• The temperature is rising, there’s a gentle rain and the cats are going crazy because the pond is heaving with frogs. They are croaking away, singing sweet songs of love to each other and there’s a whole load of spawning going on!


  • After a couple of days away, a long drive back and then a morning of re-booking flights with a clogged up brain, it was great to get out for a walk this afternoon. There is a vast quarry up the road from me, where they are digging out stone for building and paving and the like.

    All around the quarry are scowles – left over slag from previous workings – which get taken over by nature, making the distinctive landscape of the Forest of Dean.

    In the photographs, you should be able to see how the Quarry are now bulldozing their slag up against the old scowles. In places it looks like a glacier of rock pouring into the spaces in between. I noticed a cardboard box on a tree stump below one of these piles of terminal moraine. I thought it may have a warning not to come too close writing on it, but no, it was an airgun target! Pop bottles, strewn around, evidence of kids doing a bit of target practice.

    It won’t take long for the raw, bare scree to get colonised by lichen and moss, then covered in leaves, which will rot and provide compost for the trees and plants that will eventually turn this industrial eyesore into a walker’s tourist heaven, another scowle, another piece of classic forest landscape.

  • When last I visited Ysgol Y Foryd, I think it was still called Towyn Infant School. They still have the drawing and pictures that I did up on the walls – it’s always interesting to see them! I left behind a couple of big books last time. The Libraries recued them for me and I was finally reunited with them yesterday – and very pleased to be too – I only ever had one copy of Slug Makes a House, and it’s such fun to read in the big edition.

    It’s unusual to meet a male Early Years teacher, and Mark Patterson made an impression on me last time I visited. He has a wonderful way with the children. I watched him work the electronic white board, flipping from a photo of me drawing to a drawing program, he got a child out to draw on the screen as I’d shown them how to do. Instant electronic recording and teaching – just what the electronic whiteboard does really well.

    You can see the pictures at their website here.

    Thanks a lot for a great day everyone, especially ElenHaf Jones, from Conway Libraries, who sorted everything out and “minded” for the trip! Remember to get town to the Library, borrow all my books and make Elen happy!