towards the village. I was heading for a museum called Nature in Art, which was displaying the winning entries from the International Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The drive leading to the old mansion is half to miss it, though I think that next year I'm going to try and see it in Bristol, because the space allocated at Nature in Art is not nearly spacious enough, with upstairs corridors forming part of the display space.


When I got back into Gloucester on the bus, I found a text from L, my climbing partner, saying that she would not be climbing after all. So I heaved my rucksack on to the next bus back to Stroud, but not before I'd nipped into the bus station's Tesco Express. It s rough in there: I once witnessed a woman knocking seven bells out of a man who was hunched up down on the floor. The store's security guards used to be mainly young black men, but today a Polish female officer was being screamed at by a Gloucestershire teenage mother who was telling her to do her job properly...after she'd been seen off, the guard was still shaking, and the rest of the staff were comparing notes on the girl, who is obviously a known shoplifter, or at least a chancer.

In Stroud, I found I'd missed my bus home, so I walked, and that's when I noticed this light over King Street and Lansdown. I didn't get my phone cam settings right, I think it's time to stop being lazy. Maybe tomorrow....