Gunpowder, treason & plot.

Hearing the damp predictions on the 6.55 weather forecast, I dash out early to Tunstall for a run with the dogs. I like this new experience of running with a camera although the path was so slippery and fraught with peril that I did worry occasionally about plunging headlong and smashing the camera.

The light was so fragile, as if at any moment it might spill. The noise was all movement, of water channeling its way over dead leaves and rocks, ducks quacking with surprise as we dashed past their roost in the shallows, and overhead watching us intently, a buzzard.

On the final leg I saw this, an anarchist's bonfire with a couple of garden seats and even a henhouse at the top. As I was photographing it, the bonfire's constructor came out and told me about his novel way of lighting the fire. One year he learned how to breathe fire (onto a rag laced with diesel he told me, which made me fear for his hairline and eyebrows). Another time he ran a line soaked in petrol to the bonfire and lit it with a sparkler. This year, he told me with a perfectly straight face, he was building a trebuchet and fully intended to launch it at the bonfire to ignite it. I am booking a date in my diary.