Parallel Lines

This is Ale Wood - trees planted on 50 acres of hillside, visible from our windows, shortly after we arrived here 9 years ago. Thus named by its owners because it overlooks the brewery. I remember being surprised that such a radical transformation of the landscape - even one like this that I might approve of - could happen without any planning consent or local notification or consultation. Initially plastic tubes, of course, it improves every year, and the show of autumn colour this year is impressive

I like the horizontal lines and the resonance of colour between the woodland and the ironstone

Exciting times this evening: a feature-length Dr Who! Did you catch the apparently bizzare random phrase near the end? Just as the Dr's existence as Jodie Whitacre was coming to an end and she was about to regenerate in a new body, her consciousness wandered and she said "blossomiest blossom". I wonder what proportion of the audience got the reference. These were the words used by Dennis Potter, a passionate advocate of television drama as an art form, in his final interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994, shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer. He used the words to try to express the mystical experience of consciousness and how his visual perception was enhanced by knowledge of his impending death

In the same interview he revealed that he had named his cancer 'Rupert', after the malignant media mogul. Potter had the measure of the man and his baleful influence; none of the events in British public life this week would have surprised him